I am Shane Becker

  1. LA Ruby Conf 2012 Quit Your Job. Srsly.

    Yesterday, I spoke at LA Ruby Conf 2012. My talk was titled "Quit Your Job. Srsly.". The title was not a metaphor.

    It was a very non-technical talk. It was very much an emotional breakdown in front of 200 people kind of talk. It was very ...cathartic? ...taxing? I'm pretty happy with how it turned out both in the slides and how I delivered it. The feedback from the attendees seems to indicate that it was well received.

    For the first time, I wrote a script first for a talk then extracted slides from that. I've included the script below.

    When I get audio and/or video, I'll update this post.

    I plan to refine this talk a bit and give it at more confs. If you're interested in having me give this talk at your conf, email me: veganstraightedge@gmail.com.

    View the slides for "Quit Your Job. Srsly." here.

    Tweets related to my talk

    The Script

    This is the rough script that I worked from during my talk. Obviously, I didn't read this word for word. I added some things off the cuff in the moment. I forgot a couple paragraphs here and there, namely the "middle children of history" bit. Oh well.

    My name Shane Becker. I know your time is precious and you’ll never get it back. So, for letting me have a few minutes of it, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

    Quit Your Job. Srsly.
    Shane Becker
    Avatar
    @veganstraightedge
    http://iamshane.com
    Announcements
    Cascadia Ruby

    will be happening again this summer in Seattle, WA. We’re signing the contract this week on the venue then will announce the date.

    Farmhouse Conf 2

    is happening again this summer at my house in Hollywood, CA. The date is May 5, 2012. Five Five Twenty Twelve. Registration will be open this week. $100 tickets. Limited to 100 people. Stay tuned.

    Disclaimers
    I’m not special.

    I don’t think what I have to say here today only applies to people like me. That don’t have kids, aren’t married, are out of debt (finally), whatever. I’m not special. No matter what your situation is, I think this can still apply to you.

    Capitalism

    Also, this talk is not an attack on capitalism. That’s a talk for a different day.

    Capital W Work

    And this talk is not an attack on capital W work. That’s also a different talk for some other day.

    Blank
    If You Were Guaranteed Not to Fail,
    What Would You Do?
    Life. Love. Regret.

    Put another way, if you died right night now, what would you regret having not done?

    What’s stopping you?
    What’s REALLY stopping you?
    I don’t know you.

    I don’t know most of you. That’s my loss. I don’t know where you work or what you build or what it’s like day to day. I don’t know your salaries or hopes and dreams or secret plans. And you must always have a secret plan.

    But I Do Know This

    I see in our community some the smartest, most creative people alive. I see all this beautiful amazing potential, and I see it squandered.

    God dammit, an entire generation selling online advertisements or building the next walled garden social network; slaves with conference t-shirts and free snacks. So…

    I Want You to Quit Your Job
    Better People

    Maybe, just to work with better people. Are you the smartest person on your team? Try being the least smart or in the middle to learn more.

    I’ve had the great fortune of working with Aaron Patterson twice, for example, and learned a metric fuck ton in the process.

    More Money

    Or for more money. A lot more money. I guarantee you that you’re not making anywhere as much as you could and should be.

    I want you to do something for me. In your head, How much is your salary? Now give yourself a raise. What is that number? Whatever that number is, increase it by 25%. Maybe even 50%.

    You are worth more

    I promise you. You are worth more than you think you are.

    • Now, Raise your hand if you’re hiring?
    • Keep your hand up if you’re willing to give big raises to poach good people.
    Group A, meet group B.
    Something Fun
    Something Different
    Nothing at All

    Maybe just quit to do something fun. Or something different. Or nothing at all. The work ethic of this culture is killing us all. Meanwhile we toil away making shit that no on needs.

    Start a Company

    Maybe quit to start your own company. Run a consultancy. Start a product shop. Start a collective with your friends and peers. Take co-working to its logical conclusion.

    Fear / Courage

    Maybe quit because you’re scared to quit. Maybe you’ve never done it before and you’re fucking terrified at what lies just over the edge of that cliff.

