>> All right. You came back!

(applause)

 >> Hurray! Before we get started, I
want to make a couple of administrivial
announcements. For those who weren't
here yesterday or for those who just
forgot, we have Wi-Fi. The password is
nevergraduate!, with an exclamation
point at the end. And it's also on the
white board over there. We have a
restrooms over there, and there's
usually a line during breaks, so please
be patient. What else? We have quiet and
loud rooms. So Hopper over here is the
quiet room, and Babbage, Church, and
Lovelace are the loud rooms. So feel
free to use those as you will. And last
but not least, we have a code of
conduct, and it's on the website, at
bangbangcon.com. So please familiarize
yourself with the code of conduct, if
you haven't already. With that, I think
we're ready to get started with our
keynote talk.

Oh, and... Once again... I'm sorry. What
did you want me to announce? Oh, thank
you, Erty for doing AV.

(applause)

And on that note, I think I should also
thank our amazing sponsors, once again.
So...

 >> Yay! Thank you, sponsors!

 >> And we have six sponsors for the
conference. Hacker School of course gave
us this space and a fair amount of their
time, and our other sponsors, Etsy and
Venmo, both helped support food, and
Venmo is supporting our amazing realtime
transcription, done by Mirabai. Perka, I
believe, also donated food. Mandrill
made our T-shirts possible, and Stripe
is sponsoring an ice cream break this
afternoon. So let's give them all a
hand.

And I'm of the understanding that
they're hiring, so, you know, there are
various people here who are from these
companies. So you have an in to talk to
them now. You can say -- hey, I hear you
like sponsoring things. Maybe you'd like
to sponsor me! So today it's my
privilege to introduce our keynote
speaker, Camille Fournier. She is a
major contributor to Apache ZooKeeper,
VP of engineering at Rent the Runway,
and as a personal note, we were really
excited to get Camille as a keynote
speaker. When we started organizing this
conference, we didn't know how to
organize a conference, and we had a list
of people we thought we might want to
invite as speakers, and we agonized over
how to write the email to invite them,
and I wrote an email that was almost
apologetic, like... You know, our
conference has a really silly name, but
we hope you might want to give a talk at
it anyway. And Camille wrote back really
quickly, saying -- sure, sounds cool.
And so we were really touched, and
excited that she wanted to be part of
this. So let's welcome Camille.

(applause)

 >> All right. Come on. There we go! All
right! Good morning, everybody. You will
have to forgive me if I start coughing
or doing other disgusting things. I'm
suffering from a little bit of a cold.
But I am super excited to be here!
Talking to all of you. And this is my
first keynote as well. So I'm a little
nervous, but I'm sure it'll be fine. My
talk is "How to Stay in Love with
Programming". And it is a personal
history. So... We are all here because
we are passionate people.

And programming is our passion. Or
technology. What have you. Programming
is also one of the few passions that you
can really easily carry into a pretty
freaking awesome career, if I do say so
myself. On the other hand, there is the
saying that the quickest way to lose
interest in something is to make it your
job. So I've been thinking a lot
about... How do you maintain that
passion and joy that you feel, you know,
sort of early in your career, when you
first start really learning programming?
And I figured that I would share the
story of my journey.

So write what you know. I'm so happy
that Mike's keynote is a very... Sort of
a little bit his journey. Right? Mike
and I have slightly different journeys
into programming and slightly different
interests, and I think in many ways, our
talks are a little bit of a yin and
yang. We have some core things in common
and some things very, very different.
Mike's talk was all about obsession. My
talk is a little bit more about
observation. That's been sort of my key
to advancement. But I hope that you --
between the two of us, you guys will get
something out of these talks. Because,
you know, programming is magic. I mean,
it really is. It's like the closest
thing to feeling like a wizard, I think,
in this modern day, is programming.
We've seen all of these amazing talks
yesterday, more today. It's just like --
you did what with what? You made that?
You used awk and you made sound? Like...
All these other amazing things. Like,
that's really, really awesome.
Programming is one of the few things
that you can do, where you can touch so
many people with relatively little
effort.

So it's pretty awesome. But truth be
told, nothing is easy. And it can be
extremely discouraging at times. And I
have had many ups and downs in my
career. Not only the sort of micro-ups
and downs of cursing at code, which
everyone here who has worked with me
has heard me do many, many times, but
also sort of the ups and downs of --
what am I doing? Why am I doing this? Am
I any good at it? What's going on here?
So... What's the secret to staying in
love?

Through good times and bad, richer and
poorer, sickness and health, 'til death
do you part? Right? Because the secret
of programming is that programming
doesn't love you back. That's true,
right? You love programming. Programming
does not love you back.

