Keynote: Lucky: Examining the Barriers to Contributing to... by Saron Yitbarek

Speaker 1: Come on.

Speaker 2: Uh I am Kojo, and as was pointed out earlier. And so I'm here to introduce our keynote speaker, Saran. One of the things that Saran and I have in common is that we both have last names that people find hard to pronounce. So I am Kojo, Shir Sarran. Saran is the founder of Code Newbies organization, which I'm proud to be a member of. It is the most supportive community for people who are new to programming and learning to code. She also hosts the Code Newbie podcast that you can listen to every week, I think. New episode just downloaded last night. I saw it and alert on my phone. So if you are new to coding or if you know people who are new to coding and they are trying to sort of find their way or to trying to find some sort of support to help them on their coding journey. The Code Newbies community and the podcast is very helpful. There's a Twitter chat that happens every week

Speaker 2: That's Ron Hosts, and so without any further ado, I will give you Saron. Hi

Speaker 3: everybody. How's it going? Guys having a good morning? Yeah. Had a coffee? Okay, I forgot to have coffee, so hopefully this goes well. So I'm so excited to be here. This is my first Django Con. Uh I have a confession to make. I'm actually a Ruby developer. I'm sorry. I hope we could I'm so sorry. I hope we can still be friends. But I've been introduced to the Python community from many awesome people like you, including Kojo, including Adrian, and now the awesome organizers for this conference. And I'm really excited by just all the warmth and positivity that I've seen at a distance. And I'm excited to experience that firsthand with you all this week. So my talk is lucky. I'm Sarran, founder of CodeNubi. Thank you, Koja, for that awesome introduction. And this talk is very personal and very important to me.

Speaker 3: So please feel free to tweet at me with your thoughts and feelings. Feel free to flag me down. I'll leave my hair like this so I'm very easy to spot. Um this actually happened. Last time I I I gave a talk in Australia, someone said, oh, you put your hair up and we just couldn't find you So I'll leave it out just for you all. Uh but please feel free to come talk to me and tell me what you think and then we can have lots of great conversations. Where is my So two years ago I had my very first podcast interview. It was for a show called Ruby Rogue. Show of hands if you've heard of Ruby Rogues. Okay, awesome. It's a great really great podcast. It's been around for uh many years, I think about five or six years. And I was brought on to talk about my journey learning to code.

Speaker 3: And the episode was called Hacking Education And so in that process, I'm telling them how I was inspired to get into tech by the Steve Jobs book and how I learned to code for a couple months on my own and then got very frustrated, decided to go to a boot camp. And as I'm talking, I mention in passing that I am very privileged. And I sent this to a panel of four white men, and I look like this. So naturally they were very confused. And one of the panelists, Dave, actually said I can't believe that we had a person on the show that's at five, four or five levels of intersectionality. I love that word intersectionality, has just claimed to be privileged. And that comment stuck with me for a long time I spent a lot of time trying to understand how people get to where they are.

Speaker 3: I have my own podcast, as Koja mentioned, the CodeNB Podcast. New episodes every Monday, you should totally subscribe. And my favorite part about this podcast is I get to interview people at all different skill levels and I get to peel back their layers and I get to uncover their stories. We've had awesome people on the show. Hopefully you recognize at least one of these people. Adrian is in the audience. And most of these people are college educated. They come from many different backgrounds. And as I'm interviewing them, really what I'm trying to get to is their origin story. How do they get to where they are? What role do things like privilege have to do with their success? And what I found so interesting about David's comment to me was that his definition of privilege was very different from mine. His focus very much on race and gender, which often means it's focused on racism and sexism, which makes sense.

