I've practiced this before, so we'll see how this goes. So anyways, my name's Brad Herman, I'm with Hired. 5.0 over 30 is the unofficial name of this talk.

If you can't tell, this is actually a Hired shirt that I tie-dyed for the Grateful Dead 50th reunion concert. If there's any Grateful Dead fans out there, let's talk. So anyways, once again, thank you all for coming. It's super, super early right now, at least for me. I know that you're all actually just here to see tender love,

but luckily my company paid you money, so I get to stand up here for 10 minutes and talk about whatever the hell I feel like. It's super amazing to be on this stage after all these years. Believe it or not, I've been a part of this community for 10 years now almost, nine and a half technically. For the last 10 years, I've got to sit in the crowd

and look on Confreaks and see some of my programming heroes stand up here and talk. Guys like DHH got to stand in front of people like you and say really cool things like shit and fuck, and now I get to do it today. This is amazing. I never thought I would get to do this, so. When I was asked to get up here,

because we paid you, I figured like, oh, I just have to give you some sort of speech about what Hired does. I don't like selling, though, so I'm not gonna do that, and luckily, some guys from Indeed already told you what Hired does, so. That's, that's, I'm just kidding. We're all friends. We hung out and drank last night.

It's a big world. So I'm gonna talk about what I really want to talk about today. Anyways, so this is our third year sponsoring RailsConf, and we do it because we like this community. We love it. We want to give back. We're a company that's built for engineers by engineers. We're built on Rails. We have been since day one.

If you go to Hired.com slash RailsConf, which I'm sure some of you have, you can see and hear from some of hundreds of Rails engineers who've already found their dream jobs on Hired. There's thousands more non-Rails engineers who have as well. If you go to GitHub, you can check out some of our open source projects. We've got a ton of them, and some of them are pretty cool, actually.

Not all of them are, and a lot of them aren't well tested, but, you know, that's where you guys come in. So this is a community that I'm immensely proud to be a part of, and I'm even more proud to be able to support it. If I wasn't proud of this community, and I didn't love it, I wouldn't be standing here in front of you all the way from San Francisco on my 30th birthday.

I turned 30 this morning. Thank you, thank you. You all can buy me drinks later. I probably would have called in sick to work, actually, so that I could hang out in Dolores Park and dance with Robot Dance Party and Truffle Man, which, if you've been to San Francisco, you may know both of these people.

So that brings me to the theme of this talk. I don't really like applying labels, but professionally, for basically the last decade, I've been a Rails engineer. Nearly a full decade, my entire 20s, was spent building software in Rails, and well, with Ruby as well, Sinatra here and there, whatever.

I'm not always the best contributor to the community, but I do love and respect it dearly. Because of all the brilliant, curious people that many of which are in this room, the amazing feedback, never-ending discussions, and countless hours of work that we all put in, we've built so much, and we've made Rails something greater than I ever thought it could be

when I started working with it at the 1.1 days. The community is awesome. It can be a little annoying sometimes. Go read the CoffeeScript gets introduced into Rails core comment thread, and you'll see what I mean. But I love it. So eight years ago, I dropped out of college,

like all of the best entrepreneurs have. At the time, my only real dream was to be Kevin Rose. I saw this on Business Week, and I thought it could be me. In hindsight, not the best move at the time. I could have picked a better role model, but. So in 2007, I did an internship for a little company

in Indianapolis building things in Rails. It was the only thing that I'd ever had exposure to outside of like a little bit of PHP, and I won't even make a joke about that. So I decided to buy a book and actually learn Rails and turn this into a career. Of course, in the 1.1 days, by the time I bought the book,

it was severely out of date. So I had no idea what the hell I was doing. I had to dive headfirst in the Rails community, get involved in message boards, groups, email lists, IRC channels, Stack Overflow, everything, because I needed help. Sometimes people were assholes, and that'll happen,

but mostly everyone was pretty cool and excited to help me. I was just some dumb young stranger on the internet asking for help, and the Rails community was there for me. It was awesome. Because of this community and all the help that I received, I was able to turn myself into somewhat of a real engineer, start a company, and raise over $100,000

with some friends within the next year. We basically just flushed it all down the toilet, though, so I won't talk too much about that one. After that, though, I bounced around some companies for a while, consistently throwing myself into the deep end of the pool, hoping that I wouldn't sink and might learn to swim. Luckily, the Rails community was there for me

to save my ass pretty much at every turn, and it helped mold me and turn me into the engineer that I am today. My parents, like many in the 80s, came down with a very nearly fatal case of disco fever, and that resulted in me entering the world when my mom and dad were pretty young.

I was 12 years old when my mom and dad were as old as I am today, and that's crazy. When I was like 12, I thought 30 was 70. Until recently, my perception of 30 was that I would be retired by now, and instead, I live in a lovely apartment in San Francisco.

Luckily, a continuous theme throughout our lives is growth, though. We continue to alter our perceptions of the world as we gain new wisdom through experience. Along my journey over the last decade, personally adapting and growing, figuring out what I really value, I've also had the pleasure of watching the Rails community grow. I've watched Rails grow as a modern web framework, and I've seen us mature and adapt

as our own perceptions of the world, the technology we use, who we want to be, and what we want from life have changed. As we all sit here this week, talking, interacting, making new friends, discussing technology, learning about the future of Rails, I've really felt a sense of excitement, much like I did at 20 years old.

Rails 5.0 is coming soon. Today marks the first day of my 30s. Those are two things I literally couldn't have imagined a decade ago, a decade that I spent building products, learning, and growing with you guys. After watching the community, framework, and myself mature over this last decade, I couldn't be more proud to see where we're at today.

The last decade, we, along with our framework, have developed new senses of maturity, stability, and direction. 10 years ago, I was just kind of excited to build shit. I was excited to use Rails, which was the hot, sexy, new thing on the market. I didn't know what the hell I was doing. Now, I'm not so excited about that stuff. I'm really a lot more excited

about the maturity and experience that we've gained together. That's what really helps us build great products. Anyways, I couldn't be happier to be up here and be able to give back and support this community. It's shaped me for, like I said, nearly a decade. From the bottom of my heart, thank you guys. Thanks for turning me into an engineer, and I hope that I can give back more in the future,

and I hope that Hired can continue to contribute to the community as well. Anyways, I'm speaking at 10.50 in 3501G, which I don't believe is closed down, so come check it out if you wanna learn more about Hired, some of the features that we have, and basically our development culture. I actually recommend going to the Pacquiao one instead,

because that seems really cool, but if you want a cultural soft talk, come listen to me. Anyways, here's to the next 10 years, guys. Cheers.