Hi, my name is David this session is leaving Drupal This isn't this isn't a how-to. So if you were expecting a how-to That's not what this session is about So this is leaving Drupal, I'm gonna give my caveats at the beginning and there's a lot of disclaimers As you would imagine giving a session like this at Drupal con Thanks to Kathy Thase for even accepting this this talk in the first place because you know it was a little submission bait But it was also I mean men didn't complete earnestness as well. So as you might see The original title of this so the impetus of this talk as I was formulating in my head was called where'd all my friends go? A little background about myself. My name is David Wong. I'm at eating's on Twitter and on d. Oh I after talking to Somebody after the keynote looked up my Drupal profile and this is my 11th Drupal con Which is kind of crazy because the time just kind of flies right by I just very recently on the you know Where were you feature on Facebook? It surfaced a photo from the original Drupal con the Drupal con DC my first Drupal con which doesn't seem all together that long ago So I didn't realize I'd gotten so long in the tooth in the Drupal community so quickly To continue my very many caveats. I'm here to share some stories These are not necessarily my stories In fact most of them are not my story because I'm here giving a talk at Drupal con and not at home You know doing something else and I understand that story is not the singular of data and data is not the plural story And I'm not here to give a data filled presentation full of demographic data or the sociographic study longitudinal study that I've done This is really me reaching out to people. Hey, have you left Drupal? Have you stopped using Drupal? Can you tell me your story? I'll be happy to share it as long as you you know you want it anonymous and off the record Done so except for two stories here where I got explicit permission to ascribe names These are all generous size stories, but capture the essence of what people have said and In all honesty, I'm probably not qualified to give this talk other than I submitted it There's nothing special about my experience or the people I know I don't feel like I captured anything particularly special unto myself Well, there we go. Okay, and I'm just hoping to do justice with the stories that are shared today And so they're going to be in a couple major categories And we'll go by go through them one by one and then come to the unsatisfying ending where you guys tell me your side of things Because this is what I'm hoping to do is provoke a little conversation So we'll start with set one circumstances And since I've said I was going to share stories ha ha as a human I want to continuously readjust my priorities so that I can live a life that fulfills me as my personal situation evolves So for example, my partnership is the primary focus of my life now a very very common, right I Have a family and they need my attention My physical health my mental health I Can't afford to participate in community events for whatever reason, you know, it may be temporary. It may be long-term I Left my Drupal job for another job outside the Drupal verse. So by dint of that I've left Drupal Another category means to an end as An employee of an organization. I am primarily responsible for advancing my employer's business priorities Drupal helps us achieve our goals, but it's not the focus of my responsibility. I Inherited this Drupal site did my best work with it in the end We went with something else because it was better better with a star because better means different things to different people It might be better because it was cheaper. It might be better because somebody had a bone to pick with Drupal It might be better because you worked at You know at that Corporation in Panama and you know you didn't patch Drupal and now you leaked all those LLC secrets to the world My organization had a Drupal site, but we hated it we switched to Fill-in-the-blank alternative and fill-in-the-blank constituency is much happier now I'm sure everybody sort of experienced something like this before Drupal maybe a technical choice But it's not a good or sound business choice and other people are happier by moving away from it I can't afford to keep a Drupal site up when the alternatives are so much less expensive There is a bottom to the market and Drupal no longer sits near that bottom So the entry point is much much lower now both in terms of expertise and in dollars and also in upkeep There's cheaper alternatives people choose to go there for financial and or other reasons This one's really tricky, and I heard this a bit my agency isn't taking on any more Drupal business because it's faster Cheaper more fun more profitable if we build things this other way instead and this one is very I Think politically sensitive here because I mean obviously nobody went on record saying this with their names but this is something I heard a bit and This speaks of two different things that There are underlying Personal reasons for the engineers and the developers and the strategists and the designers to want to move away from Drupal And then there are market forces that are probably pushing them in that way as well and those in total Effect a change outside the Drupal universe And then this last one I like Drupal, but we moved over to WordPress at work So I'm not part of that Drupal world anymore, you know work changes you want to stick with Drupal your bosses We're not a Drupal anymore. You're not a Drupal anymore Next section structure and support As a Drupal practitioner, I want to support in my work so I can grow my skills and sustain the platforms I'm responsible for over the long term This may be less relevant to people who say create the initial sites But it's certainly relevant for those who have to sustain and keep them up over the years that they're expected to be viable I Was the only Drupal I was the only person doing Drupal at my job This is definitely a case that's out there Drupal sites that have minimal or sole Individual support and they're the themeer back-end developer Sometimes designer the be all end-off for that Drupal site They're the sole means of support for that site and when that person leaves or that site fails that Drupal niche implodes I Tried it and couldn't get past the beginning parts. I Took an Uber this morning to the convention center and the gentleman asked me What I was here for and I told them oh, I'm here for the Drupal convention Drupal con and he said oh, yeah Drupal I've used that before and so I was like please tell me your story I want to hear it and so as he was driving me down St. Charles he was telling me about how five years ago He was a friend and developer working with Drupal and WordPress and Magento and during that time He liked Magento the best, but he liked Drupal the least So I asked him why and he told me all about the pains of the theme system that of course everybody could probably share in here And I asked him what did he go for instead if he couldn't really find success within this universe and in the end He had just flat out quit on friend and development. He's an art director now. So more power to him. Oh and a part-time Uber driver So more power to him But it was also disappointing at the time that you know to hear his story like yeah I tried and I failed and you know that was the end of that This one's a little more a broad based my organization is a ruby shop a dot net shop a python shop a scholar shop a Haskell shop What have you shop and Drupal is just this weird thing off to the side This happens a lot in organizations that have a primary base, but you know, you know, there's no good say Scala CMS or at least not as powerful as Drupal So they form a little nucleus of people and then they're the weirdos that work in the other department. I I intentionally phrase this this way to to be more provocative my manager didn't support my Drupal habit So, you know, you may be fully well supported and expected to do Drupal in your organization But maybe you're not a resource to go to Drupal cons to go to camps To get external exposure to Drupal outside of what you're doing at your desk at work I was not being mentored or given a path to grow This may come hand-in-hand with the previous one. It may be unique to what Your situation is even if you're at a Drupal shop. What is a path of growth in Drupal?  And what what are paths to growth within the Drupal universe? Back to the original to earlier point. Nobody understands what I do at my work. I'm the only person who does Drupal I'm the only person who knows what Hook username alter does right or what the hell a hook is to begin with and Why it takes so long to put a person's real name up as opposed to their email address on their blog post? Drupal is the kids table at my organization the real engineer sits somewhere else the people who do Drupal sit under marketing Let's say and they're the little the little table that doesn't get the respect afforded the product team for example And then the worst of this Drupal is actively being suppressed at my workplace in favor of another technology I'm on the Drupal team, but we're the last redoubt everything else is eroding away into this other system X category got burned As a participant of the ecosystem, I want a fair chance to succeed with Drupal to contribute and to be part of the community I don't think that's an unreasonable last for anybody who participates with Drupal. I Tried to contribute, but I couldn't even get started for whatever reason structural difficulties I just never got mentored or you know, I just couldn't read this giant doc that didn't make any sense I'm taking my skills to get home I'm gonna participate in the ecosystem that has very very low friction low barriers to entry low low barriers to contribution and I'm just gonna participate there it may be smaller less political what have you Does everybody know what this reference is I kind of thought that this might fall flat No, I take hey, I made American jokes that European Drupal con that like you could hear crickets laughing or crickets chirping So I'm just make sure this LeBron James. He took his skills to Miami. Okay. Okay. Just making sure Oh, see