How to scratch an itch

Are you a “creative person”? Why is it that most of us would probably hesitate to answer “yes” to that question?

Stereotypes that paint creativity as a mysterious force for good in the world have incidentally discouraged many of us from practicing creativity in our own lives.

This talk presents a strange theory: what if creativity is more like a chronic illness, one fueled by toxic emotions and character flaws? If nothing else, that would certainly lower the barrier to entry.

Using my own career as a case study, this talk is reflection on how my own shortcomings have served as my inspiration and how creative work has helped me mitigate my personal failings while learning to accept myself.

Or, if you’d rather, this is a talk about 9 whacky side projects involving mustaches and home security systems.

The video above was recorded at SCNA on October 21, 2016, at USC Viterbi School of Engineering.

00:00

This talk is titled how to scratch an itch in 200 repos

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or less. @searls is my real name

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My parents were quite prescient and on-brand back when

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they named me. This is what my face looked

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like in 2011 and thanks to personal

00:15

branding, I'm now stuck with this face forever because you might see it

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from Twitter or Github as my avatar

00:21

Just like Todd mentioned, I co-founded an agency with him

00:22

Just like Todd mentioned, I co-founded an agency with him 5 years ago called

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Test Double. Our mission in life is to improve

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a lot of the stuff about software that sucks, and one of the things that sucks a lot

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is that most engineering teams operate at capacity

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and they don't have enough slack in the system to improve

00:37

things like testing, and quality, and craft. So we come in

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to pair with those teams to add enough capacity so that

00:43

we can all work together to make stuff better. It might sound

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familiar as a business model, it's kind of like consulting except good

00:49

So if your team could benefit from that sort of

00:52

thing, I hope you'll chat with me or Todd tonight or tomorrow

00:55

So, yeah, how to scratch an itch You might be able to

00:58

infer from that title that this is a talk about creativity

01:01

Everyone loves creativity, "yay! creativity!" That's a good

01:04

thing, right, ok, cool, let's talk about creativity. …So what is

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creativity, exactly? It's one of those axiomatic

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concepts that we generally don't interrogate

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or introspect much on, and I forced myself to

01:16

think about this when I was designing this talk and

01:19

The first thing that came to mind is that creativity is a lot like passion

01:22

Passion's hot right now. We got all these passion projects. Look at all

01:25

these passionate logos for passion projects that people have

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made. But personally I don't get on board with a movement

01:31

until I can find a way to engage with a brand

01:34

and its hashtag. So the American Express passion project.

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And it actually serves as a really good example of why

01:40

passion doesn't equal creativity, because it fizzles out

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kind of like domain name registrations

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So the Amex passion project is just gone

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now. So, no, passion isn't quite

01:52

what creativity is. You might say "is creativity art?"

01:55

You certainly—coding feels creative, right?

01:58

We know it's a creative enterprise, but not all of our

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code is art, when I put it up on a screen

02:04

You know, it's mostly functional most of the time. It certainly can

02:07

be art, but it doesn't seem like the best metaphor

02:10

or abstraction. You could say, is creativity vision

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and foresight? If we had a crystal ball where you could see

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where the cloud is and where it's going to go and there might be an

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aspect of that, but that's not in itself building anything

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it's just prognostication, so vision's not enough

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And I thought about this at length to try to

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figure out, "am I creative? are you creative?"

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And if I was forced to think in those terms

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and that popular framing about creativity like filling out a survey

02:37

Are you incredibly passionate? Do you create beautiful things?

02:40

Can you see into the future? Of course most of us would say no

02:43

to all three of those things, so certainly we're not

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creative. That's a really high bar to clear. Creative people

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are these magical unicorns and that's not me, that's not us.

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That's kind of disappointing. We can

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usually at least relate to the idea of a creative spark, right, like we

02:58

have an idea in the back of our heads we're walking down the street and an

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idea occurs and then of course what happens next is we just

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effortlessly create amazing things based on that idea

03:07

Unfortunately, that doesn't comport with my experience. Actually

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I have a—creative ideas, they stress me

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out. That spark, tells me— I'm already really busy

03:16

how am I going to find the time or the capability to go

03:19

and accomplish that thing

03:22

these ideas they sort of scare me, because I don't think I'm—gonna

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have fear, uncertainty, and doubt I'm not going to be able to do them. Where does that spark

03:28

come from? Is there some big dragon breathing fire

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behind me? Should I be running from my ideas or I'm going to burn

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up? I got this fraught relationship with these

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creative ideas in my head, and so I was thinking about my own

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weird relationship with creativity and I realized

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the best metaphor for me is that creativity is a chronic

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illness. Which I know sounds horrifying

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But here me out. Because what happens is I go two weeks

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three weeks, four weeks, and eventually something makes

03:55

me angry, something wells up inside of me

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and then I have an episode of creativity

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and I emit a blog post or a library or a

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framework. And

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the way I think of it is it's like kidney stones

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I'm passing npm modules

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And then I feel a sense of relief

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after. So I've seen this pattern

04:19

in my life, right? I've got all of these negative emotions, this

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toxicity. I'm a really sad, broken individual and

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over the course of my professional life I keep finding these

04:28

ways to shape that into positive outcomes

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and I don't know how that happens, and so this talk is an exploration

04:34

into trying to figure that out, and maybe there's something that you can

04:37

relate to. Because what I've found is that that reframing

04:40

of what creativity is certainly lowers the

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bar, it's like "are you a broken individual? Good! then you

04:46

can be creative, too!" So let's

04:49

wind all the way back to the beginning of my career

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I was working at a big accounting firm, I wasn't very

04:55

competent. I didn't have very much autonomy

04:58

at my job, and I would get ideas like anyone gets ideas

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But I wouldn't be able to act on those ideas, so they actually just

05:04

bummed me out. In fact, eventually the ideas would fade away

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and that would make me feel relieved, because now they weren't stressing me

05:10

out. And it took me years to realize that what I was missing was

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I didn't have an outlet to practice those creative ideas

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To develop a feedback loop, just like we do with coding stuff

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And I learned once I started trying that production

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wasn't necessarily the best creative outlet, either

05:25

Us as developers working at machines

05:28

At work, we might think that this is creativity, building

05:31

ideas, but typically they're other people's ideas

05:34

we're building reports, or mailers, or shopping carts

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and we feel creative, because we did create it

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but because it wasn't our own, it doesn't really scratch the same itch, I don't think

05:43

Separately, we usually

05:46

work on teams and an important part of building software on teams

05:49

(there's me and that's my team)

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An important part about building software on teams is that we're building everything