Speaker 3: A lot of the conversations we have around privilege are based on race and racism and sexism. And these are two very important topics. We have to tackle these to make sure that our communities, our Python communities and our tech community in general, are welcoming, kind, and inclusive places. And there are many examples where it is not as nice as we would like. A recent example is the story of Jesse Frazel, who worked used to work at Docker. And an article came out a couple months ago that said that one of Docker's star engineers got so many death and rape threats That the company hired private detectives to protect her. Can you imagine that? Your company's hiring private detectives to keep you safe? That's insane. I'm gonna give you an official trigger warning because the next thing I'm gonna say is very heavy. And this is from a blog post that she wrote about a year ago

Speaker 3: And it says, ever since I started speaking in conferences and contributing to open source projects, I have been endlessly harassed. I've gotten hundreds of private messages on IRC and emails about sex, rape, and death threats People emailing me saying they jerked off to my conference talk video, you're welcome by the way, I do appreciate the sass, is mild in comparison to sending Photoshop pictures of me covered in blood I wish I could do my job, something I very obviously love to do, without any of this bullshit. However, that seems impossible at this point. It's sad. She tweeted when she left and said, I lost something I loved so much and a small piece of my soul standing up for myself, and I just don't know if it was worth it.

Speaker 3: So when we talk about privilege, the way I think about it is that it's the ability to engage in this type of behavior, or at the very least, pretend it doesn't exist because it doesn't affect you. So, what does this mean for our community? It means that we have capable, passionate, hardworking people who want to contribute to our community who could add incredible value to all of us. and they can't. And they're being denied that opportunity for reasons that have nothing to do with their technical ability. That doesn't sound very fair to me. Is that fair to you? I think? How's it right here? But the good news is that we're getting better. I think we're getting better at addressing these issues. That was very clear just from the the uh housekeeping items that were talked about earlier

Speaker 3: And over the years as a community we've gotten better at talking about it, at tackling these issues, and we've had some really important people do the heavy lifting. I'm going to highlight a couple of them right now One is Corline Ada Mkey, show of hands if you know who this person is. She's awesome. She's a self-proclaimed social justice warrior, which I think is my new favorite term. And she created the Contributor Covenant, which is the code of conduct for open source projects. It's been very successful. It's been adopted by Jekyll and RubyGems and a lot of really big important projects. Another one I love is by Tracy Chow. A couple years ago she went to the Grace Hopper Conference show of hands, if you know Grace Hopper. The conference focused on women in tech. And when she was there, she found that so many people were talking about the gender diversity issue and how hard it was and how there's just not enough women, but there were no numbers.

Speaker 3: There were no stats to back that up And so she kept asking, well, where's the data? Where are the numbers? And she finally opened up a, I think it was just a Google spreadsheet and asked companies to contribute and self-report their own diversity numbers. And when she did that, she was a huge, huge influencer in getting big organizations like Google and Facebook to talk openly about these issues. And now we have data. We have a baseline so we can see if we're actually doing better if we're staying the same. Another example I really like is ISIS. And I like this one because she was kind of an accidental one. She didn't really set out to be a diversity advocate. But she was part of a hiring marketing campaign by her company OneLogin. And she had this ad, she was one of four engineers. And someone took a picture of one of those ads, made a comment and said something about how she didn't quite look like an engineer

Speaker 3: And so she started a hashtag movement, which is a thing. And it's called I Look Like an Engineer. And she invited women all over the world from different backgrounds to tweak pictures of themselves and what they look like because they all look like engineers, because they are engineers. So going back to David's concept of privilege, it makes sense that he would focus so much on race and gender because a lot of the conversation is based on that. But here's the thing. I don't like that definition. Because I'm a woman, and I'm a person of color, and I'm drowning in privilege. One of the most popular questions we get in the code and be community is how do I get a job as a coder? I know how to code, I've taken a couple

Speaker 3: courses I've done a boot camp, I I've done my work, how do I get employed? And I guess one answer is to talk to some of our sponsors here. And one of the common answers that we get is contribute to open source It's free, you can do it from anywhere. You just put stuff online, you build it, you you tweet it out, you you push it, and your stuff is out there, it's real, you can build a really great portfolio That's one of the most common advices that we get. Show of hands if you've heard this advice before in your employment role. Yeah. But what does it really take to contribute to open source? It takes code, right? You have to know how to code. And you can't just know a little bit. You have to know enough to understand the project you're working in and dissect it and be able to give back to it in a meaningful way. Next, you have to learn how to communicate.