exactly see now you're explaining it. Okay. Yeah, okay Okay LeBron James when he was first Approaching free agency instead of directly telling the world where he was going did a one-hour special on ESPN We're at the very very end at the 59th minute. He announced. I'm taking my my talents to Miami So 59 minutes of banter and then you know, he could have just said Yeah, it was crazy and he took a huge hit popularity wise because of this anyway This other community fits me better That this could mean at any number of things this community has more people like me There's people my value my skills better this community Etc. This community fits better for me. I put myself out there and was ignored or worse This is getting a little, you know into the contributor Specific the other use cases or stories that I've said so far are very broad based This is more, you know, I'm getting into the nuts and bolts of Drupal now And then and this is maybe even rare a story but more visible I pushed as hard as I could and it didn't make a difference and then I Devoted myself to I devoted myself to it to an unhealthy degree and I had to step away Because it was the only way for me to dial it down And then from a different perspective, but along the same lines We spent three years and a big pile of cash on Drupal and it was a disaster. We couldn't get off it fast enough Failure is not only at the individual level but the organizational as well and that could leave burned feelings throughout an organization across multiple individuals And then this one may be not so relevant in this room But certainly in the ecosystem at large all my Drupal expertise and knowledge lived with my vendor who was bad and made Drupal quote Seem bad and we couldn't live without the site. So we just had to live with it This is definitely a scenario that exists in the wild for sure To Drupal sites never again That was a very a very terse reply. I got Yeah, that's all they you know, they were they wanted to say Next category not a fit As a unique individual I want outlets for expression engagement that aligned with my interest goals and beliefs I did the same thing over and over and over every sites the same in the end the monotony of CMS publishing Especially when you're doing say marketing sites for sure where sites huge chunk of our market I Work on problems now that don't have Drupal shaped solutions It's easy to imagine that everything is solvable on the web via Drupal as a tool But there are a lot of things that Drupal is well, you know, absolutely poor at and or not the right tool And when you might want to start entering those problem spaces You're not using you're not reaching for Drupal out of the toolbox Content management is boring slash dying slash easy. I know this is I put this with a lot of caveats This is a very jaded position to take and maybe one of those things where it Not necessarily fair to CMS as a problem, but certainly attitude that shared out there More I think generously put I wanted to solve different kinds of problems That's entirely true when you move away from the CMS space or you're done You know trying to figure out how to build views and or the the standard things you do with Drupal This one came up at Drupal con actually I spoke to an individual if you had a choice between quote making websites Or building products. Why would you ever choose the former? Right if you had a if you had a choice in the skill and the wherewithal and the options to select the latter Why would you ever go for the former? The thing I'm best at is a side concern in Drupal at best and This I have to speak for some of the non developer roles here if you're a UX Designer your UX researcher if you are a particularly proficient JavaScript developer if you're doing at XY and Z You know, it's not Drupal's main focus and maybe there isn't a great use for you Or you're not being used to your full potential within Drupal. I Found myself spending most of my time in Drupal doing things other than that which I truly love Drupal pays the bills Drupal gets things done. Maybe not the thing you love the most The Drupal universe doesn't truly value what it is I do best it may pay lip service to what you need might say you need it badly but in the end you aren't treated as if it were that important and it all comes out I'm a blank first it just so happened I use Drupal to solve some problems for a time fill on the blank with what you need the this is a this is true across a variety of roles not just the single one and This isn't the Drupal technology or community that I fell in love with originally You're I think your point of entry to Drupal is significant in how you contextualize everything that happens since and if you are I Hate to say an old-timer like me, but God You know if you're an old-timer like me or you remember the olden days of when Drupal was demographically different structurally different When Drupal cons of this would be a big session at Drupal con as opposed to the smallest room You know, maybe your perspective has changed about you know what it's like to be in 271 and present a 400 Greener grass. Don't worry. I'm there's happier stuff. I'm getting to it. Okay As a maker with ambitions and desires to grow I want a platform that can challenge me and meet my interests I'm done doing billable client work. I Heard this one a lot. This one is definitely a pain point for many and It's not specific to Drupal as a technology, but it is endemic to the Ecosystem that currently powers in I didn't want the tech world to pass me by this idea that while Drupal doesn't change everything else is and you somehow miss the the stop for the express train and You're just still chugging along All the innovation in blank is happening elsewhere in UI in front end in Database what have you all the innovative stuff is happening somewhere else and I want a piece of that Drupal opened many doors for me, but I left to do this other thing. I've wanted to do since forever Drupal is a great entree into a technology job. Drupal could be a great first job as a developer but if your heart's set all along on being say Machine learning not gonna find a lot of it in Drupal, you know, I mean not machine. I just made that one up I didn't actually have a machine learning person. Tell me this Drupal is so far behind so slow moving that's why I stopped using it Drupal changed so much and so suddenly And that's why I stopped using it Honestly, Drupal software kind of sucks and I not saying I agree with this statement, but I heard it So I want to pivot a little bit I want to leave but I can't not yet I heard just as many of those as I did from I've already left and here's why in fact I've heard more of this and the things before are reasons that people would want to leave but haven't you know quite cut their ties off So why don't you leave? What do you stay for? I know what it says on the site, but what do people stay for a? Steady job. There's a lot of steady jobs out there in Drupal You stay for the well-known tech the The comfort of knowing something inside and out or at least your layer of it that you know well Friends and colleagues. I think this is what a lot of people imagine when they say stay for the community Yeah, I don't think they stick, you know, then when they say community I don't think people mean stay for the well-documented wikis on Drupal org You know friends and colleagues and how many people are we talking about really, you know I think it's very very visible and very popular to talk about highly visible veteran contributor who Faced out or wound down or left But it doesn't really capture the amount of people who aren't as visible to the community that have second thoughts or you know Contemplating a change or have already made a change and completely silently You didn't even know they were part of the community and now they're gone, right? You know, it's the the 80% of the of the the iceberg that isn't the the part above water So I've talked for 20 minutes now and I'm Historically very bad at writing endings to my talks. In fact, I'm awful at it. So I never even call them endings I just call them codos because it's just a part at the end This is an actual quote From a friend of mine, and I don't think he'd actually mind if I called him out of this I hate the software but goddamn it. I love the people. He told me to this Well, he said this at a Drupal event Last fall, I guess it kind of gives away what event that would be given it's on my shirt But he said this and this is not an uncommon thing to hear I Miss being at law. Oh, you should say Drupal con because it's fair enough Yeah, there are people who aren't here anymore, but still missed the experience of what we have right now at Drupal con I do miss being around my friends I'll attribute this to the person we saw if the person in the room wants to own up to this Quitting Drupal isn't an option for me. I can't do it So it might make sense. It might make all the sense in the world to quit, but they can't For people who have left we struggle with the same tech problems and blah that I saw in Drupal I thought the grass would be greener It's just a different shade of green. I'm just it just as many weeds in that grass as as it was in Drupal Ironically, there's also this I'm still around. I'm just not as visible anymore Nor do I want to be does this count is leaving the community if you're you know still doing Drupal under the radar You're just not you know a speaker anymore, or you're not you know in the issue cues anymore You're just doing your thing, you know And just seeing Louisie wanted to add I haven't left Yeah, she's still around and I actually have a I was gonna put a picture of the slack where she says you can go Ahead and tell them I'm not dead and I'm still around It's not my life anymore, but it's okay And I think that that that captures something about Drupal being your life So what does this all mean So originally when I wrote this there was a Proposed talk by Greg Dunlap called stay for the community, which I had really hoped would be one of the keynotes given but It came to pass that it wasn't and if you haven't read that blog post, it's on medium It's called stay for the community. It's by Greg Dunlap. Hey rocker You really ought you owe it to yourself