05:55

to be very consistent and orderly so that any of us can be productive

05:58

in that environment, but creativity is sporadic

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and messy. I might have an idea like "Hey I could pull this

06:04

one package out and that would eliminate the need for these two packages

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Because I could put a factory in front of them and look at this, and this is

06:10

really cool and I could be really proud of the creative thing that I just did

06:13

But from everyone else's perspective, they see the

06:16

system is becoming less stable and less workable. And

06:19

they're worried, and I get mad because they don't appreciate this cool

06:22

creative thing that I just did and then they

06:25

get angry because I keep going off the reservation and disrupting the

06:28

orderliness of the system. A third thing that

06:31

we see happen a lot at our company Test Double is, developers

06:34

who are passionate about what they do, they put a lot of effort

06:37

they tie up their ego in the stuff that \they build and then they hand it off

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they get excited and then it just sits in QA

06:43

or people comment on their pull requests and

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and things take forever and they don't see

06:49

it in front of users and then eventually they just get angry

06:52

because what they did was they ceded control

06:55

of their happiness and their emotional state to somebody else

06:58

and at work that's just not appropriate, because we're not building

07:01

this stuff for our own good

07:04

we need another place to practice

07:07

creativity. So you have to create your own space where that's

07:10

safe. And one morning, I was

07:13

taking a shower. Ideas come to me in the shower, I don't know when they come to you

07:16

but they always come to me in the shower, and I had an idea and

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it made me angry, of course, because ideas are bad like I explained earlier

07:22

and I got so mad at this idea that

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I went and sat at my computer and I hacked at it until I could build a thing

07:28

I felt that relief again, but this relief was

07:31

different. This was like the first green bar

07:34

in the test. This was like "OK, cool, I understand this now"

07:37

And I went from a disgruntled employee

07:40

to a merely gruntled employee because I was starting to learn

07:43

how to be productive with creativity

07:46

And from then on when I got a creative idea

07:49

in the shower, I'd roll my eyes because now I've gotta make time

07:52

for this—maybe there goes my Saturday or my evening or something

07:55

But at least I had a reasoned way to work through it

07:58

And so ever since I started programming

08:01

professionally, I've always had a main project that occupies most of my time

08:04

and most of my focus, but a little project to the side. Whenever I get

08:07

frustrated or I want to play with something or I'm learning something

08:10

I can pull on that thread as well, and I always balance both

08:13

of these things. Of course this comes with risks

08:16

I'm very often burning the candle at both ends

08:19

If I work all weekend because I'm so excited about my side project

08:22

then I come to work on Monday morning, the last thing I want to do is program

08:25

That can be problematic, and

08:28

in the last several years in particular I've spent so

08:31

much time on the road, doing all this open source stuff on top of

08:34

my normal job, that I'm often asking "Why do I do

08:37

this?" And that's where the introspection

08:40

of this talk is—part of why I did this

08:43

talk is that I don't think that I'm that special. I think all of us could be this

08:46

creative and it would save me a lot of time if you all would

08:49

do the talks instead of me

08:52

So when I sat and I

08:55

thought about why is it that I do this

08:58

I'm almost ashamed to admit those sources

09:01

because they're from my childhood, so I've got a few little childhood anecdotes

09:04

The first one's about golf. My dad was actually an amateur

09:07

golfer. One of my first memories is watching my

09:10

dad play golf on TV at an amateur PGA event

09:13

and so in southeastern Michigan, every well-to-do businessperson

09:16

wanted my dad in their foursome, so I spent as a kid

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a ton of time at country clubs with kids that were way richer and

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more world-weary and experienced and knowledgeable

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and well-to-do than me

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that was an important part of my upbringing, because it taught me the

09:31

ever-important skill of feeling inadequate

09:37

Talk about my church a little bit I went to a church that didn't

09:40

necessarily work in its community and serve the poor or anything

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like that. I went to an upper crust white evangelical

09:46

Presbyterian church where I spent years 5

09:49

through 10 of my life learning how to understand very

09:52

intangible concepts and then feel extremely

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strongly about them and argue with passionate rhetoric

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and that was also a really important skill, because I learned

10:01

righteous indignation. Fun fact,

10:04

about me: nobody's ever asked for my opinion, because

10:07

no one's ever needed to

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I can't help but form really strong opinions

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the minute I see something, and that's less fun than

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it sounds. Third thing about my life

10:19

I'm one of those people, like at lunch we were talking about college

10:22

programs. I got a computer science degree

10:25

in college, and I wasn't very good at it

10:28

My professors pulled me aside senior year when I was trying to find a job

10:31

and some of them confided in me that maybe I should find a more

10:34

hybrid role where I'm also talking to people more and maybe

10:37

not trusted with a computer

10:40

and it was through there that I learned this

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real deep-grained incompetence and

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what's funny about all those three things is that clearly they're negative but they have

10:49

flip sides that I think are really valuable to exploit

10:52

The inadequacy leads to me having a bunch of

10:55

people that I aspire to in my life—that I look up to

10:58

The indignation means that I always have something to say

11:01

or a perspective (whether it's valid or not) and

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the incompetence means I don't view myself as a rockstar, I always

11:07

feel like I've got a lot to learn and a lot to improve

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That translates to a means, a motive, and an opportunity

11:13

to exploit creative ideas

11:16

Also, worth mentioning here is this

11:19

these are all markers of tremendous amounts of privilege in my upbringing

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most kids don't have the amount of spare time that I did to

11:25

nurse my existential grief

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to the extent that I have, but through doing

11:31

a lot of creative stuff, I've learned how awesome and how enriching

11:34

and rewarding it can be. And getting back to Todd & I

11:37

forming Test Double, a big reason we did that is because we want everyone to be

11:40

able to have that experience by moving at a sustainable pace

11:43

by being able to build creative stuff in a way that's congruent

11:46

with our normal work life, so that you don't have to be

11:49

working on nights & weekends or particularly

11:52

privileged to be able to enjoy the fruits of creativity

11:55

If you want to talk to us about that

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you can e-mail join@testdouble.com. Our first

12:01

step in our recruiting process is really low-pressure, it's not some sort of

12:04

technical interview at a white board, it's literally a conversation about

12:07

how we work and how you work and whether you'd like to try how

12:10

we work. Just to learn about us and learn a little bit about

12:13

what we've learned about productive, autonomous software development

12:16

So anyway, all these things: really negative

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How does that lead to creative ideas? Well, I

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kind of feel like it's a game of MadLibs™ in my head. This is my user

12:25

story for creativity. I feel

12:28

righteous indignation, but I don't know what I'm doing

12:31

Maybe, if I build something I will feel

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less inadequate. And I have 9

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little anecdotes. 9 little stories of side projects over my career

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that have helped me to mitigate some of that toxicity

12:43

in my heart. And I'm going to start by talking about

12:46

incompetence. Because like I mentioned, I wasn't very good in college and

12:49

I was really worried: why would anyone ever pay me to write software?