Speaker 3: It's really helpful if you can communicate in English because a lot of programming languages are usually done in English. You have to have the time. And time really means you have to have the money because you have to have the financial stability to justify spending so many hours giving up so much of your time to unpaid work It also means you have to have a computer, which I think is a pretty obvious one. And you have to have internet access, ideally high-speed internet access. So you can make contributing to open source a regular part of your routine. So if we think about open source contribution as a class, these are almost like the prerequisites This is the stuff you have to do before you can even get through the door. Right? Let's forget about what happens once you're in the room. To get through the door, you kind of have to have these things to start

Speaker 3: So how do we get here? How do we get to a place where we have these prerequisites? How did I get here? Let's talk about privilege. I come from an upper middle class household. My parents are both pharmacists, which is awesome because I get to say they sell drugs. I'm Ethiopian, was born in Ethiopia. My dad came here when I was about one. And then my mother and I followed when I was almost three years old. And we live the American dream by the book. We start off with a really pathetic one bedroom apartment. in a not so great part of DC. And then when I was nine, we moved to one of the richest counties of the United States. And then sometime in high school we moved to the richest part of the richest county of the United States.

Speaker 3: I didn't earn that. My parents did, but I didn't. So what happens when you have parents who have good jobs and who can provide that type of socioeconomic stability? There's a study that came out in 2014 by the National Bureau of Economic Research that asks, where is the land of opportunity? The geography of intergenerational mobility in the United States. And it looks at how parents' income affects children later on in life. So if we look at this graph, which I'm hoping you can see, okay, that's good. We can see the parent household income at the bottom and then the mean child household income going up. And we can see the correlation that the more money your parents make, the more likely you are to be financially successful later on as an adult. But how does this affect college?

Speaker 3: Well, I got a graph for that too. At the bottom we have parent income rank, and on the left we have percent attending college at age 18 to 21, and on the right we have college quality. So we can see a similar correlation where the higher your parents' income rank is, the more likely you are to attend college and the better your college is likely to be. So we can see some very direct financial benefits of coming from that socioeconomic stability growing up But there are a few other positive side effects too. One is that you're more likely to go to a really good public high school or public school period I went to a really great middle school, really great high school. They had a magnet program. I applied. I got accepted. I had a really, really great education growing up. When you're part of this system and you go to a great school in a great county, it also means that you are probably part of a community that has very high academic standards.

Speaker 3: I didn't know college was an option That was just the step after high school. The question was how good of a college did you get into? Not if you were gonna go. Talk a little bit more about college. I have two degrees in English and psychology, good liberal arts. Or you get your money's worth. Oh, that's funny because it's true. Okay. So let's talk about how having these degrees affect your income. So this looks at salary based on your degree, and we can see that the higher the degree is, the more money you make. Unless you have a PhD. I don't know what's going on with the doctoral degree

Speaker 3: section. They're they're not doing quite as as well. They're not following the trend. But besides that, the more money you make. And we see the inverse correlation with unemployment rate, right? The higher your degree, the less likely you are to be unemployed Let's get back to that awesome liberal arts degree. One of the things that comes with that is very strong communication skills. Even if you don't have a liberal arts degree, if you have a four-year degree, most likely you had some type of a general study Right? Where you had lots of group projects and reading and reports and writing and teamwork and all these things that over a number of years strengthened these communication skills, which we talked about are very important as part of our open source contribution prerequisites. Let's talk about computer and internet access.

Speaker 3: I had my first computer with internet at the age of nine. I don't know what to do with it, so I just played Oregon Trail over and over and over again. Yeah, Oregon Trail. I still hate wagons. And at that age, my mother forced me to learn how to touch type. And I don't know how she knew how important that would be growing up, but she forced me to learn touch touch type. And Mavis Beacon and I were really good friends. That is my home girl And in middle school and high school, we didn't have a computer lab. We had computer labs where we had Macs of all colors and we had the full Adobe suite. I learned Final Cut Pro when I was 13. Show of hands if you know what an internet desert is. Like you're about to find out.

