Life As A Developer: My Code Does Not Work Because I Am A Victim Of Complex Societal Factors...

ladies and gentlemen Outback developers welcome to NDC and now straight from the mean streets of Harvard we proudly welcome the man the myth the developer the legend James mikedz all right it's the mic on can everybody hear me good all right excellent so as I was so accurately introduced my name is James mikans and today I'm going to talk to you about my life as a developer I'm going to describe these some very deeply personal stories about how I struggle with hardware with software with poor internet connections I'm in a feud with Taylor Swift right now okay my life is a mess and today I'm going to open a portal into this nightmare struggle because I think that you can relate to my suffering so if you're like me you wake up sometimes and you say why did I decide to work in technology why didn't I study the humanities and the obvious answer is that if you study the humanities then modern society has said that your life was worth nothing right my self-esteem is far too fragile to deal with me being a constant disappointment to everyone who surrounds me alright so for example consider this guy right so he majored in philosophy he's fluent in three languages he has excellent communication skills and most importantly he loved you for who you are okay even though you have flaws because those flaws ultimately make you special and lead to personal growth okay so what a society say about this guy throw him in a dumpster no job for this guy okay in contrast let's consider this abominable snowman okay his resume has some pros and it has some cons so on the pro side he knows C++ on the con side he will definitely eat you right he's gonna start from the bottom up so that you'll be able to feel the pain as he consumes you so what does society say about this guy hire this guy okay we'll put him in a special room you can't eat anyone or we'll just let him eat that guy in the dumpster nobody loved that guy anyway right so it's a mercy killing do you see what I'm saying so literally the current economy would prefer to give money to an abominable snowman instead of a humanities major everyday The Wall Street Journal has an article with the title like computer scientists jobs increased by 15% history majors routinely tortured by pirates nobody cares nobody sheds a single tear okay everything is being driven by these business walks and these algorithm nerds right this is why modern music in fact is quite terrible you see back in the day here's how you'd make an album right you take your band you go to a farmhouse or an abandoned castle you drink some tea you read some poetry and maybe take some cocaine things happen whatever I'm not gonna judge people but the point is that you were inspired by your creative muse okay you inspire by the brightest fires of the human spirit in contrast here's how a Rihanna album gets made you just import the Rihanna module okay it's available on NPM it's a node module you can just download it and run it yourself as you can see in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen the inputs to the Rihanna function or a set of studio musicians in a series of unoriginal chord progressions at about 128 beats per minute because that kind of things sound like the stuff that you want to dance - I don't know it comes from your caveman part of your soul and the output is basically twelve songs three generic music videos and a minimum concert ticket price about seventy five dollars so this is what happens when you live in a world that overemphasizes algorithms now you might be thinking to yourself James you've stirred something up in me you've inspired me I'm gonna go out and become a musician okay I'm gonna grow my hair long and we're cool other jackets and create music that comes from the heart and I would say that's really great for me to hear but cut your hair you need to eat okay don't be crazy all right you need healthcare I don't want you to get a paper cut then you have to go die in a ditch because you can't afford to buy antibiotics okay so just think about this I care about you okay I care about you and some of you may come from socialized countries well healthcare is free I come from the land that has a lot of freedom but not actually healthcare a little bit awkward baby steps we're kind of getting there basically paper cuts are a big problem so anyways this is the real reason that I work in technology computers are okay but I really just need to earn enough money so that when the Mad Max world becomes reality I can afford to buy one of those cars that has the bendy dudes on it because I feel like having dudes on bendy poles is gonna be a key metric for success in the year 2025 one Society has killed all the people who studied Romance languages and for those of you who are actually listening please go to my LinkedIn profile and endorse me for having dudes on bendy balls there's no rush in that endorsement I just need you to do this by the time the year 2025 rolls around so thank you for your help so anyways speaking of Mad Max I'm actually glad to be here in Australia I do have to admit though I was a little bit afraid to come here because you know from the outside Australia is portrayed as this crazy larger-than-life type place where danger is constantly around the corner so for example I did a little research and I discovered that in Australia there unmarked holes everywhere okay you just you're walking around what happened to Jason unmarked hole we don't talk about Jason anymore so I'm not actually sure how common these things actually are but I think that Australians are actually very amused by Australia's reputation and I think that they like to exaggerate the danger of Australia to outsiders so for example I have an Australian friend this is true in his his name is Ryan I've actually changed his name to protect his innocence and also I'm not going to show you Ryan's real face instead I'm going to show you a photo of paranoid Hugh Jackman with the mullet I feel like this photo really captures Ryan's attitude quite