    Pride

    Maybe quit because you’re not proud of the work you do, the product you build or the company you work for.

    Get Wild

    Maybe quit your job AND professional programming. I dunno. Paint a self portrait. Build a house. Travel the world. Throw down some cardboard and do some break dancing. Get wild.

    Dying Inside

    Maybe quit because everyday that you work your job, you’re slowly dying on the inside. Because one day you’ll wake up in the middle of another cross functional iteration planning meeting assigning story points to the latest terrible idea for a new feature and realize that, I’ve wasted too much of life on this bullshit.

    Cultural Significance

    Or maybe quit your job because you hold the skills of one of the most important crafts in our culture. Mull that over.

    Software Touches Everything

    Think about all the parts of our lives that are mitigated by software. Not just us nerds in this room, but the muggles outside walking down the street totally unawares of what’s going in here right now.

    Software touches everything. And almost everything touches the network. Our phones, our computers, websites, cash registers, banks, libraries, power plants, cars, traffic signals… our entire culture is arranging itself around software.

    Transform Culture

    You hold in your hands and in your brain the skills of the craft that powers this culture. And maybe you want to do something meaningful with those skills. Something that will help more than just yourself. Something that will make lives better, that will outlive you and that maybe just maybe transform culture and make the world a better place.

    A Brief (VERY Incomplete) History of Noteworthy Achievements in the Field of Computering (as researched almost exclusively on Wikipedia)

    Here are just a few examples of things that nerds have done.

    1820s — 1830s : Charles Babbage sets out to build the world’s first mechanical calculator: The Difference Engine and Analytical Engine.
    1840s : Ada Lovelace wrote Note G, the first algorithm specifically tailored for implementation on a computer. For a machine that was never finished!
    1935 : Alonzo Church invented Lambda Calculus.
    1949 : Grace Hopper invented COBOL and the first compiler.
    1958 : John McCarthy invented Lisp.
    1963 : Douglas Engelbart invented the mouse. 1963 : Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson both independently started exploring the ideas of “hypertext” and “hypermedia” coined by Nelson.
    1968 : Douglas Engelbart does “The Mother of All Demos” showing his work on: - GUI - Mouse - Video Conferencing - Teleconferencing - Hypertext - Hypermedia - Word Processing - Collaborative Real-Time Editor All in 1968! Before Unix or C.
    1969 : ARPANET went making use of packet switching and TCP.
    1969 : Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie invented Unix at Bell Labs
    1970s : PARC re/invented all of the things - Object-Oriented Programming - Ethernet - Laser Printing - GUI - Mouse - Modern personal computer
    1972 : Adele Goldberg and others at PARC created Smalltalk.
    1972 : As a skunk works project, Ray Tomlinson created networked email for ARPANET. So users could message each other between different hosts.
    1972 : Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie invented C at Bell Labs
    1976 : Woz invented the Apple I. 1976 : Richard Stallman invented Emacs.
    1977 : Jobs/Woz shipped the Apple II. 1977 : Bill Joy shiped BSD at UC Berkeley, later vi and C Shell.
    1978 : Ward Christensen invented BBS.
    1979 : Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis Conceived Usenet.
    1982 : French government shipped Minitel. Which will be retired THIS YEAR! 30 years later.
    1983 : Jon Postel and Paul Mockapetris invented DNS.
    1984 : Apple shipped the Mac.
    1987 : Richard Stallman released GCC. 1987 : Larry Wall created Perl.
    1988 : Jarkko Oikarinen invented IRC.
    1990 : ARPANET removed, Internet! - NPL - Merit Network - CYCLADES - X.25 and public data networks - UUCP and Usenet
    1990 : Tim Berners-Lee invented… ALL OF THE THINGS! - WWW - HTML - HTTP - Browser - Server - URLs
    1991 : Linus Torvalds released Linux.
    1992 : Wifi was invented.
    1995 : Matz shipped Ruby (0.9.5).
    1995 : Ward Cunningham invented the wiki.
    1998 : Larry Page and Sergey Brin launched Google.
    2001 : Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger launched Wikipedia.
    2004 : DHH shipped Rails + 15 minute blog screencast.