Speaker 3: Internet desert is when you don't have access to wired broadband. More specifically, it means that you don't have internet speeds that are fast enough for you to do very basic web things, things we've already we probably take for granted as we build our products, that include video chat or downloading images. There are 11 million people in the United States who don't have access to wired broadband. According to a 2016 broadband progress report by the FCC see on average the proportion of the population without that internet access is highest in counties with the lowest median household income, the lowest population density, the highest rural population rate, and the highest poverty rate. If we look at this on an international level, we can see that

Speaker 3: over half of the people in the world don't have access to internet. And if you remember the panic that hit developers when GitHub went down the last time, you can imagine how hard it is to be part of the tech community if you can't get online. Let's talk about health. I've never thought much about health. I have all my limbs, I have all my senses. The worst thing that's happened to me health-wise is having a UTI Which is probably too much information. Which by the way, if you don't know what that looks like, is terrifying. We went to the emergency room. I thought I was gonna die. But not everyone has that good health. One million people in the United States are functionally deaf, 360 million in the world.

Speaker 3: 1. 3 million in the US are legally blind, 39 million in the world. We talk about colorblindness. One in twelve men, one in two hundred women. That's a lot of people. And there are a couple issues around health that we also have to think about. The obvious one is accessibility. which means experiencing the world, you know, not having to find handicapped accessible ways to go different floors and things like that, but also technology, right? Making sure that we can see things and our colors are just right and we take advantage of screen readers and that kind of thing. But there's also other things that I didn't really think too much about, like the financial impact of having health issues. Just the fact that it's expensive. Health bills are real and they can get very, very high. But there's also the financial impact of not being able to work, right?

Speaker 3: Of not being able to take care of yourself and take care of your family because you're too busy being in the hospital. hospital. And then there's the emotional stress of it all. The frustration of wanting to do things and be a certain person and your body simply not letting you do that. I didn't earn being able-bodied. I don't have to worry about these things. Let's talk about money. We love talking about money, right? Let's talk about money My parents paid for my education, so I graduated debt-free. Sound like a real jerk, don't I? Gosh. But everyone has student debt, right? Everyone has it. It's normal. Let's take a look at exactly how much debt people have. $1. 2 trillion

Speaker 3: Forty million people in the US have $1. 2 trillion in student debt. That comes out to about 30,000 per person. That's a lot of student debt. If we compare it to other types of loans, we see that with the exception of a mortgage, we owe more money in student loans than anything else. And that's pretty recent. That happened as of 2010. How does this impact your life after college? How does this impact your choices? 52% of people surveyed strongly agreed or somewhat agreed to the statement. My need to pay student loan debt is hampering my ability to further my career. And I've seen this happen firsthand. Most people that I grew up with, people I went to college with, they have to take that first job out of college because they have loans to pay.

Speaker 3: They can't afford to take unpaid internships. They can't afford to find themselves. They can't afford to travel for a couple months. And a lot of times that first job is in an industry they have no interest in. And they're building a career in a direction they have no desire to go to. And the biggest thing this meant for me personally was that I didn't have to get a job. I could build a career. I could take that two-week gig that eventually turned into a contract. I could take a few months off. I could do that paid internship that was only $7 an hour. I can make decisions for my career instead of for my survival. My parents relieved me of that burden in college, which meant that years later I could learn to code. I could take my career in a whole different direction.

Speaker 3: So how did I get here? How did I get to a place where I can code, I can communicate, I have internet, I have computers, I have a a certain comfort with technology, I have the financial stability to spend time on unpaid work like this. contributing open source. I'm really, really lucky. And I bet that most of you are lucky too. And people hate hearing that, by the way. People want to believe that they're here because they worked really, really hard. And I was one of those people. My husband used to tell me, you know, you're successful partly because you're lucky. And I say, nah. I worked hard. I earned my opening keynote engagement. But as he said this over the years, we've been together

Speaker 3: seven years. And I kept mulling this over in my head. And I mulled and I did tons of of research and and reading and really explored this topic and read tons of articles, also known as tweets And and I kept coming up with this tension between luck and hard work. Because successful people, famous people, are telling me over and over again that they got there because they worked hard. You just have to work hard. I think in Kevin Hart's bio it actually says, I'm here because I worked hard. People want to be here but they don't want to work for it. It's a very common theme. I recently left my position at Microsoft, where I was a program manager to do CodeMubi full-time. And at Microsoft, I manage a technical training program called Tech Jobs Academy.