well so I do a Google hangout with Ryan I say hey guess what man I'm coming to Australia and Ryan says that's great but don't forget the ruse control the night and so I'm kind of shocked when I hear this I'm like Ryan what is the route and he says kangaroos mate they hang out by the petrol station so they can trample on your car the route cannot be contained the Roos evil the room must be destroyed by the way welcome to Australia all right that's what I always loved about all these sort of descriptions of the country it's like things are really crazy but we're so glad to have you here so then Ryan actually continued and he said by the way most of Australia is constantly on fire take a look at this map hit City City fire as far as the eye can see it's like that red eye of Jupiter but right here on earth welcome to Australia by the way when you put on your shoes be sure to watch out for the shoes - I said man we do have these huge spiders let's let the shoe spider so my friend says here's what you got to know about spiders in Australia the shoe spider it's the size of a car the car spider is the size of a house and the house spider is the size of a tiny speck of dust so it can float inside your ear and trample on your brain by the way have you heard of this all lockpicks so at this point I'm thinking Ryan you stop telling me all this stuff I'm going to go to Australia I'm sure that everything's gonna be fine and I'm happy to report that I've only seen three Sarlacc pit since I've been here that feels very exciting to me I think I'm gonna be okay so anyways one thing that amused me actually as I was talking to Ryan was that Ryan talked about Australia in the same way that MongoDB users talk about MongoDB do you know what I'm saying like MongoDB users will tell you these insane stories about MongoDB and you'd think that all these stories would end with MongoDB being uninstalled and destroyed from space but somehow people continue to use MongoDB and apparently have a great time about it right so this is why I think that anyone who performs DevOps for MongoDB should actually speak with an Australian accent so for example instead of saying MongoDB queries don't always return on matching documents you can say sometimes dad shows up drunk to work and that's just the way it has to be instead of saying that MongoDB can return stale versions of documents you can say in the app back time is the fluid and subjective concepts look at this didgeridoo here did reduce have no versions instead of saying the MongoDB can return garbage data from writes that never should have occurred you can say on Thursdays MongoDB replaces every fifth bit in your database with an angry Komodo dragon so I don't know I guess the whole point of this rant is that life is tough life is tough sometimes your databases I guess just have to be filled with poisonous lizards this is the life that we've chosen as software developers and I think it's actually tough to be a programmer you're constantly surrounded by failure all the time your hard work and misbehave your software can crash users are always doing unexpected things and in the middle of this chaos software developers are expected to constantly improve their output to produce more and more lines of bug-free code every day and so everybody has a different theory about how to improve developer productivity you can use pair programming a wizard-based scrum programming or agile cosplay Waterfall programming you can just buy a ton of monitors so that when people visit you don't know that you lost your virginity in a chat room you can use Emacs or sublime you can be a real hero and use notepad because syntax highlighting she week okay and if your source code file doesn't fit in a note than your modularity sucks but everyone I think who's a real developer I think everyone in this room knows there's only one true metric for how good a developer is window placement okay it's the only metric that counts window placement evaluates how well a developer places her application windows within her desktop environment so for example look at this window placement here it's amateurish it's naive look at all the clumsy overlapping so the poor use of negative space for God's sake look at this file explorer I don't even know what directory it's open to this is insane now let's consider the window placement of a professional developer now you're talking yeah Papa likes it Papa likes it you got separate browser windows for different web searches you're performing you've got multiple open chat sessions with both your co-workers and your personal friends you've got a code editor boom you've got a terminal window yearning for your input right there you've got the gossip site minimized but just an alt tab away so that when your boss leaves your office you can go and see what all people are doing in Hollywood it's very exciting this my friends is the window placement of a professional developer now as you'll know when you achieve this type of window placement you'll exist in a special plane of existence it's like all of your senses are magnified and strengthened with a single mouse click or alt tab you have 67 terabytes of information at your control right it's a great feeling but after about five days of having optimal window placement and you'll be doing some programming and then you'll see a little icon pop up in the lower right hand corner of your monitor restarts required for updates oh god no no no when you when you've achieved perfect window placement rebooting your computer is equivalent to a post nuclear apocalypse right civilization is completely destroyed there's no language there's no music there's no dance it's impossible to think about rebuilding your life in such a barren world and that's why when you've achieved perfect window placements rebooting must be avoided for as long as possible right so at first it's very easy to do you minimize the pop-up window and you go about your business but those messages from your machine become more and more urgent if you don't reboot your machine this small child will never be loved by his