I was supposed to show you that slide. So whenever I give this talk, I now always

think of the first time I did. Jonas Scheffler was emceeing Keep Ruby Weird, and he had asked me earlier in the day about my talk and how I wanted to be presented. Later when I started putting together my clarinets on stage, he came up to me and he was like, wait, you're actually going to play those things? Yeah. So before I begin, important question.

Show of hands, who here used to play the clarinet in middle school? Yeah. Yeah, we're going to be best of friends. You see, I too also used to play the clarinet in middle school. I just didn't know when to stop. So my name is Chris Arkand. I work for Software for Good. Software for Good is a company that pairs cause with craft.

We develop web and mobile applications for organizations working towards positive and social change. Simply put, we build software for good humans doing good things. Most often this means partnering with benefit corporations, social enterprises, large nonprofits, startups,

educational institutions, all these different places to engineer change in industries like clean energy, clean tech, biotech, health care, education, all sorts of different things. We're based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is where I'm from. And you can find even more information at softwareforgood.com. So also, please come say hi to me after the talk

and throughout the rest of the conference. I don't bite. And in fact, I'm going to give you super awesome stickers and t-shirts, so do come say hi. So this is me now. If you met me at some other conference or here, you'll see I'm just another developer. I have my computer science degree and settled happily in a suburb outside of St. Paul, Minnesota.

I really love what I do. And I wake up every single day understanding that I'm a very lucky and entitled individual and should take none of it for granted. Now before I got into software, I was doing something very different. I've been playing the clarinet since I was nine years old. And growing up, I had grand aspirations of becoming an orchestral clarinetist.

And if you think this picture is super nerdy, I want to say two things. Number one, you're at a programming conference. Look around you, everyone looks very nerdy. And number two, I have a whole lot more pictures that are really embarrassing of me holding the clarinet. Oh yeah, I like the side one, yeah. So I could go on for a while

about my own personal background, but that's not really why you're here. I'll just say that growing up, I got to study with some of the best teachers in my area and played in a ton of youth symphonies. After high school, I auditioned all over the Northeastern United States and got accepted at a few fancy conservatories that really wanted me to sell them my soul for about 40 to $50,000 a year. But in the end,

I was lucky enough to not in fact sell my soul and was able to stay straight in my home of Minneapolis, Minnesota. Fortunately, one of the most talented and well-known clarinetists in the country happened to live in Minneapolis and play principal clarinet in the Minnesota Orchestra. He was also on the faculty

of the University of Minnesota School of Music. And I got accepted there on a pretty good scholarship as one of only two undergraduates. The rest were either graduate students or DMAs, Doctoral of Musical Arts. Yes, if you want to become a doctor of clarinet, that is totally a thing you can do if you really want to. I remember the first wind ensemble rehearsal there.

After playing one piece with the group, I was absolutely terrified. These players were extremely good and the music was really complex. And I was used to playing at this level, but not at the speed and quantity that it was. I quickly learned my first lesson. I needed to learn how to deal with looking

at complex music in a very short amount of time. In high school and previously, you can't do, sorry, in high school and previously, you don't need to do that. You can basically just show up at a group rehearsal and just kind of blend in with the group and learn your part and be on your merry way. But at university and beyond, you can't do that.

You need to get every note off the page. Scheduling time for 80 musicians and some hotshot conductor isn't cheap, nor is paying your accompanist to go over your music for your recital over and over and over and never get in the practice room either. In rehearsals, you need to concentrate on the expressive aspect of playing with the group

and not scrambling to practice technical execution. So getting new music that initially looked really complex was extremely daunting for me and fueled many intense feelings of imposter syndrome. How do I even begin? All these notes, all these things on the page, like where do I even start?

Well, I'm gonna do that with music. First, you'd look at it as an overview. You'd ask yourself sorts of questions like, what sort of piece is this? What time period is it from? When was it written? Maybe that dictates the style. What's the form and structure? What's the tempo like? Is it fast? Is it slow? Then I'd sing the rhythms to myself because if you can't sing it, you can't play it.

I don't mean sing it like tonally perfect and like some great singer. I just mean, can you like really sing out the rhythms to yourself and internalize it? Then I'd find phrases, circling specific ideas and practicing those areas individually. And under tempo, slowly start to put it together until you get to a point that you can actually play it.