Speaker 3: And we served unemployed and underemployed New Yorkers who were passionate, who were bright, who were smart, and who just needed an opportunity to launch their tech career. And guess what? Those people worked really, really hard too I have a graduate who's raising four kids on her own. She's been finding an hour here and there over a number of years to get technical, taking a course when she can, going to the library when she can slowly trying to get closer to her tech career. By the time that I waltz into my cushy tech job at 10 a. m. she's already fed four people. She works really hard too. So it can't be just about hard work. I'm lucky that I didn't have to worry about money.

Speaker 3: I didn't have to worry about health. I didn't have to think about where my next meal was coming from. I had the exposure, the stability, the support system early on in life so that as an adult, I was unburdened. And I could take my load-free shoulders and lean in To my work. I was lucky first so that I could work hard later. And that's okay. Having a bit of luck takes nothing away from your hard work. If you're lucky and you don't work hard, that's just a huge waste of opportunity. But it's a lot easier to meet those prerequisites when you're a little bit lucky to start. It's a lot easier to be in that place where you can contribute to open source, where you can be here and you can be part of this community if you're a little bit lucky. A little luck goes a long way.

Speaker 3: So, what happens when technology is dictated by the lucky? What happens when those of us who are statistically better positioned to succeed are also the ones in power? What happens when we dictate how everyone else interacts with technology? How they connect with families, how they access their memories? Show of hands if you watch Silicon Valley. I love that show. I love it because it's so true. Uh you end up with a mustache filter That's what happens. I love this scene because it captures everything I love and everything I loathe about the tech community. In this scene, the main character is interviewing for a CTO position and the company says, oh, you're gonna work on just world-changing technology.

Speaker 3: It's gonna be great. And he says, oh yeah, it's a pump, let's do this. They set him up in front of a monitor, they give him controllers, and they put a fake mustache on him and he looks around he goes I thought this was world changing technology I don't understand and they go oh no it's fine don't worry there's different types of mustaches And here's the thing, mustaches are super fun. This is awesome. I feel like I look really good in a mustache. I really do. But to me this captures a very important thing. Which is how we think about problems. We tend to solve solve problems that we personally experience Because we understand them, we empathize with them. We probably have a room full of people that we can spend all day ranting to about those problems. But if we only solve the problems that we experience that we're comfortable with, then we'll leave everyone else behind

Speaker 3: So what do we do with our luck? And I thought about this for a long time because I want to leave you with some type of an action. I don't want to burden you with all this guilt of being lucky. I want to give you something to do. And there are many different solutions, but I think it all boils down to one very, very simple thing. To expand your problem pool. The more problems that we can understand, the more problems we're exposed to, the more able we are to share our luck. And there are a few specific ways that we can do this. One is very simple. It's to follow people who are not like you. That might mean, based on gender or race, it might mean just location. I love following people who are outside of the United States. Just because it's interesting to see what other international issues they're dealing with in the tech community.

Speaker 3: Lots of times when I tweet and I say goodnight, they're saying good morning. It's fun. International It's also great to interview, to follow people who have different opinions. Half the people I follow I don't even like, but I follow them. But I follow them because I want to understand their perspective. I want to hear their opinions. You don't have to engage. You don't have to comment. You don't have to agree. But exposing yourself just by listening can get you very far volunteering. It's a little bit more involved, but find organizations like Django Girls where you can spend a little bit of time and get to know people who might have problems that are different. And this one's really powerful because you get to build real relationships. You're not just reading an article, you're not reading a tweet, you're actually sitting down with another person, getting to know their personality, getting to know who they are, getting to hear their origin