(applause)

So it has to be about you. It has to be
about your own personal journey to love.
Because that's the only way you're going
to maintain this. So what's my personal
journey? Well, we begin at the
beginning. And, you know, the beginning
of love is generally infatuation, and in
my case, also frequently frustration.
For me, falling in love was relatively
easy. So I've been, you know, a nerd for
a long time. I like to say that I fell
in love with computers in, like, third
grade, doing LOGO, and I started
learning a little bit in high school,
and, you know, I went to college for
computer science. I went to college at
Carnegie Mellon, where you apply and you
go to the School of Computer Science.
And I was bound and determined to be a
computer scientist. As of my freshman
year of college. And I fell in love...
You might say more with the idea of
programming than with programming
itself. Because especially when I was in
college, programming was really hard.
It's gotten slightly easier, I think, in
the time since I learned to program. I
was thinking... I forgot to look this
up, but I suspect that the time between
now and when I started is almost as long
as when I started and when C++ was
invented. Maybe even C. So it's a
long... Programming has hopefully
evolved several notches in that interim
period.

But I fell in love with many different
ideas of programming. So first I thought
I would be an AI person, because I read
a lot of cyberpunk. I really loved
Neuromancer, Snow Crash, I'm like... I'm
going to make intelligent computers! And
then I took an AI course. Maybe not so
much. Theory and algorithms? No. I was
at Carnegie Mellon, so programming
languages. Definitely the thing. I'm not
good at them. I wasn't bad, I took a lot
of classes in it, but I wasn't that good
at it. I got to the end of my undergrad
and I was like... Compilers. I'm pretty
good at low level stuff, and this is
fine. So this is what I'm going to be
into.

And I took a job doing sort of
compilers, debugging tools. That was
cool. I kind of got through undergrad
partly through sheer determination, and
took this job and floundered badly for a
year and a half. I basically did not...
I would say I did not get much done. And
it was really hard, actually. Looking
back, I didn't have great mentorship in
that job, but I was like... Oh my God.
Maybe this is scary. So I was like...
That's fine. I'm going to go to grad
school. I can be a grad student. I'm
smart. I had some research interests.
I'm going to go to grad school, work in
compilers, and it'll be awesome. I got
to grad school and it was like... All
right. Compilers, compilers. Wasn't good
at that. So I was like... I'm going to
switch to computer architecture and a
little bit of operating systems, and I
was pretty good at a course called
distributed systems. But they were not
cool when I was in grad school. It was
not an interesting area to pursue at the
time, so I thought. So I got to the end
of a masters degree and I'm like... This
is not good. I'm not a good grad
student. I didn't do well in this job.
I've had countless internships that have
all been fine, but what do you really
get out of that? I was beginning to
wonder if I had made a terrible mistake.

And maybe programming and tech was just
not for me. So I did a very drastic
thing, was I took the LSATs and thought
about going to law school. Fortunately,
I'm a practical person. I'm not going to
jump from grad school to law school. Got
to give it one more shot. So I moved to
New York City. I didn't care all that
much where I worked, as long as I'm
working someplace I can get paid enough
to live in New York City. This was
amazing. I got a job at Goldman Sachs,
which I hadn't heard of until I
interviewed with them. You have to tell
them how awesome they are, when you
interview. I don't think that's true
anymore. But it was when I interviewed.
So I took this job at Goldman Sachs. And
I did something sort of very lucky.
Which was that I didn't know anything
about finance, and I had kind of hit
bottom with my own sort of
self-confidence. Oh, I'm not good at any
of these things that I feel like I
should be good at. So here's what I'm
going to do.

I just let go of my assumptions. And I
went into this job and I was like... I'm
going to be dumb. I'm going to ask a lot
of dumb questions. If I don't understand
something perfectly, I'm going to ask
questions until I do. And this turned
out to be kind of an amazing thing. So
if you've ever studied Buddhism, you're
probably familiar with the concept of
beginner's mind. This is my son, by the
way. Beginner's mind is like the mind of
a child, first learning. It's this mind
where you're sort of an empty vessel,
and all you're doing is observing, and
taking things in, without prejudice,
without thinking that you know what's
right or what's wrong. Just sort of
observing and learning, and being open
to new ideas.

And for me, this was incredibly freeing,
because up until this point in my
career, I feel like I had been dominated
by shoulds. I should be good at
programming languages. I should be a
good grad student. I should be able to
do it all without help. I should know
everything. I should be working in C,
C++, doing awesome tech company stuff.
And I was like... You know what? None of
those things were working out for me. So
I'm just going to give this a shot. And
in reality, what I discovered when I did
this was that I had no idea what I
wanted to do. I had no idea. All these
"shoulds" had been making me miserable.
And I had been judging myself. I had no
idea what was hard and what wasn't, what
was cool and what wasn't. Distributed
systems, that class I was good at in
graduate school, ended up being
something that I worked on in this job
and is now the hotness. Right?