    …

    What Have I Done?

    Right now, it’s 2012 now and what the hell have I done with my life? The answer is an overwhelming “not much”.

    2012 : Big Projects

    I have three big projects that I think are important and have the potential to transform culture. That’s what I’m focused on for 2012. (They’re not secrets, but they’re not the focus of this talk.) I’m sure that you also have some ideas in that brain of yours for how you can contribute to making a better world.

    “Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.” — Horace Mann

    I think about this a lot. Like a lot A LOT. It keeps me up at night.

    You’re smart

    I’m not trying to tell you what to do. Or how you should do it. You’re smart, you’ll figure out the details. I’m just saying that you should do SOMETHING.

    Do Something

    Whatever that thing is. Go win some victory for humanity. Don’t squander this incredible potential that you all have.

    I look around this room and I see a lot of courage. And it gives me strength. We give each other strength.

    Thank You

    My name Shane Becker. I know your time is precious and you’ll never get it back. So, for letting me have a few minutes of it, from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

  2. On Nerd Club (after Tyler)

    I look around I look around and see a lot of new faces. Which means a lot of you have been insulated from recession layoffs.

    I see in our community some the smartest, most creative people alive. I see all this beautiful amazing potential, and I see it squandered.

    God dammit, an entire generation selling online advertisements or building the walled garden social network; slaves with conference t-shirts and free snacks.

    Were the middle children of internet history. No privacy or place. We have no Space Race. No Great Depression. Our Space Race is for eyeballs our Great Depression is our careers.

    Advertising has us chasing the latest gadgets and IPOs, working jobs we hate, so we can buy shit we dont need.

    We were raised on the web to believe that wed all be millionaires from stock options, made into blockbuster movies, internet meme rock stars, but we wont. And were starting to figure that out.

    I look around this room and I see a lot of courage. And it gives me strength. We give each other strength.

    Nod to Tyler.

  3. My Text Message Usage Chart (on AT&T)

    Inspired by Neven Mrgan's post about how iOS's iMessages has affected his text message use, I looked into mine.

    The AT&T site does not make it easy to go find historical data of message use. They do provide a chart of data use, but not SMS/MMS use. What I had to do was go through each month's bill and find the values, put them in a text file, then create a chart. I used Keynote to bang out a quick and dirty chart. I've included the raw data in a table below.

    My Text Message Usage Chart (on AT&T) from 08/10 - 12/11

    My Text Message Usage Chart (on ATT)
    08/10 469
    09/10 941
    10/10 723
    11/10 464
    12/10 743
    01/11 820
    02/111032
    03/112128
    04/111042
    05/111490
    06/111758
    07/111518
    08/11 952
    09/11 929
    10/11 689
    11/11 612
    12/11 307

    Comma Separated Values

    So. When a few more of my friends A) get an iPhone 2) upgrade to iOS 5 and 3) turn on iMessages, I'll be able to turn off my text messaging package. Get to it, friends.

  5. Vedera LIVE TONIGHT at The Farmhouse

    Backyard Show in Hollywood, CA

    The 100 year old avocado tree all lit up in the backyard at The Farmhouse in Hollywood, CA

    My friend Heather is working with a band called Vedera. Last weekend she directed a video for them in the desert at an abandoned water park. They wanted to play a show while they were in LA writing new material. So, we’re doing it tonight in the backyard of The Farmhouse in Hollywood, CA.

    The house is an old farmhouse from way back before Hollywood was Hollywood. It once sat on 300 acres of avocado grove. There’s still one avo tree left in my backyard. Under that avo tree is where Vedera is playing tonight. We strung up a bunch of lights last night and it’s amazing back there when it’s all lit up.

    Wear a hoodie (it gets chilly at night). Find street parking. Be nice to the neighbors. Come by at 7pm. And have fun!

    Find more information at farmhouse.la. Limited to the first 100 people. The address is 1558 Gordon St / Los Angeles, CA / 90028.

    Civ in the shed in the backyard at The Farmhouse in Hollywood, CA