to read it and what I was hoping is I would just like put a book end to that and you Know sort of take some of the points he brings and drive them to their logical conclusion. So Apologies if you know this seems like you're watching episode two of a three-part series because you kind of are Where Greg's is at least the prologue of anything So what does stay for the community really mean and if it's our If it's our expressed value that we put on every page of Drupal dot org what does that actually mean and What's Drupal's place in your career actually what's its value as a place as a career Entity god, that's a terrible word for that as you know, what what is Drupal's role in your career? What is Drupal's role in your life? I think a lot of the the the leaving Drupal Has a lot to do with Drupal's role in your life, which is a surprising amount of relevance for something that you know It's just code in a browser And because I did promise I have a terrible terrible ending Who if you have read the Watchman series or the Watchman series by Alan Moore? Okay, did anybody see the movie this wasn't in the movie So at the end of everything after literally, you know, lots of people die and the big bad is defeated and everything all the problems are same I apologize for the nudity in the next panel The the main guy asks another guy, so It all worked out right in I did the right thing in the end right it all worked out in the end and Then the blue guy John who's become godlike in his inscrutability and knowledge of the universe as in the end Nothing ends Adrian nothing ever ends and so Adrian who's only a mortal human asks John What do you mean by that and then he's gone? so Like that I opened the floor for discussion if you if any of these stories resonated with you if they Felt like something you've experienced in the past something you've seen something you felt yourself I'd love to hear about it. So a couple of things. I'll try to keep in brief so that other people can talk as well Fun statistic how many people have been a major player in more than two Drupal versions or more than two to Drupal make the versions and core itself to two people If you exclude Dries, it's to Steven Witton's and checks. I Don't know anyone else who has survived more than two core releases And I just finished my number two so On the what a state for the community mean Both Emma Jane and Greg Dunlap have observed in different ways that We're here for something and that's something isn't to be a social club But we lose sight of that something at times. I think they've said it much more eloquently than I have But yeah, why are we staying for the community and is it just a social club? And if so, why what is that other thing that keeps us here beyond hanging out with friends? For me Yeah, I I can relate to an awful lot of this I As I just finished my second score Release and I am fried beyond belief Many people probably noticed I was fairly inactive for the last year and a half of the Drupal 8 cycle Basically after Amsterdam. I had no mental or emotional energy left for core But stuck around enough to make sure that whiskey landed safely I also just Left a company of ten years. That's very good company for those who haven't read my blog I just left Palin sir net after ten and a half years to take a job with platform sh and One of the key reasons for that was it is a transitional type of role for me because I Was tired of client work. Yeah, all the universities look the same to me at this point. I can't tell the difference anymore But I don't want to leave Drupal because it is a Good community. I it is moving in the right direction. I firmly believe that I have invested a decade of my life in it But I'm in a role now where I can professionally straddle that line between Drupal and other stuff And I'll be honest five years down the line. I don't know Where that straddling is gonna end up. I may move closer to Drupal. I may move further away. I don't know but a large part of that move for me was You know what I'm doing now is not sustainable But I'm so professionally tied up into it. What's my other option? And I'll be honest. This is a really good option. That's why I took it Where that'll lead I honestly don't know So there's my story contribution. Thank you You know, I actually you instead of speaking to me, which is kind of weird. It'd be cool You guys like turn the mic around. Oh, sure. I love Talking about Drupal. Hi My name is Chris Weber. I'm a software engineer at the nerdery. I'm a Drupal enthusiast and At last year was my 10-year Drupal verse 3 Thank you. Thank you This is not an 88 club by the way Drupal has always been an escape for me before working where I currently work. I Was at that place where nobody knew what Drupal was My job was completely different. I was a database engineer. I didn't really have anything in my work or In my future that would allow me to work on product to see that that that evolution between a platform that can Make up you could make applications on top of that and the the ecosystem that is created with that loop so I have improved my professional skills more with Drupal than anything else I have ever done and I remember in the time that I was looking for this kind of a project I've searched all different kinds of projects and every single one of them turned out to be jerks Seriously, I was having fun until someone said read the manual noob And Drupal was the very first one where someone actually appreciated the input that I put in and the Drupal camp twin cities was the very first camp I went to and The first person I met was Angie Byron who immediately said thank you for your contribution. Let's have lunch with Larry and I'm like You know, I've been a lurker I've been a person who for most of those years just been lurking and just been watching people do things and saying hey That's pretty cool. Wouldn't be great if I could do something like that And then over the last couple years I tried to step up But I don't know if I'm gonna reach burnout or anything like that but I just know that in The conversations that we have with people the going to the events to constantly learning of ideas the constantly being able to share ideas I can continue to get better as More confident person someone who could stand up in front of all of you and consume this time. I'm sorry But the fact that I can finally feel like I'm a person that I always wanted to be someone who has something to share and Drupal gets me that outlet Hi, I'm Kim Erickson. I'm also from the Twin Cities community and Chris Weber was one of the people who welcomed me into that community when I got here What inspired me to stand up is that when we talk about people leaving Drupal We also have to talk about why people get into Drupal and one of the things that has occurred to me Over time it went well one of the things that inspires me about Drupal is the backgrounds of people who come to it When I'm in the community in the diversity we sit down at a Drupal user group And we've got people who are dancers and English majors and Political science majors I study peace studies in in college Was not a coder and I think a lot of people come into the Drupal community or learn about Drupal From non-technical backgrounds, but have some technical skills and they want to build their own website Drupal is a great tool to do that pretty soon. They enjoy it pretty soon Somebody else asked them to do it and all of a sudden they have a career in Drupal And I think it's important to keep that in mind as we think about why people do leave Drupal because You know to some extent to me that often indicates that this might be just a step on a path. It's you know going somewhere and you know I This is different from I think people that come from real strong technical backgrounds and maybe have Sawed out Drupal as a particular technical solution to a problem I think a lot of us stumble into it and the fact that we've stumbled into it doesn't shouldn't lock it Lock us into it for life, right? There's lots of other opportunities out there And I don't like to think about the fact that somebody you know that spent a lot of time here and invested in it And then moved on that that's necessarily always a bad thing. Sometimes that's just the right thing for them and I Don't know. I think that was just the point I wanted to make Hello My name is Avi. I've been doing Drupal for eight years I've never really been a technical contributor, but I've been around the community for a while and I've seen Lots of people and met lots of people over the years and so one of the things that I've seen I mean, we've obviously been in a Rough economic time over the last few years, but I'm also wondering If we if there's if the people who have been doing doing the technical, you know core Module work for for so long and keeping that up if if you all see that this Level of burnout is like specifically related to the many many many years of stressing about getting Drupal laid out if it's a more kind of wide-ranging issue and What what you see as as kind of the future like the last two years have been a lot of people talking about being really really upset and Is that getting better? Do we think anything's changing? How do we kind of move forward from all this? That's kind of a question and then the statement and also I just give the talk. I'm not the answer person Fight answers. Yeah, I wouldn't be giving a talk Danny, please I'm Danny So I guess my story and how I got into Drupal is a little different I Grew up poor and most of my family still lives in poverty and The reason I got into Drupal was because it was the first thing I could do where I was actually valued for what I could do and I made money for it and Because of that It became very important for me to get other people into Drupal and to As a way to help them essentially help themselves. I've been very active in trying to get more women into the tech community more poor people in the tech community a couple of people have probably heard me rant that more dev shops really need to Do something about this and you know sponsor essentially Underprivileged people and teach them how to do Drupal because I've seen the power that it has What's interesting to me is that I am much more of a designer who