I'm coincidentally -- happen to be very
good at this thing that now everybody
thinks is really cool. But that was
totally accidental for me. I discovered
that actually I really like working in
an iterative way, which was very
different at the time from, like,
traditional tech company -- I was
working at Microsoft earlier, where you
are building software that's going to
ship in all one big bang, for years and
years and years you're building. I love
this iterative style of building. I
loved building with a business purpose
in mind, actually. I really enjoyed
that. And this was really freeing for
me, because I actually discovered what I
was good at and what I enjoyed.

It also let me focus a lot. So I
discovered that I sort of liked it, and
I started to focus on what I was doing.
All right. This is actually kind of
cool. I'm actually kind of good at this.
I'm focusing on it. I started to really
learn my tools. I learned the
intricacies of Java. I like to say that
unit testing saved my life. Until this
job, no one had ever taught me how to
test anything. And I still cannot
believe that. It still blows my mind to
this day that it took until 2005 for me
to learn about testing. How did anybody
ever get anything done before that?

(applause)

Like, you had to have it all in your
head. Oh, debugging. I did a lot of
that. I still do a little bit of that.
But all of a sudden unit testing freed
me to actually get things done. I
learned... You know, all about garbage
collection, how to use an IDE and make
it useful. And if you're writing Java
code, a good IDE is really useful. I had
some good mentors along the way who
helped me with this focus. And a few
years into that job, something amazing
happened. I found this confidence that I
had not had before. You know, Julie
Andrews -- I have confidence in
sunshine. Right? The obstacles between
me and problems stopped being me. And I
achieved something that I think is
incredibly important -- for me, at
least, in staying in love with
programming, which is mastery. What is
mastery? What does it look like? The
thing I will say about mastery is it
does not come fast or cheap. You are not
guaranteed it because you have a great
undergrad or graduate degree or
anything. It took me ten years to
achieve. I'm not saying that's how
long it'll take anyone, but for me it
took a long time. It took a long time
and a lot of focus.

Mastery, in my mind, looks like -- it
manifests itself as confidence. But to
achieve it, it looks like really, really
learning your tools. Taking the time to
pick some language or a couple of
languages, and really just understanding
them. Soup to nuts, in a way that lets
you get shit done really well. It means
understanding the memory model,
understanding the garbage collector or
the standard template library to a level
that most people don't really care that
much. Right? Understanding what the
global interpreter lock means for your
programs. Understanding enough that you
have to do a minimal amount of yak
shaving to get any new thing done in a
particular language.

Mastery to me is really important, and
really valuable, because it will sustain
you throughout your career. So, you
know, I was introduced as an
Apache ZooKeeper person, which is true,
and a manager of engineering. I do not
write code very much now. Maybe in
extreme anger. I fix alerts. That's the
limit of my programming these days. But
I feel confident because I have this
mastery. If I have to go back into
programming, I can do it. Nobody is
going to tell me -- Camille, you're not
technical enough. Nobody would say that
to me, because I have this experience
and this mastery. And I think that
achieving mastery -- and you will
achieve it, if you keep at it -- is one
of the key parts to staying in love with
programming, because it just gives you
-- it's just sort of the bedrock of
love.

But it's key, but it's not the only
thing. So as you continue in your
career, other things are going to become
important. In a way that they aren't
when you're still in this rapid growth
early stage. And those two things in my
mind are authenticity and purpose. So...
More recently, in my career, I had
achieved mastery. I was at Goldman, I
was doing some awesome things. This was
the period of time I was building giant
systems and ZooKeeper and working on
big technical problems. I was also
miserable. My friends and I refer to
that as the bitchy years. I was taking
it out on everyone around me in a way
that... We kind of had to have an
intervention for me.

And it's weird, because I was working on
generally speaking things I liked, but I
was just very unhappy, and so I did a
lot of introspection and tried to figure
out what was going on, and I realized
that I had a fundamental value
misalignment with Goldman Sachs. So
anyone who has ever worked with me or
for me knows that one of my biggest core
values is transparency. I am a
transparent person. I want to work in
public. I want to talk about what I work
-- I want to be able to do Open Source
programming, I want to be able to tweet
random shit, write blog posts about what
I'm doing, and share that with the
world. I am a citizen of the world. I'm
not a citizen of any particular company.

And finance is not a great place for
that. They actually were very... They
let me. I worked in Open Source, at
Goldman, but not everybody could do
that. That bothered me. I wanted to be
somewhere where anyone could do that. So
I was at this value misalignment at
Goldman, and I realized -- you know
what? I need to find someplace where I
can be more aligned with what I valued.
So finding my values and actually sort
of going towards them was important for
me in being happy.