Speaker 3: story A third one, this is my favorite one, is amplifying voices. Like I mentioned, the three incredible women who are doing a lot of the heavy lifting to make our tech community a better place. There are lots of other people like them. You can make their job just a little bit easier with something as simple as a retweet, something as simple as recommending them to speak at the next conference, recommending them for a position at your job. They're very simple ways to amplify voices of people who are doing a lot of the hard work. at very little cost to you. And my hope is that as you do these things, you can incorporate the experiences and the issues and the perspectives that you hear into your own code. And we can do this when we think about things like accessibility. Are we making sure we use those alt

Speaker 3: texts? Are we making sure that we've checked our website and used screen readers? Are we doing these things to make sure the products that we build are accessible? To as many people as possible. When we think about internet speeds, how big are your file sizes? The photo doesn't need to be that big, Saran. Make sure to think about these issues when you're building your next product. Another one that I really like is taking advantage of convention. Creativity is awesome and it's great But a lot of times you don't need it. Use the rules that everyone already knows. Use icons and symbols and expected user flows to build products that don't require knowing English. Easy ways that we can build products for everyone. And there's some awesome examples of people who are doing this. One is Code for America.

Speaker 3: Show of hands if you know Code for America. Yeah, it's an awesome, awesome organization, been around for six years, and they've worked with over a hundred government agencies, local agencies, to really understand the problems in their community and build tech products to solve them. Another really great inspiration is the ATNF blog. Show of hands if you know ATF. Oh, that's pretty good. So ATNF is an office inside the General Services administration and they help other federal agencies build, buy and share tech solutions. And what I love about their blog is they're very transparent, they're very open, they share as much of their data as they can and they talk very openly about problems that the government is facing and different issues and ways that they solve it. Another one that's specific to New York City is the big apps competition.

Speaker 3: And I love this competition. Every year the uh EDC works with uh another company so they may remember, and they put on a competition to solve four big problems. And this year the four problems were affordable housing, waste, civic engagement, and connecting cities. And the best part about the competition is it's very public. So throughout the year you have hackathons and events where people are invited to come and listen and see these problems and see different ways that we can solve them. but it's incredibly inspirational to you. So I encourage you to expand your problem tool and share your luck. Because the more we can do this, the more we can help more people. Now when we talk about luck and privilege, it might sound like we're talking about diversity.

Speaker 3: We are not. This is not a diversity topic. I hate the word diversity. Diversity talks about differences. It draws lines between us. It assumes that there is a normal and there's an other. And if we just get enough others in the room, then we're diverse. We're doing great. Diversity is too easy to have ass. I prefer the term inclusion. Because inclusion requires you to always ask yourself, who am I leaving out? Whose voice? Whose story is not being heard? Whose perspective are we not considering? Inclusion is worthy and elusive.

Speaker 3: It demands that we care. It requires that we empathize. It will outlast the latest diversity trend. It cannot be captured in a hashtag. It's easy to talk about women in tech and the truly pathetic number of people of color in the tech industry. But I worry that when we focus on just race and gender, we forget everyone else. We forget about the single moms and the dads working three shifts just to make ends meet. We forget about the long line of people waiting every morning at the library just so they can use the computer that day. Inclusion demands that we invite everyone to the table. Because when technology is dictated by everyone, we're all a little better off.

Speaker 3: And we can all be a little more fucking

Speaker 4: Fantastic book, thanks very much. And um my my question is about the for those of us who are lucky, for those of us who have had this this sort of um experience has been been very good, and I count myself amongst them. We're exposed to this, we see what's going on, we can listen to the other opinions that are out there, we can listen to other people. And you try to get involved and you try to help. And then you help so much that you end up being exhausted and you end up not being useful to anyone. So do you have any tips for self-care in all of that? this of you know and it sounds really bad if no b uh it's all about you but no but what about me, Yanginosa? I'm I'm more important than without going that far, but it's How how do you balance the the need to self-care and not be sort of smothered by the empathy for everybody else and oh god I feel so guilty

Speaker 4: versus the fact that yeah they actually need as much help in lifting up as you can give them Oh, that's such a good question.