happens to know the web and I love solving big nasty sticky problems, so you can imagine how much that makes me love Drupal I also by the way I want to argue that a website is a product and without websites Most products would not exist because you could not sell them or support them. So that's my rant But I think it's interesting because I am much more of a designer because as I've grown I've transitioned out of actually writing code and More into leadership and UX and all of these other things The fact that I still keep coming back to Drupal, but speaking to the you know burnout when I was doing my master's thesis I spent 15 months going to a ton of Drupal events talking to people giving you know giving presentations and it was fantastic But I also had a one-year-old and I was getting a master's degree. I Am not quite as active now And I'm learning to be okay with that because I can come in and bring value When I can in the ways that are good for me and that's been a really important transition because I feel like what I heard from contributors is that it becomes all-encompassing and so much gets Dumped on you, especially when you become very active in the community. So I guess what I'm saying is a Drupal is still really really important especially if we think of it as a tool to enact social change and to help Bridge the gap that we have unfortunately in terms of income inequality But also that as contributors we really need to make it easier for other people to take the burden So we aren't constantly burning ourselves out Right Right you can step up like so it's you guys aren't so close to the door. I mean the line at the back It's great. It's great. It's all great. It's my bad. I guess I'll just get out of here So I I guess that I have a couple different thoughts, you know echoing with Danny said I think it's really important everybody take care of themselves avoids burnout take care of each other right Randy Faye who is not here interestingly enough. I don't know if you pinged him perhaps, but I feel like he might have some Interesting thoughts about like leaving the Drupal community although he still does some stuff But he had a really good series of blog posts about burnout what causes it like how to recognize it in yourself and others how to take care of yourself Also, I looked at you know sort of to Larry's point and Ari Avi, pardon me I looked at Because this is what I love to do in my free time looked at CVS commit messages Going back to like the beginning of time for different releases of Drupal And found like that they're sort of a somewhat predictable arc that people have followed of like having one or two commits Having 30% of the commits in a release having 20% of the commits and release having 5% right like that It's it's a pattern that has been happening since 2001 and I think is Something that happens probably in almost all projects I'll also say that like for myself personally I have a six-year-old who I love very much and you know She's become a you know and a three-year-old And they you know when they were born I like consciously said okay, what are the things that I'm going to cut out of my Drupal community involvement and Tried to find able replacements for those things that I did as much as I could And and in fact like sometimes those replacements are now finding your placements So you know I think that that's sort of like an important thing for people to consider as you're considering your own Commitments and burnout is how can I transition this effectively so that things can be you know carried on yeah I'm gonna bring one point up here, and I don't want to overly emphasize the role of contributors in this I know it's very important contributors and without contributors We wouldn't have Drupal and then you know we don't have to work on WordPress but I Tried to be as a not ambiguous I want to be a broad base as possible when we talk about people burning out because it's not always just contributors that burn out Right people who attempt to contribute people who don't even know how to contribute themselves burnout as well There's movie apocalypse now, which is I think like four hours long You know and it took them like a year to make this movie It was such an ordeal that a second movie was made about the making of that first movie Right and so there's a second movie you can watch which is two and a half hours long about the making of this other four-hour long Movie that two and a half hour movie has directors commentary about the making of the making of that movie So I think that there's a certain There's absolutely necessity to talk about contributors to Drupal themselves But we shouldn't also I mean we are at Drupal con we're at a core conversation Drupal con right like we are we have This is this is the directors commentary to the making of of the making of the movie That we shouldn't lose sight of the larger people who one can't or won't participate in something like Drupal con and certainly not step into a core Conversation about participating at Drupal con So that all that to say There's definitely a dark matter of participants out there that we shouldn't lose sight of or at least you know or Overlook in our zeal to solve the problems that are very very present in front of us right now Hi, my name is Ryan and I Actually have recently done a leaving of my own I left my home of Orlando, Florida, and I moved to the west coast in Portland So when I was there in Orlando, you know active in the local technology scene We would watch all these people move to San Francisco move to New York move to LA Where would they go to start a company to get a job to work for Google or whatever it was? And so there was always this sort of discussion of like how do we stop the brain drain? And it wasn't necessarily that our community was bad. It's that some other thing was pulling those people away But this is discussion that is being had on all different levels But one of the things I think is really positive here is that this community doesn't have you know just like one physical location where it can happen and I kind of think while we're having this discussion like if the people in this room didn't have Drupal to tie us together Like would we get together ten years from now for the you know Drupal Khan class reunion? And I think maybe that's even something that we should look at you know And I guess as the person saying it now. It's my responsibility to organize said event You know if Drupal Khan ever stops who's going to be the president of the Drupal Khan Alumni Association, right? Maybe there's something there that we can do to make sure that the people who have left us, you know Are are still feeling welcome even right is leaving necessarily a bad thing, right? I've graduated. I got a job. I got a master's degree. I had seven kids. I Don't have time for this anymore. Is it is it bad like I feel like Not to not to say anything as you David, but I feel like the premise of this talk is that leaving Drupal is a bad thing No, no, no, I didn't say that No, but I don't know did anybody come in here with that that preconception Okay, you guys are way less judgmental than me that So so that's something that I think about too is you know If if we all leave Drupal what happens to right I would hate to lose you guys so I have about 17 more things I could say but I'm gonna pass it on. Hi. My name is Mark and I'm a Drupalist So I've been doing Drupal for like seven and a half years now something like that I think pretty normal path like The first few years of working with Drupal. It was like head desk syndrome, right? Like why is this so frustrating? Why can't I figure this out? Being in my head like and then finally, you know trying to figure something out and figuring it out and then some Somewhere the long line Well, Twin Cities Drupal one of the Twin Cities Drupal camps I started figuring out how I could try to start helping to fix the things that were making me bang my head on the desk Which just created a new problem of now I have new things to bang my head Against because then I ran into the Drupal contribution process which You know That that's a real challenge is it is not always easy to contribute to Drupal I know you don't want to you know, there there's definitely other situations. It's my situation tell your story.  Maybe it gets reviewed in three months Maybe there's an issue that stays open. I mean, I don't know even know how many issues I've run into It's like been open for seven years Like there's definitely things like these have stuck around and they're hard problems, you know, it's understandable. It's nobody to blame we're all This isn't like a blaming thing. It's just like it is difficult and This might surprise you but people on the internet have different opinions About things so Not only are you gonna run into some friction of like just It can be difficult the whole review process can take a really long time There can be you know, we got to get every little thing very very very perfect And so there's back and forth and back and forth and you have to Reroll a patch numerous times, but then you run into you know disagreements about should we do this or should we not and And and when you're first getting involved in the community, you might not this is my first triple con I've been involved, you know seven and a half years is my first time and there's a lot of people It's different when you know people in person and you've known them face to face But it's when people don't know each other face to face It's really easy for things to get contentious and for people to because it's just like a you know I like that we have avatars now because at least there's like some indication of the human in there, you know um and then You know so you work through when you get past the contribution process and and then you you deal with disagreements and like but some of them You know, I love this xkcd comment Comic where you know, there's somebody like typing at their computer late at night and you know There's something wrong on the internet right like for me That's sometimes one of the drivers of working with Drupal like I've come to really care about this And I I really like Drupal and I I want to make sure that it's as good as can be my ideas of