12:52

when I can barely learn how to do it? And my library

12:55

at the time where I worked said "Hey, we need a new citation editor"

12:58

on the web. And I thought, you know, I'm

13:01

up to this challenge. I feel like I don't need this

13:04

Computer Science hifalutin stuff, but I also don't know how to

13:07

build apps, either, so maybe if I build it I'll at least

13:10

find a way to survive this profession, and it was a pretty low

13:13

pressure gig, because it was $10 an hour and I could

13:16

spend all summer on it. So I built this thing called

13:19

KnightCite, a little citation editor on the web. It was free

13:22

and I was really proud, I did it. I accomplished a lot

13:25

of my goals. It supports all the major styleguides, dozens

13:28

of sources (the only one that did that). Has an account

13:31

system where you can login, create bibliographies, and export them

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It's got millions of users, and still to this day it's by

13:37

far the most-used piece of software that I've ever written, and

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I made it all up as I went. I didn't read in a book how to do this

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I just had to figure out how to do a reset password

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thing, and I just figured it all out as I went. This, of course

13:49

had some very minor downsides. Like, for instance, it's totally

13:52

insecure.

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It's 100% manual testing

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It produces gigabytes of daily server warnings

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That those poor admins who still

14:04

are, over a decade later, still dealing with

14:07

and it's one 16,000 line-long PHP file

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of just if's and else's and string concatenation

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But

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what had happened to me in my classroom education was it had

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drilled into me this fear that I don't get what's going on

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and paralyzed me from ever practicing any of that creative

14:25

reflex and that creative muscle. So recognizing

14:28

that I needed a safe space where it was OK to make a mess

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and to do that in concert with learning proper

14:34

computer science-y stuff was crucial

14:37

to me even being in this profession

14:40

much less on a stage, talking to you all about it. So that

14:43

certainly lessened my sense of incompetence. The

14:46

other thing at the time, the web was just a really fancy hypercard

14:49

implementation. I didn't feel like a real developer; my friends all worked

14:52

on airplane realtime controls and operating systems

14:55

so the web versus being

14:58

closer to the metal. Like, Uncle Bob told me—is Uncle Bob still

15:01

here today, that you're not a real programmer

15:04

unless you programmed assembly—well, I hadn't really programmed a lot of assembly

15:07

So I didn't feel like a real programmer. And so I

15:10

tried to go native at multiple points in my career

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Maybe on a Saturday, I'd open up Xcode and say, "I'm gonna build an OS X

15:16

app", and i'd look at the documentation and it would confuse me and I'd feel

15:19

stupid, and then I'd wait a weekend and I'd go, and I'd

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find a different part of the documentation and it'd depress me, and I'd feel

15:25

stupid. And then the week after that I would open up Xcode and I'd

15:28

look at a different part—and this outside in, like, "maybe if I just read it all

15:31

and then I'll know how to make native apps." Of course, that didn't go well

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and time kept passing and I just concluded I was

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probably too dumb to make native apps, maybe I just had

15:40

stay on the web. But then one day, a momentous day that a lot

15:43

of us remember: the iPhone was announced. And I thought to myself

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as soon as this thing has an SDK, I'm gonna

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make an app. I really want to build something for

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the iPhone. The only problem was I had no idea what that would be. So I

15:55

got the original iPhone and it changed

15:58

my life, right? It was beautiful, obviously. It's innovative, there's nothing like it.

16:01

I knew from the first day I had it that it was

16:04

life-altering, because I took my wife to a restaurant and I ignored her the

16:07

whole time. And I was, like, "this is

16:10

the future!" Boy was I right

16:13

So, the thing about that was I

16:16

was staring so long, because Edge was so slow

16:19

and I had this one gaming forum I liked to visit, and

16:22

at first it was not very readable, but it took like

16:25

3 minutes to load a single page

16:28

of what were often 50, 60 page-long threads

16:31

so that was unacceptable. But there was no such thing as

16:34

the mobile web at the time. There's certainly no responsive

16:37

design, and so I thought to myself, maybe I could build an app that was like a

16:40

client to this website. Because I felt like the mobile web was a joke

16:43

but I kept failing to learn Cocoa, and so maybe

16:46

if I built something, I'd at least learn how to learn a

16:49

really unfamiliar thing and tackle a new platform

16:52

and I did it. So I started by building a little system that just

16:55

go and fetch the HTML, and then I figured out how to load a library

16:58

like libxml2 and parse all that into an object

17:01

model, and then, you know, I'd find all the media in those

17:04

objects and go and fetch them from the Internet, so I could build a

17:07

UI and have a custom user interface in an iPhone app

17:10

and you know what, it was way faster, and it was legible, and it was

17:13

full-featured, you could log in and edit posts and stuff, it was really neat

17:16

it was also the very first time I ever contributed to open source in a real

17:19

way, and it was so

17:22

cool, because every time that the Facebook app got launched, a

17:25

little bit of my code ran, and when I realized the impact that I

17:28

could have that way, I got addicted to sharing my stuff in

17:31

open source. It was also my very first user group talk, and so

17:34

the only reason I'm here today is because this one app happened to go well

17:37

of course, it was rejected by Apple

17:40

because, sometimes people swear on the Internet. And swearing

17:43

was against the guidelines, which were very prudish at the time

17:46

and so I threw it in the trash. But I didn't care

17:49

I was happy as a clam, because mission accomplished: I'd learned how to learn a thing

17:52

That was the real purpose for that exercise, and

17:55

what I learned there was that learning something simple is pretty easy so

17:58

long as you can fit it inside a day or whatever the bounds

18:01

of that passion is, because it's enough to get

18:04

through a weekend, but when the going gets tough, your motivation

18:07

fizzles. If you try to learn something bigger, that's going to take several

18:10

days, weeks, months, then you really need a purpose

18:13

that's going to push you through those barriers as time

18:16

goes on, or else you'll get distracted, you'll end up with just

18:19

a graveyard of half-finished projects everywhere

18:22

So what I try to do is find the smallest thing I can possibly

18:25

caremad about. Really, like, "I need this project to exist

18:28

and I'm going to just push and drag it over the finish line"