parents and you're like oh well good luck with all the sadness maybe you should join the army work out some of that anger because your father never loved you I can't help you I've got perfect window placement I'm better than you in a very real sense okay I'm sorry I'm not I'm not sorry okay this this is how you feel when you have that perfect window placement right so the days go on and you still haven't rebooted and at this point your machine starts to become unstable every one of your cores is running at a hundred percent utilization it's all kernel-mode activity files are being opened and closed and read and written for no reason at all all of your Bluetooth devices are on your machine doesn't have any Bluetooth devices and at this point your machine begins to become physically hot if your machine is a laptop it isn't comfortable to put on your lap the fan is constantly blowing just hot air onto your lap there is now a 97% chance that you are sterile your reproductive organs have been barbecued out of this plane of existence and sit to a spirit world where gonads have formed their own civilization free from the failings of traditional human society and this all sounds very terrible but there is a bright side you've got perfect window place so that's still pretty cool now this point you've actually avoided rebooting for a month and your operating system is queued up 83 critical security patches which fix devastating security holes in your machine but you can't install aeneas batches because your fuses are doing your machine day 45 without rebooting you come back from lunch and you discover the entire northwestern quadrant of your screen is gone it just doesn't work anymore it's like a migraine aura just unfathomable pixels coming in and out of existence and it kind of sucks but guess what still got perfect window placement and three-quarters of the screen right you've got two copies of everything open anyway so who cares if you lose a quadrant right and so you continue about your day however about an hour later things take a turn for the worse now when you look in the northwestern quadrant it's filled with that kid who's always trying to escape from Japanese televisions and mirrors all of your input devices at this point have now been corrupted by Satan so whenever you try to draw anything with your mouse you just draw pentagrams on the screen for no reason and then when you try to alt tab and then one of your perfectly placed windows your machine just displays that quote from Nietzsche about staring into the void and so finally after 57 days without a reboot you are forced to reboot your laptop by physically taking out its battery and then throwing it into a river you wave goodbye to it like a lover and you think of all the great times that you shared your perfect window placement is now gone but it's not forgotten and much like a Phoenix it will rise again now of course because you've delayed all these security updates hackers are stolen your credit cards you can no longer afford a Phoenix but you get the point the metaphor is beautiful much like your window placement used to be now some of you might have noticed that the machine in this story is a Windows machine and I'm sure that some of you are thinking James you'd have fewer problems if you used a Linux machine instead of a Windows machine and my response to that is have you ever used Linux Linux is never the end to the question what life choice would reduce the number of life problems that I have right now right Linux is very nice if you like editing configuration files that are poorly documented it's also nice if you want to desperately search for device drivers for your devices and it's also nice if you want to in fact write those device drivers because they either don't exist or they do exist but you can only download them from Eastern European websites which may be fronts for human trafficking Linux is also very nice if you like kernel mailing lists which frequently resemble a bar fight or an awkward family reunion in which your uncle unleashes the profanity filter irate about the proper use of tab space and commenting formats and everybody has to listen to this because everybody is running the operating system called uncle X so hashtag uncomfortable Linux is also nice if you'd like to use GUI managers which are often indistinguishable from brutalist french architecture from the 1960s any guesses which one of these is a window manager as it turns out both of them are window managers the one on the right is called genome brutally and it will be available with the upcoming a boon to distro so go out there and check it out so don't get me wrong I actually like Linux I have several machines that run Linux natively but I do think that it's funny when I meet people and they say why isn't Linux more popular on the desktop and the answer is it the real impediment to Linux on the desktop is Linux on the desktop right that's the big problem right people who say that Linux on the desktop is right around the corner or like members of a religious cult who keep miss predicting the data the world is going to end right it's like the day the world is totally going to end on Tuesday and then Tuesday rolls around and they're like I totally misinterpreted that cave painting the world's actually gonna in next Tuesday then the Monday before that is when Linux on the desktop is going to become real so it should be cool so news I digress where were we I yes so I had just been forced to reboot my machine so I reboot my machine and my operating system finally upgrades itself I'm greeted with an empty lonely desktop and I begin the painful process of reconstructing perfect window placement but soon I noticed a different icon in the corner of my desktop it says that the Adobe PDF reader would like to update itself now this notification raises a very disturbing question why would my PDF reader ever need to update itself here's what I need my PDF reader to do display PDF documents that's it now you know that the rest of this list is blankness it is the absence of additional list items right a PDF