What is the good thing for Drupal are going to disagree with somebody else's thing? And when it gets contentious over time, you know, it's it's draining. It's mentally draining and For a lot of people. I mean the the work that you do the work that you put into this Is done in after hours work You do a full day of coding and then like, you know, I've my daughter's three and a half so you do dinner you do bedtime routine and then You know, do I have the energy is it good for my mental health to spend another cup? you know an hour two hours three hours to dive in in a difficult process and Do that or is it better for me to like do something that's gonna be a little bit relaxing and be better for my mental health and You know, it's it feels like how long can you sustain this? One of the things for leaving Drupal I'm not sure if you mentioned this or not But you know, hopefully it gets to the point where the things that were the itch that you wanted to scratch the thing That you were frustrated you want to fix like hopefully like one of the outcomes is like hey I fixed that thing and it's like all right. I fixed that You know, I'm exhausted enough Maybe then I'm gonna take a break like I certainly took a break after eight came out And I'm only now starting to like getting into writing some stuff again, but I don't know I just wanted to talk about the fact that it's like Maybe maybe finding ways to smooth our Process of contributing in the issue queues that might help a little bit with burnout but I mean no matter what it's it's a difficult thing and and I agree like it's I Don't know you got to do what's right for you. I think like You got to take care of yourself. So I guess that's my message to me. All right. Thanks I want to say one thing. Oh, sorry. I didn't mean to prevent you from speaking The one thing Greg said really resonated with a set of slides. I actually deleted I had a one set that was more cheeky and it had to do with Padawans actually, you know Jedi apprentices The idea that We're just older than we started in Drupal. All of us have just gotten older, right? We get older. We can't you know I can't dunk anymore. I'm sorry You know, I don't run a 4 3 40 anymore But the idea that you know 25 year old me, you know had no problems doing some of these You know, all you know all in kind of commitments to technology and hobbies that 35 year old me can't anymore and There I saw this talk for I know it was J. S. Conf me was fluent conference I forgot which conference it was but somebody on stage Said something about how this was the last talk He was ever going to give because he wanted to cede his space for the next person that would secede him And that while he continued to be that guy who talked about blah But he was you know he as he while he continued to be like the JavaScript guy, right that prevented the next layer of Talent to bubble up and become the next JavaScript guy or what have you right? I'm butchering the story But the idea that you you know one can't be a master without an apprentice or yielding their position to their apprentice at some point It does sort of ring true in Drupal. Some of us have been not me, but some of us have been I think That guy for a really really long time and when we look around to look see where who's the next that guy Maybe we can't have another next that guy until the first that guy, you know steps off the stage a little Anyway, go ahead Hi, my name is Hulling and I'm at the step two of the 12th step program from step one being a lurker to Step two being one of the seven community Organizes for the Drupal meetup at NYC so I just want you guys take a step back and Say that this is an open-source community. We have run by volunteers Volunteers, I mean, do you guys get paid for this to write this up this whole piece of software that runs like 5% of all the websites in the world? Probably your company does but what on you guys do on your own time So I want you to know that do not feel guilty that you have to walk away Take a break or walk away forever. It is I know volunteer Burnout my non-tech interests. I've been a Sunday school teacher for seven years I was the only Sunday school teacher and last month I told my priest I have to leave Sunday school I know about volunteer burnout feels like so please do not feel like guilty or like it's okay to feel tired It is absolutely Honor your feelings honor your body honor yourselves It is okay to be selfish because it is like when we're on a plane with those emergency protocols They say that if the oxygen mask drops off put it on yourself first before helping others There's no do not feel guilty that you have to help yourself first because otherwise then somebody else will have to help you So I want you guys to know that I really I for myself really appreciate all the work that you've done for Drupal So you push it to Drupal 8 to push it to this awesome platform that my other developers other Non-drupal believers look at this platform and say that hey, this is something that we can use Hey, this is something that we can get behind so thank you all. Thank you So we have literally seven minutes. So you get three minutes each. Sorry I've been in this room accidentally and I saw Larry and some other speakers. I decided to stay by the way, I like the PHP 7 that Larry Did very much With my limited knowledge I have a few words about the technical Let's say That he was very enthusiastic and very happy when he was speaking about PHP 7. I saw different Larry here I would like to see the Larry that I saw first. I would like to see everybody in that mood but what I see My point is about technical is let's say jQuery is independent of any application and Visually CK editor you can use them independent of the applications What I see with my limited knowledge is the Rupal 8 became like a monster If you could make it next to the Rupal's API is more independent from each other's which I believe it would be possible Then I think it makes everybody more happy especially We would be able to keep Talents like Larry and we all will be happy. Thank you. That's my point. Hi. My name is Lucas I think that What our our friend over here spoke about us is absolutely true and to add on to that is We get a high we get excited when we come up with really great solutions and we're the module guy or You know, we're doing a lot with whiskey or I'm doing a lot with migrate right now because I've got time in my daily life and my family life And I like that. I like that people ask me questions and IRC. I think everyone in here likes to be that guy But then I think we also need to kind of accept that we can't always do that in it. So You're asking is it bad I did kind of walk in thinking leaving Drupal. Hmm. Is that a bad thing? I don't know It's not But it is I think we have to identify in ourselves That it's okay not to want that adrenaline rush in our own lives Because someone else will always replace us someone else will always step up and be the next JavaScript God, right? Yeah, right not me. No, right. No, no, I'm just looking at you because you shared about it, but You know, we are all replaceable and You know, we just got to wait till the person who comes from some either some very Remote part of the world or from the US or somewhere to set forward and and and be the next God at Drupal And and then, you know, we can retire You're the last one Larry. I'm gonna only slightly disagree with that. We're not all replaceable We need to all make ourselves replaceable. There's an important difference All right As a small favor so for those who stuck around please rate my session and for those who just came in and didn't hear Any of my session you can rate it too Thanks everybody


That is absolutely wrong. You found the solution. That's incredible. Wow. That's extraordinary. Oh my gosh I love that. That is wild really exciting. That is so Nerdly cool. Wow. Wow That's unbelievable. Love that. Wow. That's amazing


Greetings to viewers and welcome to this virtual presentation on patterns and practices to minimize provider lock-ins with serverless. This has been an extraordinary year and I want to begin with my profound thanks to the organizers of this conference. It wouldn't have really been easy, so heartfelt thanks for all the hard work here. When I submitted this abstract for this talk back in February 2020, none of us could have imagined how the rest of the year would unfold. In that same way, none of us could have imagined the amazing progress that has been happening in the world of serverless. Particularly, there is a cloud-native computing foundation that is associated with the Linux Foundation. There is a working group that has curated so much about events and functions. My goal in this talk is to share the work of the cloud-native computing foundation working group and acquaint you with the emerging trends, standards, patterns and practices that could be helpful. So let's dive in. It can be a bit confusing to use the word serverless because clearly there are servers being managed somewhere by somebody. But somehow, its significance to the architecture is a bit diminished in the current scheme of things. It's better to think of events, event sources and how they are invoking functions synchronously or asynchronously through an enabling platform which in turn manages the many prerequisites such as identity, the data and the access to the various functions in the backend. We have actually seen papers written about motivating the serverless architecture to think about the binding of function as a service which in turn ties to a backend as a service construct. I wanted to talk about what are all the choices that you have to think about in order to make sure that you minimize the lock-in that you may otherwise suffer from a vendor. Clearly the platform that you choose, you have to carefully think about that. How do you go about developing the events? Where do they originate from? Whether they come from a programmer's ID or a service or an IoT device. How exactly do you bind that to an endpoint? And how do you really manage the ongoing lifecycle of all of these changes is the crux of this talk. I wanted to take a moment to introduce myself. My name is Murli Kondiniya. I work with a very large financial institution focusing primarily around enterprise platforms. I do a lot of cloud-native work on the CI CD, middleware, and SRE. But my fundamental passion is around developer productivity, developing patterns and practices, helping developers make the right choices. So they are by default the easy choice. So let's dive in. When you think about serverless, it might really be helpful to start with a set of technical use cases, right? Serverless architectures or events or functions, depending on how you think about it, they are nothing but loosely coupled, asynchronous, concurrent, parallelizable systems. They have the means to scale up and down with unpredictable workloads. They obviously are stateless and short-lived. So they are highly dynamic, supporting change velocity. And when you think about the classical applications that tend to benefit from it, if you're really sending a lot of triggers and doing a lot of analytics, you're doing some stream processing or doing ETL, or even CI CD for the matter, these are all prime candidates for you to consider the event-driven architecture with a function as a service backend, right? So let's also talk a little bit about the business use cases, because we all work for enterprises in some form or shape. So when you think about the integrated account view of how end users are really interacting with the platform, they are traversing multiple services that are exposed to the web.  