18:31

And that was a lot of valuable lessons, and certainly

18:34

made me feel less incompetent as a developer, because I got to go native

18:37

For a long time, I did Java development

18:40

and Java's a cool language, but I felt like it was

18:43

a little uncool. It was

18:46

certainly not getting a lot of buzz in the mid-aughts

18:49

certainly not like Ruby was. A lot of my friends, they

18:52

seemed really cool, they all worked on Ruby at work

18:55

and the best way I can compare the two languages is via

18:58

Super Mario Kart. You might think of Java

19:01

as being like one of the early courses, just like a really

19:04

wide lane and you can't really mess up that badly

19:07

If you go off the course, you can just drive back

19:10

on and we get that with Java, because it's not a

19:13

very expressive language. The compiler does a lot for you

19:16

the tools do a lot for you. Ruby is more like Rainbow Road

19:19

where it's narrower and faster

19:22

and if you fall off, Lakitu has to pick you up

19:25

and you lose like 20 seconds, and that's reflective of

19:28

dynamic programming and metaprogramming and how

19:31

you don't have the same amazing tooling. And so programming

19:34

even at this point in my career, I felt like I wasn't a very good programmer

19:37

much less dynamic programming. And at the time

19:40

in Ruby, meta-programming— changing at runtime the

19:43

object model, the classes and method definitions

19:46

I didn't even understand how that could possibly work. So I joined

19:49

my first Ruby team completely terrified and surrounded by people who

19:52

were way cooler than me and I thought "I have nothing to contribute

19:55

here" until I looked at their test suite

19:58

Because in Java, we had a pretty formal sense of what

20:01

good tests looked like, and I knew that Rubyists wrote a lot of tests

20:04

But it turns out that they all sucked, and so when I looked

20:07

at those tests, I thought maybe this is a way for me to sneak in

20:10

the back door and actually be relevant. I looked at a test like this

20:13

This is creating a fake dog object and it's saying

20:16

the dog should be called with the method wag and the argument tail

20:19

and then you pass the dog to your subject under test

20:22

and this just looked way wrong to me. First, there's no type awareness

20:25

so you don't know that dog actually responds to wag. Then

20:28

these things are out of order. It's like given-then-when and that feels

20:31

awkward. And the API for making that

20:34

test double and stubbing it was kinda confiusing, so

20:37

I got caremad enough to say maybe

20:40

I hate these mock objects, but if I

20:43

can't metaprogram Ruby, I can't build something to replace them

20:46

so maybe if I build it, I'll at least find a way to fit in

20:49

as a Rubyist. And my whole goal here was just to

20:52

cargo-cult my favorite test double library in Java and implement it

20:55

in Ruby. And it turns out that that didn't work so well

20:58

I learnedl some

21:01

humility in the process that I had to go and actually talk to humans about

21:04

the idioms and conventions in Ruby. I had to really bone up and learn

21:07

how the Ruby object model worked. And then I had to put the time

21:10

in. I took two weeks off for Christmas that year and I spent the whole time

21:13

squirreled away just working on this, which my family

21:16

didn't appreciate. And so what came

21:19

out is this little fun gem called gimme. You pass it a type

21:22

the subject

21:25

It's in the correct order. Here you can say you verify that the

21:28

dog's called with wag and tail in a way that looks like a method

21:31

invocation. And so I was really proud because this had the type awareness I was looking

21:34

for. It preserves the test order. Has a clever, terse Ruby

21:37

like API. Of course, no one adopted it, because nobody

21:40

knew who I was, but I shopped it around at a couple conferences and got people

21:43

like Jim Weirich to incorporate this style into Flexmock

21:46

and now RSpec—which was the first example—

21:49

has incorporated the same style. So I was able to kind-of move

21:52

the needle a little bit. But what that project taught me

21:55

was it's important to get out of the line of fire, right?

21:58

I don't want to try to

22:01

learn how to metaprogram in the most important feature, because

22:04

then I'm on the spot, and everyone's going to call me out as an imposter

22:07

Meanwhile, I learned that working code

22:10

can sell an idea way better than just nitpicking stuff

22:13

if I just come to that team and say "hey your tests suck, because I don't like this

22:16

and this and this", they'd say "what, so?". But if you throw a keyboard at

22:19

the problem and actually build something—a proof of concept—you can reframe the

22:22

discussion around the concrete stuff, and that was how I was able to sell

22:25

that idea. Additionally, if what you're selling is ideas

22:28

the best part is they require no maintenance. Nobody is going to open up a GitHub

22:31

issue at 3am on a Saturday because your idea stopped

22:34

working and so it's true that thoughtleaders

22:37

have more fun. So that made me certainly

22:40

feel less incompetent. A little bit

22:43

about my own sense of inadequacy and how I was able to deal with that

22:46

I practice a thing called Midwestern programming

22:49

So if this is the continental

22:52

US, my general

22:55

stereotyped perception is that people on the east coast, the developers

22:58

there they have serious jobs. They work at universities doing

23:01

high finance, it's very obviously valuable

23:04

work because it creates a lot of money. And on the west coast, your apps

23:07

obviously don't make any money, but they get a lot of attention and

23:10

all the really, really

23:13

popular snacklechat, and other stuff, everyone is sort of…

23:16

but in the midwest, we do a lot of charts

23:19

We have all these blue

23:22

chip companies that have backend office apps that they need

23:25

built that might only have three users, that might

23:28

not be that exciting. So frankly, I'm just not

23:31

great at cocktail parties, when I explain, "Oh, well we're building

23:34

this system that participates in demand-response energy

23:37

markets in various parts of the country", people… their eyes glaze

23:40

over and I heard a certain amount of rockstar envy. I just wanted to build a cool

23:43

thing that I could say in a sentence, people would know what I did

23:46

so I felt like my work wasn't exciting, but I only really knew how to build

23:49

enterprise stuff, so maybe if I built something that was just designed to

23:52

go viral, I'd feel more appreciated

23:55

There was a service called mustachify.me at the time. My friend Aidan

23:58

wrote, and what you do is pass an image and then it would

24:01

use face.com API and put mustaches on the faces

24:04

and I thought "that was cool, but let's go bigger". Like, what could I

24:07

build that leveraged this, so I made a Chrome extension called Must

24:10

Stache. And my friend Cory and I wrote it

24:13

and so basically we would just go to the mustachify service, replace

24:16

all the images on every page in your browser with a mustachified one

24:19

and we though this was really cool, we did it in like 3 hours

24:22

posted to a forum at night, we went to bed. And then the next day we had like

24:25

3000 installs of Pro users so they were visiting 40

24:28

pages an hour, or 42 images per tab and

24:31

we did the back-of-the-napkin math to realize it was like 5 million requests per hour