reader should be very simple because displaying a PDF document is a timeless operation which never requires an update it should be like the plus sign right you would never think to yourself what's two plus two hold on let me update the plus sign I just need to download about 48 megabytes and new plus sign semantics okay that's cool the update is done and now two plus two equals the color shamrock green wow that's so amazing it's a plus sign for the modern generation it's not your parents plus sign right this of course is stupid and dumb all right it's a reading a PDF file should be very simple it should never change so why is my PDF reader always updating the reason if you allow me to answer my own question because I've thought about it is that the Adobe PDF reader has an infinite number of features and new features are being added every second right so is it allowable by the laws of physics from a PDF reader to add multiple digital signatures to my PDF file and then I can add comments to the passes and the PDF file that I find interesting and then Anna would say my PDF file with an embedded video and then encrypt the entire PDF file so that after the PDF file has been automatically uploaded to the cloud only my very best very special friends can read it is this allowable by the laws of physics yes is this allowable by the laws of human decency No right so I was talking about this topic to one of my friends and he said that all these features are there because a lot of enterprise customers use these features but if your corporation uses all of these features what is your business model okay are you in the business of ridiculousness right let me give you some life advice okay if you're protecting your mission-critical data using encrypted PDF files in the cloud the Russians already know what you're doing okay they weren't fooled by that at all just hot knife through butter very hot knife very cuttable butter okay so Adobe Reader sort of cracks me up because if you think about it it represents the weaponization of complexity everything has to be a platform now it has to enable this vast constellation of experiences and feelings it's ridiculous PDFs are supposed to be simple right here's my mental model that I think is shared by a lot of people for how PDFs are created and used somewhere there's a monk sitting at a castle his face illuminated by candlelight this monk has an idea an idea that he wants to share with the world he goes to his closet he takes out a single scroll of sheepskin paper the sheep's name was Steve we all love Steve even though we eventually turned his skin in the paper and his hair in the novelty sweaters it was a complicated situation but Steve understood he was a hero there were no tears from Steve anyways the monk takes the skin of his friend Steve writes down his great idea you see the monk is employed by a consulting company that produces completely meaningless white papers about technology 3d printers result in more 3d things being printed big data's bigger than you think unless you already know what the adjective big means there will be 27 gajillion IOT devices by the time you finish reading this sentence basically just take the up into the right grab and label the axes whatever you want and now you can write for Forrester that's basically how that works so anyways this is the miracle of life just the way that God intended so the monk takes his sheepskin paper scans it he has all the content digitized a PDF is born into this world that PDF is posted on a website I download it and I open that PDF with the ideal PDF reader I only need four simple commands page down page up zoom out and zoom in that's all that I need for my PDF reader so let's see what kind of tools I get from the modern adobe reader Jesus Christ look at all that this is what Tony Stark sees when he's looking to the eyes of the Iron Man suit right Jorma barded with all these colors and these icons and expanding menus I mean look at all this stuff I can do I can optimize and stamp and measure and redact I can put JavaScript in my PDF that one's too easy even for me to make fun of okay just gonna use that as an exercise for the reader right but one thing that does actually seem cool is that I can put accessibility features into my PDF file so that people who are blind can read the PDF using a speech synthesizer so that actually seems pretty neat so I decided to click on that accessibility icon and see what happens I'm taken to a website which tells me I have to pay money to make my PDF file accessible that's actually kind of messed up right so should have the ability to create accessible PDFs the part of the free Adobe software I can just imagine Wolfgang von Adobe or whatever sitting somewhere the executive office counting all the money then an angry mob of blind people show up in his office and they knock the desk off his land and then a lamp off his desk and he says now you're playing in our world right now to be clear I'm not encouraging blind people to form gangs and commit vandalism okay in case any of your news reporters don't tweet this snapchat at whatever the kids do these days I'm just saying that Adobe PDF reader has a ton of features that most people don't meet I think and the result is that Adobe constantly has to update itself to add new features and patch the old ones so by the way this is a pretty uplifting talk huh just a list of things that I hate you're lucky the organized only gave me 30 minutes otherwise I'd be up here Fidel Castro style in an hour 15 t to nano VMS are a tool of capitalist oppression the workers deserve em three double X largest from each according to their ability to each according to their poorly understood understood workload characteristics which may not in fact need the most expensive VM right San Francisco belonged to the San Franciscans of the new variety who used is efficacious push out the original San Franciscans anyways what was I talking about oh yes so I was talking about things I don't like it was very easy for me to recover my train of thought there so what don't I like well one thing I don't