You really need to have a 360-degree view and a real-time understanding of what is really going on with the customer so you can really provide a unified experience. Now, think about all the things that you've really seen in the world of Uber, in the world of Airbnb and so on, where disruption is happening without you having to commit a whole lot of capital to build all of these enterprise services. You typically have the means to federate many of these services and you can appreciate the loosely coupled nature of how you're really integrating all these things to create value for end users. Depending on whether you're working for a bank or for any services sector, you can appreciate that you're going to reuse services available in the world outside and create additional value for the end user. So now with that background, what exactly are the choices for you?  Now, I wanted to quickly share the major installable platforms that are installable on-prem, as well as the major providers in the public cloud who offer this as a service. It pretty much comes down to amongst the installable platforms, it's a matter of what flavor of Kubernetes that you really install this on, but predominantly the options vary from choosing Knative, which is from the Google community, which is an open source platform, and it basically deploys on to Kubernetes and you can actually take all of the other products that are listed here, you can also deploy them either on Kubernetes or OpenShift. So the conversation predominantly is on the pros and cons of how these installable platforms are easy to operate and run your business on and how you could possibly take those very same options and work with the cloud providers so they in turn can actually be deployed on the cloud so you really have the flexibility to manage the whole life cycle of how you go about developing it. We'll dive into that in a moment. So what I wanted to share, as I said early on, is the working group that has been busy within the cloud-native computing foundation, which has been focusing on getting all of these communities that have been hard of work developing tools and security capabilities, frameworks, hosted platforms and installable platforms and they have nicely curated this into a taxonomy and I wanted to share this graphic because this might really be useful because what I showed in the earlier slide was a small sampling of the major tools but there is a thriving ecosystem of vendors who are really creating amazing innovation. Some of these are open source, some of them are not, but you can clearly leverage the good work of this working group to see what the community is up to and how many of them are collaborating with the cloud-native computing foundation. So when you think about functions and the services, I made a brief reference to the various personas. You have a developer persona who is really focused on developing the functions. They are focused on identifying the events, identifying the functions. They are developing small units of code. When you really talk to the provider side, these are individuals you can think of them as operators. They are building APIs and subsets of functionality and they make sure that those functionalities automatically scale, they go up and down, they have a very efficient cost model and they don't really charge you when those resources are idle. So when you think about events and functions, it is about these two personas focusing on the business logic leading to economic transactions and they want to have the optimal combination of speed with stability. The developer rapidly iterates on the function, integrates with their CI process and they want to be able to test locally. That is a very key point. When we identify patterns, we will touch upon that and they want to be able to upload their functions to several platforms. The provider likewise wants to extract the runtime. They want to optimize on the middleware and they want to do the metering and monitoring so we get the best of both worlds. So when it comes to evaluating platforms, these are all the features that one really needs to keep in mind in terms of their selection choices. First and foremost, the business model. Are your applications really open to this loose federation that I alluded to before? Or are you really going to be stifled in terms of not being able to federate and therefore you really need to have them coexisting within your same enterprise? The second part is the technical suitability. What programming languages do you develop on? What are all the runtimes that are important? What are all the libraries that you are going to be dependent on? How do you want to do versioning? What are all the frameworks that your team is comfortable with? What is your development style and deployment workflow look like? How portable do you want your implementation to be? I'm just really giving a sampling of the suitability attributes that you want to evaluate because when you choose a platform or a cloud provider, they really have a significant batting. And then on the operational control, regardless of whether you are deploying it on-prem or on the cloud, these are all the attributes that you need to be thinking about. What does your environment really look like? Do you really have the means to make sure that in a multi-tenancy model you can have the resources dedicated for your consumption model so that you are not really getting penalized for your co-tenant consuming a lot of resources? How do you really make sure that you don't suffer any kind of interruption when there are updates to the data center or you're really dealing with some resiliency issues or in having some scalability challenges? What kind of a control do you have so that your business application is not adversely affected by the happenings within the cloud provider space? Now, regardless of whether you deploy this on-prem or on the cloud, these are all things that you really need to keep in mind because you want to make sure that the end users are not adversely impacted by these invariants. Okay, so let's talk about the lifecycle of how functions come into being again. I'm generously attributing all of this credit to the good work of the Cloud Native Compute Foundation where they have documented the whole lifecycle of how a function comes into being.  In this case, there are small units of code, there are call functions, they basically get deployed and once they're deployed on to your platform, you won't be able to monitor and be able to scale it. But the key thing here is rather than really do it based on the idiosyncrasies of the cloud provider, what the foundation has done is they have created very clear steps in terms of defining the various lifecycle, create, publish, updating the label, execute, the event source association, et cetera, et cetera. You get a feel as to how the whole lifecycle follows the traditional software development model so that when you are really developing functions, it benefits from the same structured thinking in terms of the lifecycle. That is really important to keep in mind and not really be completely locked in to how the provider treats the lifecycle activities. The next thing here is, in reality, as you develop your functions and they keep hydrating, they will keep evolving. So when you start with the very beginning, you will start by creating a function. Once you publish it, you will rapidly iterate. You will want to create the next version of the function. And you want to be able to do this in a thoughtful way so that you can really learn from all the iterations that you've taken in the past. So subsequent versions may choose to go back to a prior version. You want to be able to do that and keep track of the history of how these functions came into being so you really have the means to assemble them in the right way. The other pattern, again, that has been published by the Cloud Native Compute Foundation is the various patterns of computing. When you think about the synchronous model where the web is generating a call into a gateway which in turn replicates that request to one or more functions. And then the messaging model is a message arrives asynchronously into some sort of an exchange and it gets queued up. And then the queue in turn gets drained into one or more functions. We have seen these patterns in the enterprise computing space. They will apply to the serverless model as well. And then the streaming model where through kinesis or one of those similar technologies, messages basically get routed into one or more partitions. They in turn really get picked up by one or more functions. They drain all of these partitions and finish the backend part of the computing. And then the third part is the notion around a master list of tasks that comes into a priority queue the master dispatches the tasks to one