And looking back, I'd often think to myself, oh, you know, this actually isn't that hard now that I've all put it together. Easy, right? Well, how does this relate to software? In software, as you all know,

seeing a new code base can be extremely daunting. But eventually, as you all know, often you'll look back at that once daunting code base and think, oh yeah, I kind of get it. I don't know every single detail of the entire code base but I have enough in my brain now where I can really start to get stuff done. And for me, my music experience told me from the start

that if I broke things down like that, it was gonna be okay. Not a big deal. One of the most memorable things my instructor ever told me was, playing the clarinet is easy. Playing the clarinet is easy, right? There's some obvious falsity to that statement

but there's also quite a lot of truth. I thought at first he was just being the figurative lead developer of my future who just didn't understand how things looked anymore from my side of the music stand. But what he meant was that when you get down to it, playing the clarinet boils down to a small list of things and you see those things over and over and over again

regardless of the level of playing that you do. It's all the same in the end. You're using all the same skills. Taking that into account, there are fewer pieces than you'd think that are just that ridiculously hard that anyone, regardless of experience level, would just say, oh my gosh, that's just so hard. Even though you're a world-class clarinetist

and you've been practicing this and playing it for decades, there might be a piece of music that's just so inherently complex and difficult that it just remains hard no matter how much you play it. Complexity is on a relative scale though. There aren't many problems in programming where the code itself is so inherently complex

that anyone, regardless of experience, would say, oh, that's just really hard. No matter how much I work in this code base or how experienced I get, it just remains difficult in my brain. Don't let initial complexity scare you from diving in. Don't freak out if something looks hard. It was important for me in music

and it's just as important with programming.

Okay, spent, concentrated on one single thing and that is technique. But there's a lot more to performing than just playing all the notes off a page.

And I struggled with that aspect at first. And at first I thought it was just learning technique. Just study your technique. You'll be a better player. But what I actually learned is that it's not a question of technique. It's actually a question of concentration. You need utmost concentration performing a piece of music with no technical mistakes and bringing the music off the page

in a believable way to your audience. You need to be able to block every other single thought from your brain, pouring your entire being into thinking about what you're playing. And you might be thinking to yourself like, oh, great, it sounds kinda corny. Like, let the music take you away to a magical place. But however you view it, it's actually what's required for technical excellence.

And in software, this level of concentration we often call being in the zone, right? Distraction-free, concentrated, super productive. There's always the image of the programmer where he or she has their headphones in, and oh my gosh, don't disturb the developer. They're in the zone. You don't wanna interrupt that chi, right? Of course, that's total bullshit.

And it's not that it isn't true, but that concentration is something that anyone who has to do any task that isn't trivial can benefit from. And I could talk about that for the rest of my talk here but instead, I'm just gonna plug a book. There is a book called Deep Work. It's by Cal Newport, and the subtitle for this book is

Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World. And in it, the author talks about the concept of deep work versus shallow work. And in shallow work, shallow work is like doing these low-demand tasks, even if they make you feel super productive. Something like checking your email in the morning, right? Oh yay, you got all the little meaningless emails archived in your inbox.

What a great use of your time, right? Deep work, he described as the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. First, he makes the case that any knowledge-based profession will reap huge benefits from doing this, giving historical examples that seem to follow this pattern.

Then he gives real-world advice and strategies to actually achieve a habit of doing deep work. It's a really good book. I could babble about it forever. Just go read it. So deep work, or maintaining concentration, is exhausting. And so related to intense concentration and deep work is the concept of balance to produce quality.

So as you can imagine, musicians practice their music a lot. There was a colleague at school of mine who, if I may humbly say so, was a very average player, but supposedly spent around seven hours a day practicing their music just individually.

Now seven hours a day, whatever, it seems like fine, okay. But then you have to factor in the three hours of one ensemble or orchestra that you had every day, maybe another hour of chamber, bunch of other group rehearsals in that. All in all, if you add it all up, it's basically having a clarinet in your mouth from before the sun comes up to after the sun goes down.

Now in contrast, my instructor advocated no more than a couple hours a day practicing, maybe creeping up towards four or something when you were crunching for auditions for a couple weeks from now or whatever, but no more than that. Why? Why would my instructor tell me, don't practice so much? Because concentrated work is exhausting.

And at some point, if you're not careful, you're just mindlessly playing notes and not really pushing yourself to be any better. It's even detrimental. You perform like you practice. You perform like you practice. Practicing without concentration actually teaches you to practice, to perform without concentration.

And, surprise, I discovered the same thing going into software. Right as I hit the stage in my career where you'd call me an intermediate, I overworked myself a lot. I worked these ridiculous hours and had a hard time decoupling my thoughts from work at the end of the day. I wasn't productive with my time as I could be

in a shorter amount of time, and my personal life suffered. This concept of balance extends itself outside the confines of just the hours in a day, too. It's about balancing yourself as a person and making time for things that you enjoy outside of working. Now, as members of the Ruby and the Rails community,

you've probably heard this stuff all the time from people like DHH and Basecamp. Things like avoiding burnout, not working 60 hour weeks, and not glorifying someone who claims that success means never seeing your kids. Now, I didn't have it all figured out when I started doing software, of course, but coming from music, this notion of balance

was already very natural to me. As I was reading that Deep Work book, I constantly thought to myself, oh yeah, I know this. I literally learned this exact very thing in school. The no practicing for more than four hours a day, that's literally the exact time estimated in Deep Work. It's uncanny how many things I discovered through music that present themselves directly in that book.