It's important that everybody realize
that you are allowed to be you. You've
got to do you. You cannot do anything
but you. In particular, you're allowed
to be creative in your own way. The
other thing I realized -- in literally
the last couple of years -- I am a
creative person. For a long time, I
really thought that I wasn't, because
I'm not an inventor. I'm not a blank
canvas creator. I'm not an amazing side
projects person. So many of you here
just open up your editor and create
something amazing from scratch. That is
not me.

I am a creative problem solver. Mike's
keynote yesterday was super awesome, and
I wished that I could be like that guy
Harry. I wish I could be like Mike,
frankly. Because man... That's like a
really cool creative inventive sort of
way to be. But I'm not that person. I am
a problem solver. And I have to accept
that. But I also have to accept that you
don't have to be original to be
creative. You can be creative in your
own way.

So be yourself. Right? You're allowed to
be yourself. You're allowed to be a
little cynical if you want to be a
little cynical. Not too cynical, but a
little cynical. Right? You should expose
yourself to new things, so that you're
continuing to learn new things. That you
don't just sort of stand on the old
stuff you know. But sometimes exposing
yourself to new things is mostly about
reminding yourself how the old stuff
isn't that bad. And the last thing I
want to say, in the context of being
free to be you, is that side projects is
not a requirement. You don't have to
work in Open Source if you don't want
to. You don't have to do side projects.
You don't. It's really, really not
required. It doesn't mean you're a bad
programmer. I know a million amazing
programmers who have never done a side
project. They have other things they
like to do in their spare time. It
doesn't mean that people who do side
projects aren't good programmers either.
Everybody can be a good programmer, but
you have to be a good programmer in your
own way. A lot of people when I asked
how you stay in love with programming,
they did say side projects. But it isn't
a requirement for everyone. So finally,
I think the last thing I will say about
staying in love is that it's really
important to find purpose in what you
do.

Now, what do I mean by this? You do not
have to work for a company whose purpose
you love. You don't have to work for
Spotify if you love music. You can love
music and work for a company that does
nothing related to music. Right? It's
great if you do, but you don't have to
align yourself with the purpose of your
company. But you should figure out what
motivates you in terms of your actual
job. And find places where it's great to
do that. So for me, I like to build
software that moves a business forward.
That is just what I enjoy doing. I'm a
practical, pragmatic person. I like to
see problems and be able to move things
forward.

That doesn't mean that I loved finance.
I didn't. I actually don't care at all
about finance. But I had a great career
at Goldman. I like fashion a little bit
more, but fashion is not the reason I'm
at Rent the Runway. I'm at Rent the
Runway because the purpose of my job
there is great and I'm aligned with the
values of the company that I'm working
for. It's more important that you figure
out what your purpose is. Whether if
it's that you like to find secrets in
data and use those to create direction.
Maybe you like to help developers do
their jobs better. You can do that
inside of a lot of companies. You don't
have to work at a company that's making
an IDE to help developers do their jobs
better. You might love to make beautiful
interfaces that people love to use, or
many other things. Right?

But I think it's easy early in your
career to confuse the idea that the
things that you love have to be the
thing that... The company that you work
for does. I love tech, but I don't have
to work for a hardcore tech company to
continue to work in something that I
find purposeful and meaningful. The
other thing I will say is that I think
it's really valuable, especially later
in your career, to find purpose
externally in higher order work. Which
means things like... Teaching, writing
blog posts, giving talks at conferences
like this, mentoring, contributing to
Open Source, if that is something that
interests you.

Doing these things that force you to go
outside of yourself help you to build
empathy with other people, help you to
see the world through other people's
eyes. And I think that that's really
valuable, and becoming a senior
engineer, becoming someone who is able
to sort of jump into any situation and
see both sides of the story. Right?
Because it's very, very rare that
everything is as black and white as you
might think in... You know, in reading
blog posts or looking at Twitter. Oh,
this software is bad. And this software
is good. It's like -- no, in reality,
everything is about the circumstances
under which it's built. Not just the
choices made in those circumstances.

So finding that purpose outside of your
job and working with other people,
mentoring, teaching, is really very
valuable in just helping you build up
that empathy and helping you see
different perspectives. So as I said,
programming is magic. And if you want to
stay in love with programming, rely on
growth to give you confidence.
Authenticity to align your values and be
true to yourself, and purpose to direct
your passions and go outside yourself
and see the world through others' eyes.
And I believe these things can help you
stay in love with programming and have
an amazing career throughout the years.
Thank you very much.

(applause)

 >> Thank you! That was awesome. We're
going to take a short break from now
until 11:30. Have some coffee.