or more of these workers who in turn execute on those functions and then return the logic back into functions. There have been a number of patterns that have been published building upon these basic premises and I will share the references in just about a minute. But one of the things that I wanted to say which is really important again this is work that's been done by the cloud native foundation is when you think about defining an event or you think about defining a function the metadata associated to that event and the function is really important. So when you think about an event, you want to say what kind of an event class it is, what type it is, what is the version of the event, what is the identifier of the event, what are the sources, what is the identity etc. As you can imagine this is really important because if you are using any kind of a framework that takes the event and binds it to the corresponding function that is going to be executing to that request you really need to have the means to bind the two together. So obviously the event will really be tied to the source, the function will really be tied to the function as a service model and when you are developing a framework you want to be able to say how did you really associate which event to which function and having all of this data and metadata is going to be important because you are now dictating the behavior of these functions based on things that might really be happening. So as you can see in the various definitions of the function it in turn tells you who is the function handler. So when the event arrives, the function handler is the one that is processing the event and routing it to the appropriate function. It in turn is going to have a bearing on what runtime the language is dependent on, what code and dependencies does it depend on, the environment, the runtime behavior, et cetera. As you can imagine when you want to externalize the behavior of all these functions having this in a well-defined attribute class is going to be very helpful because it really allows the developer and the operator to bind these two constructs together. So now we have talked about the basics of how the events and the functions come together the question that begs to be answered is how exactly are we orchestrating the functions at the back end because as you can imagine a simple event could trigger one function or it could really trigger a combination of multiple functions. An event could basically be executing multiple functions in sequence or it could do it in parallel. Both are perfectly valid. So you can also see the daisy chaining effect where the result of a function could in turn trigger another function and you really need to be able to manage the daisy chaining at the back end so you can really manage all of those functions and events one after the other. And again the URL that I list here below pieces out the many patterns that are being documented that address the final grain details about how to build sophisticated enterprise applications that can really benefit from all of that thinking there. The key takeaway from this slide is if you basically have n events and you have m functions you clearly have the cardinality of n to m and you want the programming model to help you bind the two together. Now the key here is that if you look at the many providers they all provide tool kits that will help development teams go about developing and deploying to this framework. What I'm showing in this chart is the various cloud providers who in turn have really been partnering with this company called Serverless. They have both an open source framework as well as a commercial framework that allows you to abstract away all of the idiosyncrasies of the cloud provider so when you program on Serverless you in turn are assured that you can deploy to one of the many cloud providers that they have already worked with. So for example if you are currently on AWS you could choose to use the AWS framework which is available, it's called the Serverless application model or you could choose the Serverless framework available from this company Serverless what they have essentially done is they have taken the sequence of activities that you would have to do interacting with AWS and codified this into the framework so what you essentially get is if you are developing applications or products that are going to be deployed to multiple cloud for example that is the perfectly valid business model what this really gives you is the ease of development because once you have trained your developers to use the Serverless framework that in turn abstracts away all the complexity associated to the cloud provider now I would love to see more of these because that is definitely good for productivity there are pros and cons of this now when you really have a foundation like cloud native compute foundation taking all of the foundational architectural attributes and addressing them so that you can really build upon it we would love to see frameworks like Serverless framework support cloud native computing foundations work so we can benefit from that standardization so there is another implementation that I am somewhat biased towards which is the model called Knative Knative is the Serverless implementation from Kubernetes community so what you see here is the various personas interacting with Knative and Kubernetes the reason I tend to favor this is all of this is open source and Kubernetes is widely accepted if not becoming the standard for all of the cloud orchestration so what this basically shows is if you are dealing with the developer persona who wants to build and deploy they can develop all of those capabilities using standardized APIs and Knative has the means to build and deploy your functions on to the Kubernetes framework so you can either leverage an existing application that might be deployed as a container or you can choose to do this like the functions that you see from the other non-Kubernetes implementations what this really gives you is the best of both worlds you have the operators we take care of all of the deployment and the management so there are two constructs called eventing and serving the serving basically takes care of all the aspects of exposing the functions to your end users at the top and the eventing component takes care of all of the plumbing that you would need to do with all of the providers all the sources of events and all of the things that you would need to do with the developer persona the developer persona the operator persona the end user persona as well as the contributions from the community at large that is continuously developing and improvising on top of this framework by building everything on top of a novel source platform now the advantage of such a framework is that you need to have this deployed on-prem or on the cloud or for the matter of any cloud vendor because every cloud provider is supporting Kubernetes so by having your applications run time basically be mapping to Kubernetes you benefit from the support of every cloud provider who is committed to Kubernetes so it gives you extensive portability that you all want so I would love to say that this is a thriving space that you can see a lot more innovation just as I like the Knative implementation you can also see implementations from frameworks like spring which is developed spring cloud functions which can actually be built and deployed on to Kubernetes as well so whether you are a shop or a Node.js shop or doing things with Python there are extensive support available to develop and deploy your events and function as a service on to this platform by working closely with a standard group like cloud native compute foundation I would really expect to see the community standardize on these technologies in the coming months to come so with that I would like to thank you for listening and love to take any questions


Live from Orlando, Florida, it's theCUBE. Covering Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, brought to you by SiliconANGLE Media. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, the best name in tech conferences. 18,000 women here in Orlando, filling up the Orange County Conference Center. We're excited to be here for our fourth year and part of the whole program is getting some of the leadership from Anita Borg on to give us an update. We're really excited to have Elizabeth Ames. She's the SVP of marketing and alliances and programs, but we just think of her to Elizabeth at Anita Borg. So, Elizabeth, great to see you. It's great to be here. Absolutely. We're thrilled to have you here at the celebration. Can't believe it's been four years. I've been telling so many people. There's still so many people that have never been here. I was amazed at the keynote the first day. There was the call, the house lights went up, how many people it's their first time. And as big as this conference is, as much as the people that know and love it, there's still a lot of people that have not been exposed to this show. It's absolutely the case. We have every year, it seems like more and more sort of first timers, which is great because we'd love to have them come back. And we, but I think it's really an expression of how this issue has become a big issue and that the women are really engaged and excited and they want to be a part of it. So it's great. The other thing I don't think a lot of people know is there's obviously a lot of recruiting going on. There's a lot of young people here, which is what I think really gives it its flavor. But we had Workday on. They said they had 140 people here from Workday. I talked to a guy last night at dinner from Google. I think they had 180 people. And I said to her, do you have any show that you bring that many people to that's not your own show? So the amount of investment that I said was it's all young, fresh out of school. No, it's all ranges, all ages. So again, I think there's a lot going on here that people are just not that exposed to. Yeah, that's absolutely true.  