So my experience in music, of how to make the most of my time and understanding the importance of being a well-rounded person outside of your work, made me a better programmer right from the start. The last thing I wanna talk about is hero worship and imposter syndrome.

Throughout my years studying music, I got to meet a lot of really well-known, important people in the classical music world. I studied and played side by side with some really monster players that now have jobs with the National Symphony Orchestra in D.C. or play on Broadway, crazy.

I got to work with internationally known conductors and composers, people that I still can't actually believe gave me their time to listen to me play on an individual level. There's so many stories that I wish I could tell. Now these musicians that you see up here, these are some of the DHH's,

Aaron Patterson's, Chad Fowler's, or Sandy Metz's of the orchestral music world. Now I've gotten to know a lot of people in the Ruby world as well. In my previous job at Red Hat, and especially working full-time on open source, I've worked with lots of names that everyone in this room has undoubtedly heard of.

So I've been internally screaming at myself since the last slide, because I purposely have been setting humility aside and pumping myself up and making myself sound so awesome, but I'm actually trying to say the complete and utter opposite. I'm not awesome. I'm a very normal person. I feel like an imposter right now talking to you all about this. I just have worked and gotten to know enough people from both music and software

to authoritatively say that your heroes are normal people. All those people on that previous slide I just mentioned are normal people. Your heroes don't have some super power that makes them super amazing. The clarinetists I met and studied with all started somewhere, and it wasn't just sheer talent that got them to where they are today.

It was almost entirely hard work, a lot of sacrifice, and quite honestly, a little bit of sheer luck. There's a reason why the saying goes practice makes perfect and not talent makes perfect. Your heroes are not inherently better than you and understand things that you never will. Their knowledge is not a simple superset of your own.

They don't know everything you do just like you don't know everything they do. They can actually learn from you. Your heroes have simply learned how to handle complexity, concentrate deeply, and balance themselves so as to create quality work that you admire.

And that's not to say that they have it figured out perfectly as well, especially the balance bit. Balance is always an ongoing struggle in life, and it changes depending on your life situation as time goes on. In the end, what I'm trying to say here is that everyone, including your heroes, are just people, and they too deal with imposter syndrome and feeling inadequate. And me coming from music

where I got to study with some of my heroes, I feel I can internalize that very, very quickly. So I did finish my Bachelor of Music degree. I taught my own studio of students for a few years, but I did decide to move on, and the rest of the story brings me to where I am here today. So the inevitable question

that I know I'll get after the talk is why? Why are you here? I looked at myself in the mirror and decided I wouldn't be able to keep the balance that I need in my life while still attaining the career goals that I set for myself. There's more to life than just playing the clarinet. I knew I needed to sacrifice more time and effort being a successful musician,

whereas with software, something that I enjoy, really just as much. Maintaining a healthy life balance doesn't require me to sacrifice that time that I can spend doing other things that I love, like, I don't know, seeing my family. And although some people might say that I wasted my time not going straight into what I ultimately made in my career,

I don't really regret it at all. The things that I learned made me a better programmer before I even got started, like handling complexity, concentrating, balance, understanding heroes, all those different things. So there's a dirty little secret caught up in this, and I've actually been noticing that this dirty little secret is manifesting itself in lots of other talks that I've already seen here

at this very conference. The dirty secret is that all of these things apply to life in general. Many of you have likely discovered these very things for yourself from a completely different angle, from a completely different background. So really, these lessons didn't just make me a better programmer, they made me a better person.

So I'm gonna play one more piece. Does anyone know what a bandonian is? Bandonian? Ooh, not a single one, I've never had that before. Okay, so a bandonian is just like an accordion, except it sounds a little bit different. It's the instrument that brought about Argentinian tango music.

And as the bandonian, it's considered the, you know, quintessential tango instrument. The man that you see up here is the quintessential tango composer. This is Astor Piazzolla. Astor Piazzolla was a virtuosic bandonian player and considered the world's foremost composer

of tango music. He single-handedly invented the style Nuevo Tango, which is basically a mix of tango, classical, and jazz music. So here is an etude by Piazzolla that he wrote for flute, but I'm gonna play it on the clarinet. Before I play that, I just wanna say a quick thank you to Red Hat.

I originally wrote this talk while I was working there, so thanks, Red Hat, for giving me the time. And also my current employer, Software4Good. If you're looking for someone to craft you some quality web and mobile applications, please come talk to me, especially if you'd like to make the world a better place, just like we do. We're doing stuff like currently building a web app to increase transparency and affordable housing wait lists.

And we don't just work for benevolent nonprofits, so please reach out if you're a company looking to build something great with us. And thank you for listening to the talk.