Speaker 5: Oh, I'm so proud of you. That 's a good one. Uh self-care. Yeah, so uh show of hands if you read medium at all.

Speaker 3: Okay. So I recently started blogging. I've been very good. I've done like five blog posts in the week. It's incredible Very exhausting. Uh but now that you know a bunch of very not great things have happened in the last couple weeks, I can't look at medium anymore Because it's it's it's just draining. I I just see nothing but bad experiences and sad anecdotes and it's the most disempowering thing that I can read And so I think that there are definitely times where I just have to step away, where I have to not look at medium, I have to not look at Twitter. And I try to I try to find the positive stories and I'll just reread them to make to give myself a little bit more hope, if that makes sense. So I'll read about the success stories I'll read you know books that I really like from you know people who are underrepresented who are doing really great things and I'll I'll gravitate

Speaker 3: and I'll go back to these really important stories that are very, very positive and just take a break. And I think that's totally fine By the way, I think there's a difference between being informed and being informed to the point of exhaustion. And finding that balance is very personal, but definitely feel free to just take a step back and focus on the positive stuff

Speaker 4: It's quite f quick full up. Do you know of any like good pipelines of sources of good stories? Like I essentially like Twitter but only the good stuff. That's true.

Speaker 3: So so it's actually funny. Um there's this she's actually a podcaster and I think she works for the late show or one of those shows, uh, named Heaven Heaven Negatu. And she actually had a hashtag. I wish I remembered it. I'm gonna find it and I'll tweet it later. But it's it's a hashtag that's in something like black kids having fun or or just something like and and the idea was just being very very exhausted by you know all the shootings and things that have happened and just wanting a stream of just nothing but positive joy and a bunch of people from all over the world tweeted and sent pictures and videos of their, you know, of their kids just playing and having fun. And it was amazing. It was a huge source of positivity. So I'm gonna find that hashtag and I'm gonna tweet it in my account and you can take a look at it So hopefully it's a good starting point for you. Gotta come up with like a a bag of positive things after this

Speaker 3: tough fixing out. What else

Speaker 5: you got? I have a question and I'm also really short. Um so I'm like on my tiptoes here. So part of DjangoCon is code sprints, which will happen on Thursday and Friday where we get a you know as many people together as we can and we we contribute to different Django open source projects What are things that we should be doing or that we should be providing as a conference or that the sprint leader should be providing to um and this is maybe a question for next year because everyone who's gonna sprint is already here, but um what what can we do to include people who are not as lucky

Speaker 3: Oh, that's a good question. So I think that I think accessibility is probably one of the easier things to incorporate into, you know, code and products. And I think for me, I was very and I'm still a little intimidated by it because I just think it's gonna be very hard and I think it's gonna add all this extra work. And so I think a really great thing the conversation can do is maybe do a five-minute lightning talk on easy ways to include things like alt text and how to make your images smaller and all these things that might seem very intimidating and very like, oh man, I have to add this whole thing on top of my feature. So just m Yeah, providing that information so it's so that we know it's not actually as hard as it might seem and highlighting the benefits of it. I think that'd be a really great way to kick off any hackathon or any spend Someone see Current Up.

Speaker 2: While while we're waiting for our next question to make. We have someone with a question making their way to the microphone, so while that person's making their way to the mic, I'll reiterate yes. If you want to give a lightning talk on accessibility, the lightning talk sign-up form is at the registration desk.

Speaker 3: There you go.

Speaker 1: Okay, so this kind of this is a question that kind of goes beyond uh the kind of the technical industry. Okay. But um you know we can stick to that. Uh how do you get people to care. I mean, we talk about the number of people that, you know, aren't on the internet, they don't have broadband internet access, they don't have the access, they don't have the luck. But when they you know when you're interacting with them and they say, Well, why should I care about that? You know? I mean and you know they should.

Speaker 3: Yeah.

Speaker 1: Because I mean, you know, honestly you were talking about um I'm feeling lucky and well, aren't we lucky that somebody figured out zero thousands of years ago? Because we're really without zero. Yeah. But um anyway, so what are your thoughts on that? I mean how do we how do you engage people who are so I don't know. Disenfranchised by their circumstance. I mean like that they don't even understand what they don't have access to.