24:34

and we learned a valuable lesson

24:37

on that first day. It's actually a popular meme right now called

24:40

serverless architecture, because we just destroyed

24:43

Aidan's poor dyno. So we had to go back to the drawing board

24:46

and what we did was we rebuilt it but this time talking directly to the

24:49

face.com API which did the facial recognition and got you JSON

24:52

back. And then with that JSON we'd take our own image and

24:55

then just rotate, transpose, and put it over the images ourselves

24:58

And that was really fun. That was a fun weekend hack

25:01

But I didn't get a ton of attention. In fact time passed

25:04

I forgot all about this thing until I saw in the news that face.com

25:07

was getting acquired for $80 Million by facebook

25:10

that made me—that was surprising. So I went googling

25:13

around my Must Stache thing and saw it had been covered in Tested

25:16

it'd been covered in PC World in print. It

25:19

was on the Verge. You know, the Glamour magazine wrote an article

25:22

about this Chrome extension. And no one ever thought to contact me

25:25

But I felt pretty

25:28

proud that I'd had this impact. And pretty

25:31

annoyed too when I thought about it. I looked at face.com's

25:34

developer forums and almost all the posts were just people using my

25:37

stupid Must Stache thing, and the developers at face.com were

25:40

giving them active tech support. And I thought "but this is violating

25:43

your terms of—ohhhhh, it's so that you hockey stick and can

25:46

show off a ton of usage to Facebook, and I bet you a big

25:49

part of that $80M valuation had something to do with

25:52

my thing. Where's my cut? Well, my cut

25:55

came in the form of face.com shutting down and then me getting a bunch of

25:58

e-mail because all of a sudden, nobody's browser worked

26:01

Because all of the images would just 404

26:04

So that was cool. I built a popular

26:07

thing, yay, but I didn't get to

26:10

enjoy any of that popularity at all, and I may have

26:13

made somebody else millions of dollars [citation

26:16

needed]. But it feels

26:19

that way and I made lots of users angry

26:22

the only time they ever learned about me was after their stuff stopped

26:25

working. And I was left with no recourse

26:28

I didn't have time to build a new face.com, I just had to kind of

26:31

shut down the extension. So I learned in the process

26:34

serverless isn't. Obviously, if you depend on someone else's server

26:37

they can always pull the rug out from you

26:40

That was a valuable lesson. Also, chasing

26:43

popularity without an underlying purpose or value statement is

26:46

toxic. Because, when I did run into a problem, I didn't have

26:49

the time—there was no economic reason or even moral reason

26:52

for me to invest the time to fix it. I was just left, you know,

26:55

with people angry at me. So that sucked.

26:58

But! It did get covered, apparently,

27:01

in the last season of HBO's Silicon Valley where

27:04

they made an AR version of the plugin, so

27:07

that made me feel pretty cool, I guess.

27:10

Another way that I felt inadequate as a developer is that one time I was on this

27:13

legacy rescue project. A big waterfall project. If you don't know these

27:16

terms, by the way, legacy when we use that in software terms

27:19

it means that your kids will inherit it

27:22

and rescue means that you want to be rescued

27:25

So I was on this project for months

27:28

I could barely—my computer was just a memory

27:31

at this point, because I hadn't programmed in so long, I'd forgotten how to program

27:34

I felt like, "could I even program anything in 2 months anymore?"

27:37

I was really feeling kind of despondent and out of touch with myself as a

27:40

craftsperson. And at the time the

27:43

to-do apps were undergoing this renaissance, because it was still

27:46

early in the App Store and there was all these new to-do apps and I didn't really like any

27:49

of them. I kept falling back on this plaintext thing that I did where

27:52

I'd define a project with a colon, and I'd dasherize tasks

27:55

and I'd indicate something's done with a slash or blocked

27:58

with a pound sign, or I'd date it with braces and I

28:01

would just do this instead of using an app, but of course that was inconvenient

28:04

So I was thinking at the time, I feel like I hate all these

28:07

to-do apps, but I've also forgotten how to code so I can't

28:10

built my own. But maybe if I were to try I'd at least be able to restore my

28:13

dignity as a developer. And what I had to do there was I could give myself

28:16

the constraints needed and so I gave myself a little quest

28:19

I said "I want to build a to-do app that's so great

28:22

that I will use this at the exclusion of all the others…

28:25

and I only want to give myself 24 hours."

28:28

Can I still hack it? Under pressure.

28:31

So I built this app called doing-it.

28:34

So in doing-it, you define a project. And I started by just saying

28:37

contenteditable

28:40

dump it into localStorage, read it from localStorage

28:43

and then use the tool to track the rest of the work in the tool

28:46

So I was using doing-it to build doing-it from like minute

28:49

40. So I did it, I built the thing. It's still up at

28:52

todo.testdouble.com if you want to check it out you can

28:55

make a project, it'll autoformat based on the

28:58

the lead character here, so this is me making a couple different things

29:01

I can mark them done or overdue or high priority

29:04

and mark'em all done. And that was a lot of fun, you know I finished it within the

29:07

1 day. Gave me a renewed sense of confidence as a developer

29:10

It still works, thanks to Heroku's free dynos

29:13

No users, so no angry e-mails to

29:16

deal with. That was nice. And I just threw it up on GitHub

29:19

Because that's just the default thing, I just work in the open

29:22

But the purpose of course was just self-validataion that's what

29:25

I wanted to prove myself I could still program, but when I throw

29:28

stuff out into the open, that's just because that's my default, it's not because

29:31

I'm necessarily trying to become an open source star. But I do

29:34

get a lot of people—because I do a lot of open source—come to me and say

29:37

"How do I get into open source", and I think that maintainers struggle with this

29:40

question, because they want to make it sound easy to get involved

29:43

They might say, "write me some docs" or "Send me a

29:46

small pull request or something", and the problem with that of course is that

29:49

it's not the normal creative exchange of ideas. You might

29:52

even submit the pull request, but then most of the time that maintainer

29:55

is gonna get angry and say "this isn't how I'd do it—rejected!"