And a lot of those are companies that are bringing their women. And some of them are there younger women who have maybe been in the firm for, you know in the company for a year or two or three or something like that. But, you know, the place where a lot of women drop out of the industry is more mid-career. And so I think more and more companies are seeing this as a way to help kind of their mid-career women reconnect to the field and make those connections with the community at large and get a little bit more reinvigorated. So we definitely see companies bringing all kinds of women out of their organization. And they like to bring a mix so that they have some of their senior women that are sort of mentoring, you know women who are mid-career or women who are more junior. And it's just, it gives them a really good mix. And then about 30% of our attendees are academic, we call it academic, but it's primarily students. So undergraduate, graduate, postdoc and research type people. And then, you know, some amount of professors and teaching assistants, those types of people. Yeah, and I really think it's the youth that give this show its special vibe. I mean, there's a lot of great keynotes and some fantastic stories. Really great global representation, kind of African representation. But I do think it's the youth, it's the youngsters that bring a really unique and positive energy that you don't really see at many other conferences. Yeah, and I think part of that is that the community at large, you know, women that are in the field, they care about the women coming up. And they want them to succeed and they want them to have every single opportunity. So everybody's kind of invested in them and interested in nurturing and helping them along. So it does create this really, I don't know, positive environment, right? I mean, we always jokingly say, there's a reason we call it a celebration, right? And we don't call it a conference, we call it a celebration. Everyone's a delicate too. I like that too, not attendees. And that's come up on a number of interviews too, where when people have reflected back on people that have helped them along the way, the payback, it's almost like it's been scripted is, okay, now you need to do this to the next person, really pay it forward. And that again is a consistent theme that we've also heard on the keynotes earlier today, that it is about paying it forward, which is funny, because sometimes you'll hear kind of a catty women reputation that they're trying to keep each other down. You know, that was kind of a classic, another hurdle that women had to face in the professional world, that they weren't necessarily supporting each other, and that is not the case here at all. It's very much a supportive environment. I mean, we may have a self-selection bias going on there. Well, that's probably, that's okay. But yeah, I mean, I think there's nothing but support for one another in the community, and everybody recognizes that we all have to pull together, right? So interesting times at Anita Board, the organization that puts on Grace Hopper, change of leadership, we had Brenda on, so kind of a fresh phrase, fresh energy. Telly is, I'm going to see if I can get her a horse tomorrow to ride off into the sunset, if the sun breaks out here in Orlando. So exciting times, it's time of transition, always a little kind of mixed feelings, but also tremendous excitement and kind of a new chapter, if you will. So tell us a little bit about what's going on at Anita Board. Yeah, it's an incredibly exciting time.  She's been at the helm for 15 years. She's seen an incredible amount of growth. She took this on really as a favor to her dear, dear friend, and then took on the mantle upon Anita's death. And so she's done an amazing job, and she's certainly an icon within the community overall. So I'm sure you'll hear more from her in the future, but it's been great. Brenda is a new fresh face. She has accomplished some pretty amazing things with the Chicago Public Schools. She's really invigorated to step into this space, and it's great having her. I mean, I think the thing that you really, hopefully you got from her when she was here is that she is just this incredibly genuine person. She's lived the experience. She can relate to what all of these women have gone through, and she has this profound commitment to make things different. And just the biggest part that you can possibly imagine. And a little chip on her shoulder, but she talked about, you know, and it's come up time and time again where when people are told they can't do things, for a lot of people, there's no greater motivator than being told you can't do this. You shouldn't do this. You're not qualified. And she said, you know, I've been in positions where I've been told I can't be there. And so to have that little chip on her shoulder, I think is a real driver for many folks. It is because, you know, it, you know, we recently did a little written piece that hasn't actually gotten published yet, but where we kind of went back and looked at a lot of the language that we're hearing today about like, well, women are not biologically suited to be, you know, programmers, or, you know, women aren't this or women aren't that.   Right, right. Until the 1960s, right? Which is kind of shocking when you think about it, right? Yeah, like yesterday, practically. And, you know, the language that was used at the time was almost identical to the language that we're hearing today. Women weren't biologically suited for this, and it's really not in their, you know, the right makeup for them. And, you know, and yet today, half the students at those schools are women, right? Right, right. And women have earned their way there. Right. So I just kind of laughingly say it's like deja vu all over again, right? Like, we've heard all of that. We've heard people tell us, you can't do that. You shouldn't do that. No, you're not welcome, right? And I think women are just, they're not going to back down. No, well, it's interesting times too, right? Because kind of the classic gates, you know, the distribution gate, the financing gate, the investment gate to build companies, create companies. They've all been broken down, and kudos are serendipitously, computing is the vehicle that's broken down a lot of those traditional barriers, right? You used to be, you couldn't start a new company because you had to get into the distribution. You couldn't be a writer. There was only like a few newspaper editors that controlled everything. That's all completely changed.  It's so much easier to go out and affect the world than there's no easier way to affect the world than writing a great piece of software. Yeah, I mean, I think you're spot on on that. I mean, there's so much more leverage out there for people that want to start something. And I believe that will accrue to the advantage of women. And I think that, I think the thing is, is that I always end up saying like, women are going to do great things. And then I have to stop myself and say, they are doing great things today. And I mean, I think we've seen that already with some of the keynotes. I mean, Fei-Fei Li, right?  She's had her challenges and she told her personal story, not like with a woe is me, but with a just a clear eye towards the things that she had to overcome to get where she was. And a lot of hard work, right? Just to flat out a lot of hard work, including working at the dry cleaners while she was going to school. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And yet there she is, one of the leaders in that space. And doing incredible things. And so I think you're starting to hear more and more about those women. I think they've always been there. I think that we just don't hear as much about them. And so this venue is such a great opportunity for us to hear more of their stories. Right, and we learned a lot about that last year with the whole Hidden Figures thing that we had on here as well as the movie. And that was again in the sixties, right? So we're in October. Kind of the end of the year. As you look forward to 2018, what are some of your priorities for Needed Board? I won't put you on the hook to tell us where Grace Hopper will be next year. You can tell us if you want. Oh, I saw it posted. Is it posted already? Oh my goodness. I saw that and I was like, whoa. I didn't know that was in the wild yet. But give us kind of what are your priorities for next year? You know, I know ABI locals been, you know, a thing that's been growing over time. What are you kind of looking at as you do in your 2018 planning? You know, as amazing as it is to have 18,000 people here, which just blows our mind and we hope it continues to grow. We also know that no matter how big this conference gets, that not everyone will be able to come here for a variety of reasons. And so building out the local communities and, you know, making it so that empowering those local communities to have smaller versions of this type of thing and growing this movement to a bigger scale that really encompasses all the women that are out there. Because even though people here say, like, oh, 18,000 women, holy cow, it's like the tip of the iceberg. There are thousands and thousands more women out there. We know there are, right? And so we really want to find a way to reach every single one of them and bring support and connection and inspiration to every single one of them so that they, you know, stay in the field, and achieve their dreams and their highest potential. And that will have an impact on them and on the communities that they live in. So that's really what our focus is. Well, Elizabeth, again, always great to see you. Congratulations on a phenomenal conference. And thanks for inviting us to be here. We, you know, it's really, honestly, one of our favorite places to be. We love having you here.  There you go. You got to tell them where? Houston, Texas. Back in Houston. Good barbecue. Ask me, I'll tell you where to go. All right. She's Elizabeth Ames. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing 2017. Thanks for watching.


So what we're looking at, at the case, is that one remote operator could be monitoring 10 vehicles. And what this gives an opportunity for is for drivers to work in another type of setup. So it could be closer to home, it could be more like normal office hours, and it just becomes a completely new type of work. And there's so many benefits to this new type of position.