>> Hello!

 >> Hi!

 >> I taste words. When I hear a word,
the flavors and textures of foods and
sometimes non-food items can be vividly
felt and tasted on my palate, as if I'm
experiencing the sensation of eating
them. Words have always tasted like
things, and I never suspected I was
weird. This is because I have
synesthesia. Synesthesia is an anomaly
of association. It's when something you
experience stimulates an unrelated
sense. The most common form is graphene
color synesthesia, where words are
experienced as having colors.
Robert Cailliau who developed the world wide
web along with Sir Tim Berners-Lee designed its logo as being green
because to him W is green. A rare form
is chromosthesia, where sounds and music
trigger colors. My type of synesthesia
is lexical gustatory synesthesia, which
causes words to trigger flavors and
textures. The associations between words
and tastes that they evoke are formed in
childhood and are unique to the
synaesthete. They don't change over
time. My all time favorite word,
sneaker, tastes like an Italian cookie I
haven't tasted since childhood. I think
because I used to have pink sneakers. To
another synaesthete, the word will taste
differently. Words frequently evoke
things I haven't eaten in decades. I was
tasked with prototyping something using
the Instagram API, and I was losing my
mind over the taste of Dunkaroos, which
is what Instagram triggers. I haven't
had them in years. The words don't have
to be in English. They come from the
sound, rather than the meaning. Some
however taste like things that are
semantically related. So the meaning
can't be totally excluded. Sounds of
words share sounds of flavors that I
experience very literally. My
synesthesia isn't exactly triggered.
It's constantly experienced, alongside
all the other things I'm experiencing.
It's like another sense that's being
stimulated. Like being able to see and
hear at the same time.

Much like your sense of taste is being
activated while you eat, mine is being
activated while I listen or read. I'm
going to take an intermission to tell
you a little more about myself. My name
is Chloe Weil. My last name tastes like
pickles. I was born in Brooklyn. Which
tastes like broccoli. I just moved back
to New York, fun size Snickers Twix
bars, after living in Portland, Oregon,
chewed bubble gum (inaudible) peanut
butter. Because my synesthesia touches
every aspect of my life, it has a way of
always being there. As developers, we
may focus in one language, system, or
role, but we are all generalists in one
degree. From angular to Zepto, there are
a million frameworks, libraries,
platforms, and tools designed to help
developers work in a more modular way.
I'm a front end developer, which is at
its core HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. But
I've worked on the back end, which
tastes like Hershey's chocolate, on
Rails, which tastes like warm Sprite out
of a can. Nothing is more delicious than
Ruby. On Jekyll, the process triggers
cravings for sliced sandwich pickles. My
latest project is a mean stack
application. That's Mongo, express,
angular, and node. So depending on which
aspect I'm focusing on, I could be
fixated on dried mango, coffee flavored
hard candy, Laffy taffy with sprinkles
or spaghetti-Os. Being familiar with
markup and HTML 5 elements is one of my
responsibilities as a developer. HTML 5
has given us a broader way to describe
content, from articles to sections or
the in addition of the new nav element,
which enhances accessibility. We can
also use ARIA for additional support in
assistive technology. But my favorite is
figure. And there are web components
that enables developers to extend HTML
in order to express more complicated UI
widgets. The HTML of a custom element is
written inside of a template and uses
the shadow to offer encapsulation from
external JavaScript. Many commands
activate my synesthesia and cause me to
fixate on whatever item it triggers.
Apt, brew, curl, and git. Spending an
afternoon in merge conflict hell can
turn into an afternoon wanting a stack
of sliced American cheese.

Unless rebase is involved. Then I feel
like I'm licking a basketball. Not all
words have actually edible associations.
Deployment and automation tools are not
my area of expertise, but I've been a
spectator in several conversations about
them. Capistrano versus puppet. Again.
Not my area, but I'm obsessed with
canned soup served at room temperature
with grape popsicles and not listening
to the conversation. In JavaScript,
everything is an object, which means
everything tastes like soggy toast
crunch cereal that has lost its bite
after sitting in milk for too long.
JavaScript tastes like vomit, and so do
variables and most things that begin
with V, but actual variable scope... You
know, this? This tastes like sinking
your teeth into an entire brick of
Philadelphia cream cheese. I've been
trying to manipulate my synesthesia to
help me become a better developer
through mnemonics. Since I've already
built associations for many words that
describe programming concepts all I have
to do is marry them in a meaningful way
and then I'm brilliant. That doesn't
actually work. I basically have a really
useless superpower.

There is absolutely no value in knowing
that these McDonald's chicken nuggets
are also pieces of cereal floating in
milk. But objects are pretty powerful.
What if we crush one up and turned it
into pie crust? And we added some
properties which tasted like dried
apricots or wrote some methods that
tasted like crumbly cheddar cheese? The
result is a cinnamon apricot cheddar
pie. Which sounds amazing. JavaScript is
delicious. Relying on memorization or
analogies is probably not the most
constructive way to get better at
something. Building something you'll
actually use might be. Even if your
superpowers cause you to want to eat all
of your tools. Sneaker!

(applause)