29:58

or "Change it!" and nobody needs another boss

30:01

right? So if you get into open source

30:04

to be creative, you just create stuff instead

30:07

Because, when you go and talk to open source maintainers, like "how did you get started

30:10

with open source," it was rarely "oh, I started doing docs for this

30:13

one other guy. It was usually "well, I made stuff that I

30:16

wanted, I threw it up on the Internet, and then some of it got popular

30:19

and most of it didn't." And you'll never predict what's

30:22

gonna stick and what's not. The reference to 200 repos is that I've probably

30:25

got like 250 repos that I've started and you've—

30:28

—odds are you've heard of zero of them. You may have heard of two or

30:31

three. But the vast majority is stuff that I just built

30:34

just for the sake of it, and I don't expect to hear about it again

30:37

And it might seem scary to work in the open, like

30:40

you know, people are going to criticize your code, but there's a secret:

30:43

nobody reads code. So

30:46

just don't worry about that. I'm not going to read your code

30:49

So that made me feel a little bit less inadequate

30:52

as a developer. Third one, now that I'm a self-professed

30:55

thoughtleader who talks at conferences a bunch, most

30:58

thoughtleaders get into this line of work, by doing something

31:01

interesting, or observing something interesting. Sharing that insight with

31:04

other people. But then eventually, you stop doing

31:07

the work, and you run the risk of thoughtleading other people straight off

31:10

a cliff. And you don't want to do that

31:13

When it comes to test-driven development, I talk about test-driven development

31:16

a lot. I've talked about it for more years than I've practiced

31:19

it, which is worrying. And one day I decided to start leading

31:22

some thoughts about test-driven development. In fact, if you google

31:25

the phrase tdd failure, this blog post is the top

31:28

result, which I"m particularly proud of

31:31

And I got a lot of attention. And it was the front-page of Hacker News and I was

31:34

in the article I was saying "well this is what London-school test-driven development

31:37

is", and then the guy who actually invented that, Nat Pryce, was like

31:40

"no, it's not, really", and I was like "But I just got 400

31:43

thousand page views saying it was" and now everyone's going to find out that I'm a big

31:46

idiot. And so I was really upset about that, but

31:49

then, being the opportunistic and

31:52

person just seeking the

31:55

validation of everyone else, I decided to pivot and instead

31:58

just rename what I do as its own thing, so I

32:01

call it "Discovery Testing" and I actually built libraries

32:04

and talks around how to practice Discovery Testing as its own school

32:07

of TDD. So much so, that I realized I give a lot of talks

32:10

but I hadn't actually practiced it much

32:13

and I was just full of hot air. And so I felt like TDD, of course

32:16

it's not very well understood. A lot of us try it and fail

32:19

or don't really learn how to apply it consistently, so there's stuff

32:22

to say here, but I've just become a talking head at this point

32:25

And so I realized this last summer, maybe I need to

32:28

start practicing this more on my own and really proving out

32:31

that it really works. I've gotta validate my ideas. So I've got this

32:34

Simplisafe alarm system. It's just a thing where you

32:37

stick it to the wall, and if a door

32:40

opens, an alarm goes off, police come to your house. Simple alarm monitoring

32:43

And I love Apple's HomeKit, because I really love this idea

32:46

of a smart home, like we learned today the Internet of Things

32:49

aside from denial of service attacks

32:52

is also useful for just the convenience

32:55

of controlling your domain. So I have this server called

32:58

homebridge, runs Node.js and

33:01

you can build adapters, so I was thinking I'll build an adapter for Simplisafe

33:04

So that when I'm on my couch I can say "hey Siri, turn on my alarm"

33:07

The idea being, of course, I'd spend 40 hours building

33:10

a thing to save myself 8 seconds the 3 or 4 times that I think

33:13

to use the thing, because programming.

33:16

So the question was: what's this thing in the middle? How do I

33:19

build an adapter? The truth is I had no idea how to build this, and that's

33:22

purportedly what my practice of test- driven development, Discovery Testing

33:25

does. So does my process actually work? And so I actually

33:28

experimented, and several hours in I was very

33:31

relieved to find that I could build a thing and that it actually worked

33:34

So there's this npm module now exists, simplisafe and it's got

33:37

a simple little API. You pass it credentials, you get a

33:40

client back, you can set the state. What was funny was I TDD'd

33:43

this, right, so I was writing tests. And the only credentials I had were the ones

33:46

to my house. And so I had to be really careful in the failure states, because I

33:49

didn't want to send the cops to my house by accident

33:52

And in particular, this got really

33:55

confusing with Travis [CI], because I would upload it to Travis

33:58

continuous integration, and people would send pull requests and it would

34:01

change the beeping in my house and I'd have to make sure all the doors were shut

34:07

But the lesson I learned there, I followed

34:10

my own advice and really practice it. I was relieved to see that it

34:13

went well. But honestly, I'm kind of ashamed because I went so long without validating

34:16

my ideas. And you guys, just by having

34:19

me here today, have given me a platform and I don't want to

34:22

abuse it by just being a talking head. I want to make sure that everything I

34:25

share can potentially really help you grow in your career

34:28

So that was a valuable lesson and I think

34:31

we can apply it to managers, like technical

34:34

managers, former developers, what I've

34:37

been able to generalize from my experience, especially at Test Double, is that everything

34:40

at a distance seems simpler. The people

34:43

actually doing the work, when a developer says this is going to take several more weeks, they're

34:46

closer to it, they see all the complexity, which is easy

34:49

to just hand-wave away when you're operating at a distance

34:52

Additionally, when you have a lot of experience, you tend to

34:55

—we're all pattern-recognition machines and you feed in all these problems and somebody might

34:58

feed you a problem, and you might say "well, yeah, that looks like the 15 other

35:01

things that I did." And you come up with this round, polished idealistic

35:04

solution. But, of course, that's not going to actually map very closely

35:07

to that individual's context. You have to actually trust the people

35:10

closest to the work.

35:13

And so that's been a humbling exercise in a manager role, to not

35:16

just jump to conclusions that I always know best.

35:19

But nonetheless, that was also helpful in me dealing

35:22

with my own sense of inadequacy as I merge into this

35:25

more management role. Let's talk a little bit about indignation

35:28

First of all, I'm a big worrier

35:31

Todd, mentioned I'm really high anxiety. I worry about

35:34

banks, and credit card statements, and finances, and stuff

35:37

and I really wanted a dashboard to handle this all for me and Mint

35:40

was that for a long time. I'd use Mint, I'd see all my finances

35:43

were still there, and I'd feel good. But

35:46

six years in, I had this random thought: you know I wonder how Mint

35:49

is actually secure? How does it actually securely go and get all these

35:52

services? And get all my account updates?

35:55

Of course, what I figured out was that it's just not secure

35:58

it has decryptable versions of all of your passwords

36:01

to all of your banking stuff and doesn't support two-factor auth or anything like

36:04

that. And that's kind of worrisome. It's actually a very popular Internet

36:07

cloud architecture right now called SPoFaaS.