Speaker 3: Oh, that's interesting. So you're talking about the people who are not lucky who don't No, they're not lucky.

Speaker 1: Well, or they don't like when when when you're interacting with them and you're suggesting it's like, well, you know, have you have you thought about you know have you thought about exploring, you know, um uh you know, programming. Coding, you know, like as as as as a thing, you know, as a or or even just uh you know technology as a way to communicate, as a as a way to find uh uh a a place in a community that's more than just you know like the block that you live on.

Speaker 3: That's interesting. So I feel like Rob and I I feel like Rob's my husband. He's right there by the way. He's he's the unofficial He's my official photographer. But that's a really good question because we deal with that a lot where we will share really important potentially life-changing information whether it's how to code or how to save money or things like that to people and they're not very receptive to it And I think there's two things I learned from that. I think one is that there's kind of a limit of how much you can make people do what you want them to do. I wish I could make people people do what I want them to do all the time. It doesn't it does not work. I've done pretty well with him, but that's basically it. But I think that It's important to provide information and to provide consistent support. And so I've had people who the first time I mentioned, hey, you should learn to code, there's code academy, there's tree house, there's a bunch of things.

Speaker 3: really, you know, easy ways to start and they'll go, uh, I don't know about that. And then I'll just kind of remind them, I'll bring them up and over a period of time let them know that if they do change their mind, if they are interested, that I'm there to make the journey easier for them them so I don't think it's as simple as going to one hackathon having one conversation bam their life is is you know different I think it's introducing and being consistent consistently supportive so they know that if they do come around, if they do change their mind, if they you know a lot of times they're just really intimidated, they don't believe that they can actually do it. And if you just consistently constantly show them that they can, both through your own work and through encouraging words, I find that over time, they'll at least try it. And they'll try it to a point that maybe they actually do take that information and do something positive with it. What's up?

Speaker 6: So now we have a conversation going. When you do that with um, you know , for social justice, you know. You have like a neighbor, you let them come over and play Minecraft with your kids, then you show them the Raspberry Pi server, you know, you get them into it. That can work, right Well, so what if you're trying to transform an organization and they already sort of think they know how to code, but you really do know a lot more. And and you know, um you know obviously you don't want to, you know, talk about bloom filters or this algorithm or that algorithm. You want to talk about you you should try Django, you know, here's what I can do. I can I can set up this this thing really simple and look, five lines of code, I've got a a CRUD

Speaker 6: application and no repeat code. But how do you keep on doing that and bring them up, you know, over time. That's something that I have to learn how to do. I certainly don't know it. So

Speaker 3: is it your internal organization or are you

Speaker 6: Yes.

Speaker 3: Okay I have no experience with that, to be very honest. I'm gonna I'm gonna stick with in my own wheelhouse. My guess is that it's a similar process of so I we've had a lot of people on the Clinton Be podcast talk about how they got their start coding by taking an idea that someone in the office had, building an app on the side on the weekends, coming back and saying, Look what I did And then they'll look at that and go, Oh, that's very interesting. We didn't know we could do that. Let's now incorporate that and make that into

Speaker 2: So concentrate on their ideas.

Speaker 3: I so we actually had um had a meeting once where uh at the end it was like a three hour meeting. At the at the end of the meeting I had one of the people come up to me and go, you know, you're very good at making people think like they have really good ideas. So yes, I have that's a very powerful communication. skill. Use their ideas, use their ego, stroke that ego, and use that to make them do what you want them to do. So

Speaker 2: I'd like to thank Saran for an excellent keynote presentation. And I'd like to thank you all for coming out. Uh we've got a break happening here at ten o'clock and then talks will resume after that. Did you all have anything else, Jason Jason? Thank you all for coming and enjoy the rest of the conference. Uh Saran, you'll be around throughout the conference. You'll be here the rest of the conferences. So people want to find you on Twitter or parse on Twitter to ask you questions.