like is that I feel like there are too many software frameworks these days so back in the good old days there was just one software framework and it was called lib see ok back in the good old days your application consisted of things you did yourself other things you did yourself and that was it people were hard-working and they knew the value of re-implementing the wheel okay there was no sharing of high level frameworks if you didn't like Lib C then you go home because that's how things work around here our little town is everything we want we got a restaurant we got a pond we got a place where you can sit we got Lib C ok that's all that we need but now these developers these days they're so newfangled and when I hear about all this talk about this framework and that framework I just want to cry big angry tears right so whenever I go to Silicon Valley I hang out in the coffee shops I always hear the developers talking about frameworks one of them says hey how's the app coming along and the other one says oh it's going pretty good pretty good we just migrated from AWS to cloud i/o that IO IO they have 17 tens of availability they also have data centers located in outer space the center of the earth and the Louvre how exciting so it's pretty awesome if I do say so myself I a store all of my application data in kitchen sink which is a non relational no sequel semi relational JSON document table store it supports all possible schema types natively it only has indices if you want it to and if it only has in this season everything becomes an NDC so it's just very fast it's like super convenient then of course the support continuous testing and development I set up an instance of you to real MVP which simultaneously executes my post commit hooks and also sends me an inspirational quote of the day from a famous movie star or an older European gentleman who lived in the 1700s and I also put all my configuration data inside a Gandalf the other person says oh I've heard of that you mean Gandalf the Grey no Gandalf the white it's totally incompatible with Gandalf the Grey the data format change from XML to JSON it's just a big mess a big mess anyways though of course my application needs a monitoring infrastructure to ensure that all of my code is running properly now for that I use drunken frenemy from high school as a service this is actually a crowdsourcing platform that harnesses the power of all the losers that I knew from high school you see people are constantly monitoring my infrastructure in sending me irritating late-night text messages about the health net infrastructure they also text me and they asked whether they should stay in their current relationship and the nice thing no but then they say but I love her so much that I'm like we should try to make it work and they say but it hurts so bad I don't know what to tell them because they've been in this place so many times it's not healthy anymore you know and I'm saying anyways back to my infrastructure so I collect my mobile payments using triangle and I collect my web payments using Bill buddy and I detect payment fraud using Pokemon know which allows me to look at my financial statements and see if any of them are being used by pokemons associated with financial crime such as Russian mob syndicate Pikachu and Kim jong-un means foreign currency Bulbasaur so the developer on the right finishes the description of the application stack and he says so what do you think now if this world were fair the developer on the Left would transform into some type of zombie and just devour the developer on the right unfortunately we do not live in this world so we suffer what we must so I hear all these conversations at the coffee shop and I grudgingly conclude that I should probably learn some more about these new technologies so I opened up my laptop and I try to do some research in Internet however when I use the wireless network the connection is just really really bad right it's horrible I'm trying to open up a tutorial on YouTube I'm not getting 10 20 P I'm not even getting 720p I'm getting 7-piece ok I didn't even know this was an option I have three and a half pixels okay one of them isn't even parallel to the horizon this makes no sense this is how a salamander perceives the world salamanders cannot understand tutorials on large-scale web services I feel like I'm not getting a lot from this tutorial so I make this sad sad noise of defeat and then I noticed that the only person in San Francisco who is older than 35 it's now leaning over my shoulder this man turns to me and I can tell that he's extremely wise and knowledgeable and and he says I noticed that you were looking for something on the web maybe you could find the same information at a library and I say I'm not trying to learn about the causes for the French Revolution I need to learn about a web protocol that was invented five minutes ago do you see it I'm saying right when you take the internet away from you as a developer I'm literally ruined as a person okay it's like you've stripped away all of my fundamental dignity okay I'm getting two kilobytes per second over this wireless connection I tried to load my Facebook page I got something from a CSI episode okay this is terrible okay so my timeline my news feed and my friend list have all merged into something that supports neither time nor news nor friends okay I can't live in a world like this okay so can you spare me some sympathy can you try to understand where I'm coming from and the man closes his book and he leans over and he says that's not really what I came here to tell you today and then he takes off a mask and it's a time-travelling grace hop what a convenient anecdote with which to end my talk time travel is real Grace Hopper has access to it and she's using it to deliver common-sense wisdom to the confused technocratic elite my name is James Mickens thank you for your time

Channel: NDC Conferences

Views: 40,482

Keywords: James Mickens, NDC, NDC Sydney

Id: 7Nj9ZjwOdFQ

Length: 32min 12sec (1932 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 29 2016