36:10

If you're not familiar with SPoFaaS, it stands for single point of failure as a service

36:16

Another thing we're learning about today, too, with the Internet outage

36:19

So, Mint, Yodlee, if they go away

36:22

then all of your stuff just disappears. You're just giving

36:25

a single point of failure for them to take all your money. So I was stewing on this

36:28

I got angry. I was trying to figure out how do I get off Mint.

36:31

Sure, I could cancel it, but I want to replace it with something better. What could I build

36:34

So I thought: security matters.

36:37

But I'm not an expert. I'm not going to build the next Mint or Yodlee

36:40

and solve this very difficult distribution problem, but I could probably

36:43

just build something for myself and at least personally feel a

36:46

little bit safer. And so I built this gem that I call fine_ants

36:52

In fine_ants you build adapters. So here's an adapter to Vanguard

36:55

I pass it credentials. And because I can run it locally, I can

36:58

actually do two-factor auth in my terminal, so I have two-factor auth set up

37:01

now. And it just downloads all my holdings for all my Vanguard accounts

37:04

And I built a little Rails app for it too that

37:07

runs at localhost, and so it's encrypted on my disk

37:10

And it shows me all of my account holdings and I click that button and it

37:13

launches a Selenium worker to go and

37:16

open browsers to go to all of my banks and stuff

37:19

And I was really proud, because now I've almost got this dashboard that I wanted

37:22

It's locally-encrypted. It's as safe as running it from my own browser

37:25

Puts Selenium for good use to once, instead of just

37:28

really brittle integration tests, and

37:31

and, you know, admitting it's

37:34

not a generalizable app. I mean, you can go and find this stuff on

37:37

GitHub and clone it yourself and run it yourself, and I'd encourage you to try it

37:40

But it's not going to be the next unicorn, billion

37:43

dollar company. But, honestly, there's no shame in hobby

37:46

grade. A lot of times, we're talking about creativity, right? We're talking about

37:49

building stuff. And sometimes just solving your own

37:52

problem is enough. Like these little toy apps like this are often

37:55

what got us into programming in the first place, even if you're just

37:58

solving your own problem, there's no shame in that. So that

38:01

made me feel a little bit less furious

38:04

at the world. Another example, so

38:07

Test Double, our company, right. I've already referred—I used

38:10

the term "test double" a few times, but some of you may not know it. That library

38:13

gimme is actually an example of a test double library. If you don't

38:16

know the term, the word "test double" is supposed to evoke the image of a

38:19

stunt double. But not like a stunt driver in a plane, like

38:22

a stand-in for your tests. So assume you like, maybe

38:25

your app depends on the cloud, so you have to fake that out to make your

38:28

test pass. Well, whatever you did to fake out the cloud is probably

38:31

an example of a test double that fakes that service out

38:34

And in JavaScript, the most popular test double

38:37

library is called Sinon. But when

38:40

I see people use Sinon, most of them don't understand it very well

38:43

Because it's kind of confusing. A lot of people get frustrated

38:46

because it's a huge API, or just angry at the

38:49

fact it's not very opinionated. So I've given

38:52

a lot of thought to making something better than Sinon in JavaScript

38:55

And I decided, you know, a lot of users

38:58

that use Sinon are in pain, but I have to admit I

39:01

can't beat it. It's got like 2 million downloads a month

39:04

But if I build something at least I'll be less grouchy and at least I'll

39:07

have something to hand somebody instead of just more snark

39:10

and whining. And so it was humbling, right, because

39:13

I've built now—this is like the 4th or 5th test double

39:16

library in a different language that I've built and I keep coming back to the same

39:19

saw over and over again. And it's humbling to think

39:22

that my entire career may well hinge on just

39:25

two or three concepts and I keep repeating them, because

39:28

I learn, because I'm passionate about it, and then I build

39:31

something and then I share it, and then I feed back into learning more

39:34

and it's this infinite loop of me iterating over time on just a handful

39:37

of issues, and with Test Double, we're able to

39:40

do that again by building testdouble.js. You can install it on

39:43

npm. To get the npm install, and

39:46

the npm package "testdouble" it works on the frontend and the backend

39:49

There's a screencast on our website called happier tdd with

39:52

testdouble.js you can go watch. We've also got a comparison

39:55

blog post of testdouble vs. sinon and

39:58

what was cool about testdouble is it works, but it

40:01

most importantly, shares all of our opinions about what we've learned

40:04

about test double libraries and good isolation testing over the years

40:07

And it's certainly better than just being cynical and snarky

40:10

about "oh, JavaScript sucks" or "JavaScript testing is this or that"

40:13

A lesson I learned early on is that if

40:16

your message isn't getting through to somebody and they're not hearing

40:19

what you're trying to say, you can conclude one of two things:

40:22

you can either conclude that they're a bozo for not understanding

40:25

you, or that there's something with how you're trying to communicate that's

40:28

failing to convey to them. And if you conclude that they're a bozo

40:31

that's it. You just

40:34

disengage, right? There's no next step. But

40:37

I always assume it's something wrong in how I'm

40:40

trying to communicate, and so I'm always iterating on my message

40:43

and only as a very last possibility do I assume it's

40:46

the listener's fault, because I can't control that at all

40:49

And also, for your library

40:52

to win, not everything else has to lose. Sometimes just doing something that's

40:55

useful for a small group is plenty. Especially if you're able to communicate

40:58

ideas in a way that moves other people forward

41:01

in how they think about something. And certainly criticism

41:04

is easier than contribution. It's really easy

41:07

to be snarky on Twitter and say something sucks, but

41:10

Christian Johansson who made Sinon, he put himself

41:13

out there and it has served a lot of people really well

41:16

and he's a really really nice guy, but I

41:19

spent like two years just shitting on his work on twitter before

41:22

I thought "maybe I should just build something that serves my needs

41:25

instead." So building

41:28

that certainly made me a little less angry about JavaScript testing.

41:31

Another thing you may have noticed is that I like emoji

41:34

I've used a few of them

41:37

in the slides

41:40

And creativity, open source stuff, can sometimes feel

41:43

a little too self-serious and open source feels "you create,

41:46

we depend." Other people start to pull your stuff

41:49

and then all of a sudden they're really demanding

41:52

and it usually starts with: you have an idea, you want to build a thing

41:55

and it's a labor of love and it brings you joy, but then

41:58

eventually companies start depending on it, and criticizing

42:01

or opening issues or acting entitled and trying to get stuff out

42:04

of you for free and that's a big bummer. In fact I know a lot of open

42:07

source maintainers and what's super consistent

42:10

is that they tend to hate their creations in

42:13

proportion to how popular they are, and that just

42:16

seems totally backwards. So I was feeling

42:19

kind of exploited and exhausted at this particular point

42:22

in my career. But I can't just escape open source, I'm not going to

42:25

ragequit GitHub and delete all my stuff and yank all my stuff

42:28

and take my ball and go home. So maybe if I just build something

42:31

new, something fresh, I'll find a fresh start. And the way I did it was, I

42:34

decided I was going to build something that no business could ever want

42:37

To just be creative

42:40

for the sake of creativity. And sometimes, even still, if I build something

42:43

that I worry that a business might exploit, might

42:46

build a business around and cut me out, I'll just license it

42:49

GPL as if troll them, because then that way they have to come

42:52

to me to obtain a commercial license

42:55

This is such a project. I think it is

42:58

GPL'd, called emoruby. So there's not a lot of transpilers

43:01

for the Ruby language, but this one transpiles emoji

43:04

into Ruby code. So here's an example file

43:07

listing of emoruby. This is a class called Heart,

43:10

defining a method called wave, printing out a statement saying hello

43:13

and ending those two things. And then

43:16

Instantiating the heart and calling wave

43:19

So this, if you're not familiar with emoruby, this

43:22

translates to this ruby here, and it totally works

43:25

And it was a lot of fun. So tl;dr what I learned

43:28

on emoruby is that it's super dumb, it's

43:31

just there for fun, it's just there to be joyful. I actually got a lot of

43:34

contributors on it, because they found fun in trying to map

43:37

different keywords and control- flow structures to what

43:40

emoji should that be. But it brought me a lot of joy

43:43

and it's had zero issues opened against it this year

43:46

So it's one of my favorite projects. It's okay to just build stuff for

43:49

yourself. I know some of you are developers here and you're here with your managers,

43:52

hoping they're not looking over your shoulder right now: it's actually OK just

43:55

to build things for fun. The joy of programming is like

43:58

really undervalued and we get too self-serious about our craft

44:01

So that helped lessen

44:04

my sense of indignation. Looking back on all this stuff

44:07

is—I wouldn't recognize myself

44:10

ten years ago, I think, because all of this

44:13

these creative exercises have really changed me as a person and I've actually

44:16

found a way to mature and grow up, and

44:19

I see you there, I'm saying "hey look creative stuff, this is easy" but I've

44:22

also just lambasted you with 12 years of side projects

44:25

and "look at me! look at me! This is a cool thing I built!" I understand

44:28

that might make the bar feel higher, and you know what

44:31

maybe you're right, because it's true that creativity is not for everyone. Here's a

44:34

quick litmus test if you're perfectly

44:37

content. And you're totally fulfilled. And you're OK with

44:40

the status quo, then why would you want to change things? You're right, maybe

44:43

you aren't a creative type. You should just enjoy the beach that you guys have

44:46

not too far from here. But if you have any negative

44:49

feelings at all, our culture right now, we tend to pathologize

44:52

negative feelings as themselves being bad, but often they're just a

44:55

symptom of some different root cause, and if you analyze and

44:58

you're open about that with yourself, you might find that what's

45:01

really bothering you is that you're using the wrong tool for the job, or

45:04

there's friction between the technologies and the practices that you're using

45:07

or work can't offer you what you need, or maybe you just have your own internal

45:10

baggage that you need to get over. And creativity can be a great outlet

45:13

for those kind of root cause problems. And if you reflect

45:16

on how you feel and you feed—you accept—

45:19

those emotions, what's funny is our asynchronous brain will just

45:22

start spitting out ideas and it'll be a big idea generator

45:25

and hopefully, you'll find a way to exercise it.

45:28

And when I tell you, like when you

45:31

feel confused, or when you feel down, or

45:34

upset or scared, all

45:37

of those emotions are the place where all the good stuff

45:40

comes from. Great ideas don't come from people who've

45:43

already got everything figured out, and

45:46

when the bar's that low, you fling over it and hopefully

45:49

wind up in a better place. The important thing is you've gotta find your outlet

45:52

And I don't know what that outlet is for everybody

45:55

In fact it's important for me to mention that that outlet might not have anything

45:58

to do with software. Certainly, if

46:01

my outlet for creativity wasn't software,

46:04

my wrists wouldn't hurt as much and I'd probably get more sun and I'd be in better shape

46:07

So find what that outlet

46:10

is for you, because it may or may not have anything to do with software

46:13

Tomorrow, I was here last year, and the day after SCNA

46:16

was one of my favorite days last year, because I just sat

46:19

on Manhattan beach and watched football and drank with Big Ten football

46:22

from 9am to 3pm which is something I can't do in the

46:25

eastern time zone, so that was really cool. But tomorrow tomorrow,

46:28

we're going to have even more fun, because we're going to be here

46:31

programming stuff. Todd

46:34

my partner and I, we're going to join forces tomorrow and we're doing

46:37

what we call a "test smells", like "code smells" workshop

46:40

it's a really fun, engaging thing where we all talk

46:43

together about things about testing that we hate

46:46

I hope that you come and join, and what we do is

46:49

listen to stories, and we've got this repository of

46:52

30 different types of problematic tests, work through

46:55

those examples and really kind of bring a name to a lot of the different

46:58

antipatterns that we find in tests. I hope that you'll join us, it's a really

47:01

really fun exercise, and it's going to be happening kind of coincident

47:04

with the code retreat and what other activities we have

47:07

tomorrow. So again, my name's @searls

47:10

or Justin, you can call me whatever you like

47:13

I hope you tell me on Twitter what you thought of this talk, any feedback

47:16

you have. Like I mentioned, we're here to

47:19

fix the software industry and to do that we're gonna

47:22

need creative people who want to creatively solve those problems and help

47:25

inspire that in others. If you're interested in joining, our

47:28

team I hope you'll contact us. And if you know any

47:31

teams that are looking for that slack. Looking for some

47:34

outside inspiration, we're always looking for

47:37

additional clients that we can work with. You can reach us at hello@testdouble.com

47:40

or find me or Todd tonight or tomorrow, we'd love to talk to you

47:43

Also got a lot of stickers and business cards we'd like to share

47:46

But, you know, you've been super patient. Like Todd

47:49

mentioned, I'm the only one standing between you and free drinks

47:52

and nobody got up and left, so that's

47:55

really humbling. Thank you so much for your time today.

Follow-up interview

After giving this presentation at NG Conf 2017, I sat down with the famous @EmberSherpa from This Dot Media for a discussion about this presentation and how it fits the context of the JavaScript community as frameworks like Angular, React, and Ember have become more mature. If you’re interested in additional thoughts behind this talk and its implications for open source work, please enjoy this 20 minute interview: