Hello, everyone. Welcome to the last day of Death Fountain US. We have another set of amazing talks lined up for you today. But first, let's start off the day with a fantastic keynote by Denise Dumas. Denise started her career in the field and role completely unrelated to tech, but quickly found herself pivoting towards the industry. After a number of years as an engineer, Denise ended up leading well engineering at Red Hat and did so with resounding success. Denise has won three Stevie Awards in addition to a Lifetime Achievement Award. Not satisfied with just leading engineering, Denise has recently transitioned to VP for Engineering Diversity to spearhead efforts for improving inclusion in the open source world. And let me tell you this, no one is more perfect than her for this role. I remember my first week as an intern at Red Hat, where I got to meet Denise. My mind was blown by the fact that a VP who was responsible for leading the engineering efforts of the entire well organization, which is at least 500 engineers, if not more, was meeting an intern who was just in her first week at Red Hat. Moreover, she was super kind and the calming aura that emanated from her helped me settle in. She truly made me believe that I belonged in technology and I know for a fact that she's had similar inspiring effects for many other engineers throughout her career. So without further ado, let's put our hands together for Denise Dumas. Take it away, Denise. Thank you so much for that wonderful introduction. And yes, you truly do belong in technology. It blows my mind that you could even doubt it for a moment. So I wanted to talk with you all today about what I've been doing for the last year. And it's really a topic that's dear to my heart. Open source communities have relied on talented people to volunteer their time and their energy, as well as people sponsored by companies like Red Hat. But look at all of you. You certainly have other things that you could be doing with your time. But here you are. And if we want open source communities to grow and thrive, we need them to attract members from the whole big messy diverse human pool of available talent, not just one segment of it, but how to do that. My job at Red Hat today is to be a champion for diversity in engineering. And it's a dream job for me after a long career as a software engineer and an engineering manager. But along the way, I've received a lot of lessons about bubbles and developing empathy and diversity. And I wanted to share my continuing education with you. Putting this talk together made me realize how fortunate I was that technology, the jobs that I've had that introduced me to people who I would never have encountered otherwise. From the very start of my career, they pushed me way outside my original insular bubble at an impressionable age. I was just lucky. But if this talk goes well, I'm going to inspire you all to be more deliberate about expanding your bubbles. First, let's take a look at the problem space. Here are some figures around just women's open source participation. I use women as the example here because we have the most data about the participation of women globally in open source. A lot of women who want to participate decide not to because of unwelcoming behavior. And we have even less black and Latin representation, especially in the US than we have in women's representation. Many women who want to participate decide that it's just too much hassle. They even adopt names to hide their identity. These numbers are particularly interesting to me because according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. 22.6% of professional programmers are female. But clearly, if that number is 3%, 4% for open source, open source is missing a lot of opportunity. Imagine the talent and the ideas that we're not tapping into. So there are five characteristics that are generally agreed upon to define genius. Curiosity, intelligence, perseverance, productivity, and most interesting to me, good luck. How can open source be the lucky break that some undiscovered genius needs? Because genius may not look exactly like what our nature reaction says. Real talent has never been in big supply. And it can be easily overlooked if it doesn't fit popular stereotypes. How can we get beyond the barriers to entry? Beyond the idea that open source is not welcoming to diversity? And find the hidden talent all over the world. Let's think about humans in groups. Anthropological studies suggest that human social networks are limited in size. Probably because of our neocortical volume. Our brains just aren't big enough to hold all that many connections. You've probably seen figures like this. This is showing what are called Dunbar numbers. And a lot of the social networks, a lot of the work behind things like Facebook, it's all based on this kind of sociological study. The Dunbar numbers try to explain the limits of our ability to connect closely. And how that expands up as connections get weaker. In your closest circle, you're probably pretty uniform. Our strongest ties are in worlds that we already know. To people very much like ourselves who probably know many of the same people that we know. Weak ties to acquaintances, to friends of a friend. They connect us outside of our core network. They're less like us, but there are more of them. And they act as our bridges into other networks where the worldview might look totally different. Within our bubbles, we have a circle of trust. We assume good intent, right? We believe that the intentions of the people closest to us are not to hurt us. To live in a bubble can mean to be immersed in an environment that gets isolated from external reality. We each have our own experiences which form our own reality, but we tend to be more intimate with people who've had similar experiences. We just understand each other faster and more easily because of all that we have in common. They're in the same bubble.  And especially in these days of COVID, it becomes easier to see the bubbles around us, right? The bubbles are the people that you tend to meet with face to face. Looking outside of our bubble beyond our bubble can allow us to see things from a previously unknown perspective. Our weak ties help us create connections outside our bubbles to other bubbles that make us aware of and open up to alternative points of view. The people that we meet as acquaintances are weak ties. They're vouched for by our stronger ties, but they also connect us into other worlds if we let them. Our worlds are independent and yet connected. And when we meet others who might be very different from us, someone in a different bubble, a connection into another world, if we're open and we're curious, we can develop empathy. So why do our social circles, our bubbles matter? Travel with me now to the 1980s. Going for a run? Take your music along on this handy walkman. You can mix your own playlist on cassette tapes. So much better than eight track. Mobile phone for some values of mobile. Except that what this picture doesn't show is the backpack sized bag of batteries that went along with this baby. Nice wired mouse on the Mac. That slot on the front, that's a floppy drive. Basic programming was just becoming available for the masses. Technology was strictly proprietary. Open source did not exist. It was not a thing. Linux didn't exist. Probably most of you didn't exist. I was a very junior software engineer living in a cube farm inside a huge company. This picture is scary. I bet you're all looking at this picture in horror with the visions of being trapped and bored to death and slowly morphing into a cube zombie. But appearances to the contrary. Office life only looked bland. In those early days, the technology field, it was booming. And a growing field needs everybody that it can attract right it needs talent. And it can't afford to be too picky about the way in which the brains are packaged. Especially in these early days, stereotypes had not set in and people decided people hadn't decided that engineering was a man's job. I worked with lots of women. Some of them were very senior. One of them, in fact, was in charge of the whole operating system. A lot of women just like to code. We were the norm. We were hired because we displayed the aptitude and the intelligence and skills that were needed. Diversity wasn't a thing either. It was a surprisingly welcoming environment. And we told our friends about it and invited them in. In 1987. 37% of the college grads with computer science majors were female. 30 years later in the US. That number had dropped to like maybe 15%. But that's just the US number in other parts of the world, like India or Romania. The numbers are much higher even now. Doesn't that make you wonder about the way that cultural stereotypes are biases affect our decisions about what are or are not good jobs for me. And about how different cultures have different stereotypes. I hate it when people confuse previous experience with aptitude. So although this was the 80s. The diversity mix wasn't limited to just females. I was young. I was a little slow. I worked with Don, a transgender colleague for quite a while before I realized just how much physical change she had undergone. And that our office mates once knew her as Donald. Seeing others day after day. As they went through transitions. Believe me in the 1980s. That was radical. And they were brave. And sometimes a little rowdy. Because imagine how gutsy you need to be. The first time you put on your pretty new pair of high heels and wear them into work in this office. I shared a cube for a while with Tom. Tom was a big scary dude. He was older. He was a more senior engineer. He always wore these black leather pants with silver studs down the side. He was definitely intimidating. And his heart was broken. Because his partner had died of AIDS. Tears started coming down his face one day. As he was sitting there next to me in the cube, we were just debugging something. And for all the tough exterior. Suddenly he looked very different to me. In fact, ever since that time, everybody in black leather pants with silver studs down the side looks different to me. So thank you, Don and Tom, Dave and Hollis and all of you who opened my eyes to another reality. Who shared your worldviews when I was a junior engineer. Because you changed me for the better. I learned to be able to see you all as individuals. The technology industry is not perfect. It was not perfect. But it's still a whole lot more accepting than anything else that I've seen. Open source has been international from the very beginning. But it was mostly the US and Western Europe. Which has always been the language of the internet. But even among these US and Western European nationalities, which have a lot more in common than say, I don't know US and Congo. There are style differences that can lead to misunderstandings. My husband, who is an American, has been studying German for more than five years. But even with his enormous collection of books with titles like understanding German culture and the German people and how to do business with Germans, you know, there's probably like a stack of them behind me. He still relies on his German friends to help interpret subtleties. Areas like, how do you give somebody a sincere compliment? What's acceptable behavior? How do you not offend? It's complicated. And most people try to give you credit for good intentions, even if you don't get the details quite right. But it really helps to just ask. Over 30 years of managing multinational teams, I've learned that standards differ for formality, for humor, for directness, for the amount of eye contact that feels comfortable for people. For hands shaking standards, even for smiling, you know, Americans, we always smile too much, right? Especially for hugging. And that's, that's very different. But what's funny to me is that idioms often translate across cultures. Actions speak louder than words. Poch doesn't cook rice. Mucho ruido y pocas noces, which literally translates as all talk and no walnuts. Different cultures have some of the same, at least fundamental ideas. Human nature is the same. You know, that some ideas underpin many cultures, but open source communities are seeing more and more participation from all around the world. South America, especially Brazil, from China, from Eastern Europe, from Africa, India and Pakistan. How do we manage to understand each other enough to work together across cultural differences that can be so profound? Here's a place where open source projects are already hitting diversity head on. And if our software is going to work around the world, we have to understand and respect local conditions. And just like my husband needs local help to understand German idiom, we all need to act as each other's trusted advisors, our windows into other cultures. Here's a sad story. A technical recruiter once confessed that he was so ashamed and afraid and embarrassed about pronouncing a job candidate's name incorrectly. He stopped bringing in people with unfamiliar names for interviews. So he'd never be in that spot again. What if we had a culture where it was just the norm to begin a relationship by asking, how do you say your name correctly? Even if the name is Bob. We set a cultural standard. You probably have some ideas by now about what my bubble was like back in the day. Here's a little more because I don't think I'm all that unusual for my demographic. I worked my way through a state college while living at home, which tells you what my family's economic situation was like. And at the state college, the biggest problem was finding parking. It was mostly a commuter school. And everybody who attended was pretty much the same. Trying to be upwardly mobile. Many of us were the first in our families to ever attend college. We had very little by way of economic safety net.  And I was tired of being a waitress. I ended up in programming because it looked like a great economic opportunity. I'd hated my first job at a college and I left it for a year long intensive program that taught me how to code. Aptitude, right? Not previous experience. Fortunately for me, I also fell in love with the technology. My career has been a joy, not a grind. I discovered something that absolutely suited me. So that was my reality. But what's your reality like? Because we're all living in bubbles that shape our worldview. You've met some of the people that enlarged my bubble. And how lucky I was, right, to land in a place where people outside my circle gave me a chance to get to know them as individuals and showed me that after all, we're all just people. Our bubble's overlapped because of our jobs. And we had a chance to see each other as individuals instead of stereotypes. It was a lesson I've never forgotten. And I'm sure that there was discrimination. And I saw some people torment themselves trying to fit into a mold. But generally, technology was a welcoming place in the 80s for different people. But where are you going to meet someone different from you? Who can bridge you into another world? Maybe for you, it's an older person like me. By now, I've shared enough that you probably understand a little more about where I come from. Maybe it's a black person, or someone from a different country, or a different religion, or any religion at all, or different social economic circumstances, right? Can you step out of your own shoes and try to experience the world from someone else's shoes? First, you have to develop empathy. And then you get to decide what you're going to do with it. My Julian technology. And along with that, the ability to support yourself. That's what I want to share today with disadvantaged kids, with poor smart kids from whatever background, every background, who are motivated to improve their lives. But what about you? How are you going to develop empathy? And then what are you going to do with it? What can you do in your everyday life to make the world of open source a better place? Remember, top cooks know rice. It's not about what you say. It's about what you do. Understand your biases and your bubble. Catch yourself in that split second between what you think and what you do, or what you say. And ask yourself what stereotype is driving that response. Maybe our reaction is knee jerk, but we get a choice about what we do with it. Choose well, go be a mentor for outreach, or similar internships that are aimed at bringing a little more diversity into the world of open source into great open source projects. It's a great way to meet people who are not like you. And who knows, you might find that you have a lot more in common than you think. You might find some great outreach interns. Help people feel comfortable that they're not the only one in the project. Most of us are introverts who don't want to stand out in the crowd. It's a little scary to be the only one. We show group pictures on your website for your project that includes community representatives who might be from different cultures or ages or genders or races. If they're comfortable having their picture up. Is there somebody here who looks like me. Do I have a bridge into this world. We friend new contributors. You never know who you might meet, and what you might learn from them. Provide on ramp tasks that are suitable for newbies, help people find them, let them contribute and coach them on how to do it gently. And then remember to praise somebody who contributes something useful. A lot of us aren't very confident and encouragement is valuable and really reinforcing. If you say thank you to somebody, they're more likely to come back. Remember the last time that somebody told you that they appreciated something that you had done that your work was valuable. It just feels good review patches from the perspective of, does it work. And not from the perspective of, is it the way I would have written it. This insight comes from a session at the last dev conf in Bruno face to face I missed that. We're discussing what patches from people with names, they were discussing the fact that patches from people with names that sound female generate a lot more trivial comments than those from people with names that sound male. And they asked themselves, why would I do that why am I doing that. And they realized that what they were really commenting on is that's not the way I would have written it. But it still works. So thank you nails and company for bringing that perspective to the issue. I think you nailed it. Lastly, call out bad behavior when you see it. We don't do that here. That establishes a really powerful cultural norm. We don't do that here. The open source community that I know best is fedora. And I've always loved that part of the fedora motto is friends. Freedom friends features first inclusive and innovative go together. And I want open source projects and the open source ethic to grow and thrive. I want open source to be a place where a diverse mix of people, all backgrounds, all cultures, all races, all genders, all ages, want to come and stay and bring their best ideas do their best work in open source. And if we do it right, they're going to show up. We're going to find them. And they're going to bring their friends. So thank you for listening to me and enjoy dev conf. I hope you make a lot of new friends here today. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Denise for that. That was an amazing talk. I never thought about my bubble versus your bubble. But that was great. I would like to point out that I was very lucky to be surrounded by amazing people here who invited me to their bubble that helped me get out of my shell because I was that introvert anxious intern. And now I'm here being a co-chair of a conference. So thank you so much for that inspiring talk. And look at the potential that we found in you. Yes. Yes. And I know you're going to continue inspiring many more engineers in the future. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone. I'm going to pass it on to Langdon now for our next segment. Or you're going to try because technology decided to fail at the best possible time. So I'm going to share some slides again. Thank you so much for that talk. And Ravashi's great intro. So there's always the hunt for the correct link to share. And here we go. So one of the things we like to do at DevConf U.S. every year is we like to highlight some of the students, you know, so in the U.S. if you're not an American. Internships are almost always in the summertime with some exceptions for some universities and even some high schools. But for the most part they're almost always in the summertime as DevConf U.S. is always kind of right after the summertime. So we always try to highlight, you know, some of the work that was done that we generally speaking were involved in as Red Hat. And so that's what this bit is about. And so what we have today is, you know, we have, you know, a really large like kind of internship program globally we also try to be really involved in in universities and schools and stuff in general.  What we are aware of is that we teach actual classes at UMass Lowell, which is a state school in Massachusetts and Boston University, which is a school in Boston and then Northeastern and other school in Boston.  But it's, it can be a little challenging to keep track of it because as a rule, right, Red Headers tend to be really like to give back. And so, you know, if they don't see a program that they can do that with internally, they just run with it. So this year we had kind of just in the kind of the Boston area, 142 interns. And what we are most proud of is even with the kind of COVID scenario, we, we didn't, we weren't forced to cancel a lot of internships. And that was really tough and, you know, props to all of the mentors and all of the like kind of recruiting folks and, you know, all the people involved in, you know, typical HR for supporting that function because being able to do that remotely is really challenging. And also, you know, props to the students too, because like doing an internship remotely, like I can't even imagine that just kind of crazy. We also do some other programs that are like the engineering residents that we have over Boston University, which is something I did, and is something we try to support, so that basically we have, you know, kind of someone who has been in the software development world is available to students so that they can kind of come and ask about what it might be like to work in software development. So, and kind of moving on, sorry, we also, oh, and then sorry, I forgot one which is we tend to also teach a lot of workshops at various levels, both high school and university. Basically, I'm aware of a lot of ones by the user experience folks, they do design and ideation and then even refinement workshops for students who are thinking about projects that they want to do. And we also try to support students at DevConf itself so like we had a number of students speaking yesterday and a number speaking today. So one of the things we do is we actually have an intern competition. So whoever gives the best lightning talk, it actually gets a spot at DevConf US to give a talk. And so you can look for them on the schedule, you know, they're just as real as any other talks. There's not really a signifier, but you know, definitely go check them out and hear some names of some of those speakers. And then a couple of other programs that we are involved in. Sorry, I wanted to kind of see where I am in the slides here is so going kind of back a slide is the Red Hat Collaboratory BU Spark. This is actually the program I'm a lot involved in. We're kind of supporting students trying to do things in the software world, rather than kind of things that are, you know, academic, although we do a lot of academic research as well. You know, the parts Spark, for example, tries to look for ways for students to get more involved in software engineering. Another big program that we're involved in and specifically actually Denise was pretty heavily involved in is the Leadership Academy at another Massachusetts State School UMass Amherst. They're all intelligently named by the city they're in so that's obviously an Amherst. And then another program that we supported is the RAMP program and a lot of these you can kind of read for yourself so I wasn't going to go into too much detail. But I know Denise actually mentored at least one or two students in this program herself directly.  Because one of the things that we see right is that there's a lot of fall off of students they enter in computer science, you know, as an underrepresented group. And then they tend to drop it after a while. So something we can do to help with that is to try to support them as software engineers and try to help them understand what that world is like without having to just wing it, you know, compared to somebody who's, you know, maybe gotten lucky and had a computer their whole life and then programming, you know, since they were six, like a good friend of mine, for example. So all these programs and then, you know, unfortunately, because of COVID, normally we try to feature a lot of students at this. But in this particular case, we are going to feature one program where we were able to negotiate with class times and that kind of stuff and actually get the students here for it, which is the source CS program. And now we're going to have Fred Martin, who is the associate dean at University of Lowell or University of Massachusetts Lowell, often referred to as UML. So if you hear that, that's why. And it is not a drawing language. And so Fred, do you want to come on and tell us a little bit about the program? Sure. Thanks, Langton. And I'm just blown away by Denise by your talk. It was really inspiring to me and to hear your personal story.  I'm really happy to be able to be here with you today and Langton, you're going to introduce our students from UMass Lowell. So two years ago, we created this source CS program and Red Hat is one of our founding sponsor, is our founding sponsor and you support us again this year. This year, of course, we did it virtually. And just build on what Denise and Langton, you both said. To me, this program is about giving opportunities to students to advance them in computer science, support and advance them, and particularly diverse students. So, yeah, so it's a summer program. It's called a bridge program. That's the university parlance for a bridge between high school and university to really give students a jumpstart on their university careers. And thanks for having us here, Langton, and man, and welcome to our students who are here. Thank you. Yeah. No, it's, we're really happy to have you. I think this is a lot of fun. So, and I hope the audience does as well. So to start off with, we are going to, this might, to be honest, this might be my personal favorite of the projects, because it's near and dear to my heart, near and dear to my heart as a public transit user. When there's no COVID. So this is Jaylin Dones and the project that she worked on over the summer. She's going to tell us a little bit about. Hello, everybody. My name is Jaylin. And over the summer, I got the opportunity through source CS to learn a lot more about web APIs. And so I worked on a project called predicting trains using Python and web APIs. Essentially, so in Massachusetts, we have the MBTA that runs commuter, commuter rail lines throughout all the neighboring cities. And I live near one of the commuter rail lines. So I'm always hearing the trains. But I wanted to be able to actually like predict when I would hear a train instead of having to like refer to the schedule and flip and look at the inbound trains and the outbound trains. It's a lot of effort. It's a lot of, you know, flipping between tabs. So I essentially use the MBTA API to pull that information from the schedule and then have it predict when I would be able to hear a train based on my geographic location to the to the line to the train line. And depending on whether it's an inbound or an outbound train, it also like adjusts the time given on the schedule to when I would be able to actually hear it. As you know, as we've talked about a little bit before, what I want to know is when we're going to be able to predict when the train is not going to come because that's really my pet peeve. So thanks so much for that. And I really appreciate your time. And we'll move on to the next project. And so this is Brian Montalvin, sorry, and Arthur Rosa. And they worked on a project to share a bit about Lowell itself. And so Arthur, do you want to go ahead and tell us a little bit about the project? Of course. So my name is Arthur Rosa. And during the summer, we worked on a project for SourceES. And this project, we wanted to learn more about Lowell as upcoming freshmen at the time. We wanted to learn about the area and how it is because I live pretty far and Lowell is a pretty big place compared to where I'm from. So I wanted to learn more about it. So in our project here, we made a website. We use some APIs for our map or interactive map that we learned in SourceES, which proved quite useful. And also, we use some outside knowledge that we didn't learn in SourceES, which is some web development like stuff like CSS and HTML, which I did not know anything about. But Brian here helped me a lot and we were able to get through it. So we added some fun facts. Lowell is like the fourth biggest city in Massachusetts, which is like 14.5 miles, which is gigantic compared to my 3.5 miles from where I am area. So and also we added some beautiful pictures of Lowell. And I hope I'll be able to go there someday, even though we're all very true. I hope we can go soon. And it was just a great experience overall learning and I appreciate it. Alright, so because it wouldn't be a conference without some technical difficulties, Brian is unable to get his video working. But he is going to speak to us, I hope, if assuming we can get sound. Yes, I am. I'm here. All right. Hello, everybody. My name is Brian Montalvan. Coming back to what Arthur really started with, we really started this project to kind of show our fellow SourceES members a bit more about Lowell because some of them aren't from Lowell or from around the area. So we really wanted to show them what Lowell was really about. And a quick fact for myself, I mean, a quick fact from Lowell is that did you know that phone numbers were first invented in Lowell? That is something that I didn't really know. And hopefully something new that you guys found out today. The website essentially has quick fun facts about Lowell. It has, we use Google APIs. Recently added in a carousel showing pictures of different areas of Lowell, just nice scenery around Lowell. And most of all, it was just a fun and enjoyable project where I was able to help Arthur learn more about web development, at least in the front end. And I think it was very helpful for the both of us and we're able to help our SourceES members learn a bit more about Lowell. That's great. That's great. I have a fun fact about Lowell that you may not know, which is as a parent of kids with food allergies, the minor league baseball team in Lowell has regular occurrence of food safe or allergy friendly baseball games. Obviously, not so much right now being not very pandemic safe, but in general. And so that's basically the most of the times my kids have actually seen baseball and being an American. You know, baseball is kind of important. At least, you know, to old people like us. So thanks again so much. And we'll move on to our next project. Thank you. So this project, I think it's really cool, but super scary. So Isabel Pobon and Minhouse Chattery put this project together and I think Isabella you're going to you're going to go first. All right, so why don't you tell us a little bit about the product. Hi, I'm Isabella Pobon. And for this project we work with a program called Myer, which was actually created by Emess Lowell. And in Myer you use JavaScript to basically create anything you want to VR. There's tons of different functions and shapes you can play around with, which was really cool for Min and I because we had never worked with JavaScript or VR or anything along those lines before and I was very new to coding, so RCS was my first really good time working with coding. So I had a really fun time working with Myer and we both did. So that's pretty much why we decided to finally go with it for our final project. And I think Min is going to talk about who did what and why we actually decided to do Nightmare Before Christmas. Hi, can you hear me? Thank you Bella. So we worked on the Nightmare Before Christmas because we both shared a love for the movies so we decided to recreate one of our favorite scenes. And this turned out to be more interesting than I thought it would because how we allocated the work was while Bella worked mostly on the scenery and the snow and the houses and everything. I focused on the main character Jack. And something we found was that while she was really confused at how I created Jack I had no idea how she was making the sceneries look so well. So we realized that our different skill sets applied very differently to how we worked in Myer, which is really cool. I think our next step would have been to add the music from the movie because that's honestly the best part of the scene but we were still learning how to do that as we went along. Thanks so much. Yeah, so one thing I wanted to point out is I got to say your full names but I noticed that both each of you called the other by short name. You know with Bella and Min, which I thought was particularly amusing when I was stumbling over your names yesterday. So thanks so much again for coming on with us. And we're going to just kind of move to the thank you. And so a little shout out to Beverly, Heidi, Fred, Fuzia for helping put these slides together helping be putting the legwork into actually making this happen. So I'm just the face doing the talking, but it was really on them for doing a lot of the work to make it happen. So now I'm going to invite my co-chairs back and we're going to do the announcement song for you. And if you don't know that reference then I'm sorry. But what do we have to make people aware of for today's conference? Let me get my notes. So today, again, we have a packed schedule with amazing talks and sessions and booths. And again, I want to remind you that the schedule is the source of truth for the sessions. So go there, find the video stream, and that should bring you to the room where your session is and just join at the time. And we've been updating those video stream links with the pre-recorded talks if we have them. And if not, we'll be getting to uploading the recordings from Hoppin as soon as we process them. We have our closing session tonight. It's at 6 p.m. 1800, 6 p.m. Eastern, and of course we're going to have our trivia. So please don't miss that. There might even be prizes. There might. I'm very, very close. We're actually not 100% sure, but we think there will be. And if not, I will personally send you a prize if you win trivia. One thing you can also do is you can choose any of the three of our voices on your home answering machine. Oh, gosh.  Any questions, any concerns to find important links to find the CFP for DevConf CZ, go to the DevConf booth and enjoy your day today. Thank you so much, Denise. Thank you so much, Fred and Fuzzi and all of the students. Amazing. I would also like to mention one thing. I believe the stores here students are going to be hanging out and the DevConf.us booth. So if you have any questions, we can toggle that and create it like a session so you can talk with them. Also, we have a pretty cool networking roulette thing in Hoppin where you can randomly meet other people that are at the conference right now. So check that out under the networking tab today. If you want to meet someone new, say hi to them, etc. And the schedule that Sally mentioned is the schedule on SCAD, not the schedule in Hoppin. So use the schedule on SCAD as a source of truth. Yes. Is there anything else, Langdon?  And we will see you at the closing. If we don't have enough people for trivia, it's no fun at all. And between now and then we will be coming up with the trivia questions. So we don't, we don't want to give anything away. Thanks again. We can't. So observe things that are going on in the conference. Right. Thank you all. Thank you. Have a great day.


A famous case report called the Mortician's Mystery in the New England Journal of Medicine back in the 80s described a man whose testicles started shrinking and breasts started growing. Turns out he failed to wear gloves as he massaged embalming cream onto his corpse. They conclude there must have been some estrogenic compound in the cream that got absorbed through his skin into his body, one of the first such cases described. This case was cited as inspiration by a group of researchers that came up with a new theory to explain a breast cancer mystery. Why do most breast cancers occur in the upper outer corner of the breast? The standard explanation was simply because that's where most of the breast tissue is located, as the so-called tail of the breast extends up into the armpit. But that doesn't explain this. It didn't always used to be that way. There's been a shift towards that upper corner. And it doesn't explain this. Greater genomic instability, chromosome abnormalities that may signal pre-cancerous changes. There definitely seems to be something happening to that side of the breast. And something relatively new, just in the last 50 years or so, is it possible that the increasing use of underarm antiperspirant, which parallels increasing breast cancer incidents, could be an explanation for the greater number of tumors and the disproportionate incidence of breast cancer in the upper outer quadrant of the breast near where the stick sprayer roll-on is applied. There's a free flow of lymph fluid back and forth between the breast and the armpit, and if you measure aluminum levels in breasts removed after mastectomies, the aluminum content of breast tissue in the outer regions near the armpits was significantly higher, presumably due to closer proximity to the underarm region. This is a concern, because in a Petri dish at least, it has been demonstrated that aluminum is a so-called metalloestrogen, having proestrogenic effects on breast cancer cells. Long-term exposure of normal breast tissue cells in a test tube to aluminum concentrations in the range of those found in the breast results in pre-cancerous type changes. And then once the cells have turned, those same concentrations can increase the migratory and invasive activity of human breast cancer cells in a Petri dish. This is important because women don't die from the tumor in the breast itself, but from the ability of the cancer cells to spread and grow at distant sites like the bones, lungs, liver, or brain. But we don't care about Petri dishes, we care about people. In 2002, a paper was published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, in which the underarm antiperspirant habits of 800 breast cancer survivors was compared to women who never got breast cancer, the first study of its kind, and they found no indication of a link between the two.  Women who are worried that antiperspirants might cause breast cancer can finally rest easy. But two months later, this study. Frequency and early onset of antiperspirant deodorant usage with underarm shaving was associated with an earlier age of breast cancer diagnosis as much as 20 years earlier. In women using antiperspirant and shaving their armpits more than three times a week, and the earlier they started before versus after their sweet 16, appeared to move up their breast cancer 10 or 20 years. They conclude that underarm shaving with antiperspirant use may play a role in breast cancer after all. But what does shaving have to do with it? Shaving removes more than just armpit hair. It removes armpit skin. You end up shaving off the top skin layer. And while there's very little aluminum absorption through intact skin, when you strip off that outer layer with a razor and then rub on some antiperspirant, you get a six-fold increase in aluminum absorption through the skin. So good news for women who don't shave, but on the other hand, the high through-the-skin aluminum uptake on shaved skin should compel antiperspirant manufacturers to proceed with the utmost caution. European safety authorities and the FDA specifically advise against using aluminum antiperspirants on damaged or broken skin, yet shaving before antiperspirant application can create abrasions in the skin. I'm sure everyone knows about the FDA warning having read Title 21, Part 350, subpart C50-5C1 of the Code of Federal Regulations. But we get so much aluminum in our diet from processed foods, anti-caking agents in like pancake mix, melting agents in American cheese, meat binders, gravy thickeners, baking powder, candy. That the contribution from underarm antiperspirants would presumably be minimal in comparison, but everything was turned topsy-turvy in 2004 when a case was reported of a woman with bone pain and fatigue suffering from aluminum toxicity. But within months of stopping the antiperspirant, which she was applying daily to her regularly shaved pits, her aluminum levels came down and her symptoms resolved. Although not everyone sucks up that much aluminum, the case suggests that caution should be exercised when using aluminum containing antiperspirants frequently. Recently, it was shown that women with breast cancer have twice the level of aluminum in their breasts compared to women without breast cancer, though this doesn't prove cause and effect. Maybe the aluminum contributed to the cancer, or maybe the cancer contributed to the aluminum.  Subsequent research suggests this alternative explanation is unlikely. So where do we stand now? The latest review on the subject concluded that as a consequence of the new data, given that aluminum can be toxic and we have no need for the stuff, reducing the concentration of this metal in antiperspirants is a matter of urgency. Or at the very least, it should say on the label, do not use after shaving. Or we could cease usage of aluminum containing antiperspirants altogether, but then won't we stink? Ironically, antiperspirants can make us stink worse. They increase the types of bacteria that cause body odor. It's like the story with antidepressant drugs, how they can actually make you more depressed in the long run. The more we use antiperspirants, the more we may need them. Awfully convenient for a billion-dollar industry.


Penguin Random House Audio presents The Parade by Dave Eggers Read for you by Dion Graham 1. In the morning's platinum light he raised his leaden head. He was lying on a plastic mattress in a converted shipping container below a tiny fan that circulated the room's tepid air. He washed himself with packaged towelettes and put on his uniform, a black jumpsuit of synthetic fiber. Under a quickly rising sun he walked across the hotel's gravel courtyard to his partner's room. They had never met. He knocked on the corrugated steel door. There was no answer. He knocked louder. After some shuffling from within, a lie that some man answered, naked but for a pair of white boxers. He had dark eyes, a cleft chin, and a wide mouth ringed with full, womanly lips.  Pick a number. Nine? The man at the door said, smiling, slyly. Okay, you know how the company handles names. I don't know yours, you don't know mine. For the next two weeks, you're nine. Call me four. You're four? You will call me four. I'll call you nine. Got it? For reasons of security, the company insisted on simple pseudonyms, usually numerical. Got it? Nine said, and swept his hair from his face and threw it back. They had arrived without passports. Passports were complications and liabilities in such a place, a nation recovering from years of civil war, riddled with corruption, and burdened now by a new and lawless government. Four and nine had been flown in under assumed names on a private charter. In the past, in other nations, the company's employees had been ransomed and killed. The kidnappers went first for their quarry's company, then family, then nation. But without passports or names, men like four and nine were anonymous and of little value. Their machine, the RS-80, was almost impossible to trace. It bore no company name, no serial number, and had no national registry. No one but their clients, the northern government and the capital, would know anything about them, their origins, or employer. You ready to eat? Four asked. We have forty minutes till we begin. The crew is making a final check on the machine. Soon, nine said, a smile overtaking his expansive mouth. Nine stepped out of the doorway and tilted his head toward the bed behind him. Beyond nine's naked torso, four could- Sample complete. Ready to continue?


And I'm moving on to news outside Africa. Makers of COVID-19 vaccines are to be commended for planning for the likelihood of needing to adjust their products. And this is to offer protection against the Omicron variant, a world health organization spokesperson said this on Friday. A Christian Lynn Myers said the agency was studying the transmissibility and severity of the variant first detected in southern Africa last month. South African scientists studying the Omicron outbreak believe symptoms are less severe, but that's for those reinfected with COVID-19 by the new variant or infected after vaccination. Maria Van Kecove, a RISDWHO's technical lead on COVID-19, she said on Wednesday, December 1 that she expected to have more information on the transmissibility of the new Omicron variant within days. But Delta remains the dominant variant globally, accounting for more than 90% of infections, Lynn Myers said. It's very recommendable that vaccine manufacturers already start planning ahead and plan for the likelihood of having to adjust the vaccine, the existing vaccine. That's good. Not just to wait till the final alarm bell rings. We do not yet have information together. And we said a week ago that it will take two, three weeks. Now that was a week ago. So it will still take some time. And let's not rush into conclusions here. Preliminary data, and we've said that now since a while, show that there's higher transmissibility. But that's all what we basically have so far. Again, different areas, different reports have individual pieces of information. But that's, I would call it right now, an observation of that moment of that particular area. We need all this together to make a careful assessment. And as we're talking about Omicron, let us also not forget that the predominant variant right now still remains the Delta variant. So Omicron may be on the rise and we may come to a point where it takes over to be the dominant variant. But at this point, the very dominant variant remains Delta. But let us not lose sight of the Delta variant. The restrictions that were put into place in many countries just two weeks ago, economical closures again, lockdowns in some areas, closures of Christmas markets in parts of Europe. This was done before Omicron because of a rise of Delta cases. Let's not lose sight of it. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.


Just the behind-the-scenes with Jesley.  Well, I enjoy every shoot today. It's always interesting. I learned something new during the time. Of course, I think you knew first. What did you learn today? What did I learn today? That happiness is more important. That's a good one.


which come from our past, but some of it we create ourselves in prison, but amongst the things that our past systems were based on is race. A very tropical issue in South Africa today is whether we are non-racial or whether we are racist. How do we become non-racial? Take the state of mind where we see all human beings regardless of color as our equals and extend our respect to them. Secondly, we are trying to bind ourselves into the second single-nation group. And I think most of us, usually when there are big events like the FIFA World Cup in 2010, we all suddenly become unanimously South Africa. And we forget it for a while. We need more football. Well, something is game because we can win against India. So, in this use of what you call the technology of yoga and inner well-being, how do we get and overcome, get rid of and overcome some of which are the tendencies which we've learned and perhaps are endemic in our systems and leapfrog, if you like, to what might sound like an idealistic state of non-racialism, of mutual recognition of each other as equal human being as builders of this common nationhood. The word yoga literally means union. What union means? There are many, many ways to look at it. There are poetic ways to look at it. There are philosophical ways of looking at it. There are mystical ways of looking at it. But let me make it very simplistic, common sense way of looking at it. All of you take your right hand and touch your left hand and see, please. Just touch it. Is that you? Hello? Touch the chair on which you're sitting. Is that you? How do you know this? What is the basis for you to know this is me, this is not me? That's a question. How do you know? Oh, you're reading things. How do you know? There is sensation. There is sensation here. There is no sensation here. Or in other words, what you're saying is, whatever is within the boundaries of my sensation is me. Whatever is outside the boundaries of my sensation is not me, right? So the definition of who you are is just this. Anything that is within the boundaries of my sensation is me. What is outside my boundaries of sensation is not me, am I right? There is water in this glass. Is this you? Hello? If you drink it. If you drink it. How did you gather whatever number of kilograms you carry right now, how did you gather this? Just by ingestion, isn't it? What was not you yesterday, you made it yourself simply by including it into the boundaries of your sensation. Right now, whatever is here in the form of your limbs and your body, this is definitely you, isn't it? But this was not you yesterday, a part of it at least. When you were born, you were so much, now you become this much, how? Just by ingestion, yes? The food that you have eaten, the water that you drank and everything. So what is not you, you can make it a part of yourself if it comes into the boundaries of sensation. If you have experienced a very loving or joyful moment, so loving or joyful, the tears came to you. Did it ever happen to you? That's just ten people.  Have you ever noticed this? If no such wonderful thing happened to you, let me do something horrible to you. We will chop off your right leg. If we take away your right leg, the leg will be gone, but it's possible for a certain period of time, your sensory leg could still be intact. You know this? It's called the phantom leg. All the sensations of the leg are still there, though the leg is not there. That means sensory body has a presence of its own. So this sensory body, if your life energies become very exuberant, your sensory body will expand.  This might have happened to some of you. You're feeling depressed. Someone came and touched you on your shoulder. You can't feel it. They have to shake you, otherwise you don't know because you are in a subdued state of energy. Now, what yoga means is to slowly galvanize the life energy in such a way that it becomes so effervescent within you, your sensory body will expand.  Then you will experience everything in this hall as a part of yourself. It doesn't matter what color it is. It doesn't matter whether it is even human or otherwise. It doesn't matter whether it is animate or inanimate. Both ways, everything you will experience as a part of myself, simply because your sensory body has expanded. If you make your life energies very super effervescent, then this sensory body can become as large as the universe.  The word yoga means union. Yogi means one who has experienced or living the state of union within himself or herself. Now, will this solve the problem of discrimination? No, because you will not understand what it is that people call as discrimination because you will see everything as myself. You will experience everything as myself. Even for a moment, if you don't live it, even for a moment, right now you sat here, right now you experienced that all these people who are sitting here actually are part of you. As you experience the ten fingers of your hands, you experience these people around you as a part of myself, after that, do I have to tell you do not kill them, do not rob them, do not discriminate? All these teachings will be meaningless to you. This is what yoga means. So will it be a solution for all the disparities that we have invented in our minds? Every difference, we've made it into a discriminatory process. Every opportunity we get, we are seeing how to put someone down. This is not just about color. This is about everything. This is just about everything. How to put somebody down is the only way I can raise myself. This has been the unfortunate history of humanity in many ways. There have been many great things also, but largely this has been the process because in day-to-day life sometimes it gets organized and super cruel, but it is happening every day in every home, in every transaction one person is trying to make himself or herself better than the other. One person is somehow sees the one way to become better is somehow to reduce this person in stature, in character, in capability.  If I cut everybody's legs off, then I am the champion runner here. Okay? So this kind of mindset has been there because the human effort is to somehow expand to become bigger. If you do not know how to become bigger, the best thing is to make other people smaller. So this need within the human being that you have to make someone small for you to be big will go away when that someone also you have known as a part of yourself. This experiential dimension will definitely erase the very basis for discrimination within your mind. Once it's gone in your mind, how can it manifest in your society? After all the societies that we have built are just larger manifestations of our minds.


So I am Rishnish Vandari, an alumnus of IIT Delhi. I am a first-generation entrepreneur and a serial entrepreneur and an angel investor. I co-founded Neurikibrium along with Dr. Neeta. Neurikibrium is a remote diagnostic platform for super-specialty healthcare. What should people expect to come away with after they've attended your keynote at Agile India this year? So the key message is how agile methodology can be used to develop simple solutions for complex problems. How to foster a culture of innovation and how business model innovation can help us impact millions of lives. So one of the things that we believe in is that technology per se is not what one has to pursue. One has to basically look at a solution for a problem. And for that solution, whatever technology or amalgamation of technology that is required, those have to be integrated in your solution. So we have integrated 3D printing, virtual reality, clinical decision support system, computer vision, AI, to provide a simple and sustainable, scalable solution for this super-specialty. How is what you are doing perceived by some of the players overseas that you are competing with? So there are other players who produce similar equipment. But we are the world's first chain of such super-specialty clinics. And we are collaborating with the best hospitals across the world, the best organizations including Johns Hopkins, Howard Medical School, you know, Massachusetts University in Netherlands, Ludwig University in Germany, etc. So we are at the cutting edge in this domain across the world. And you know, our products are recognized globally as being top-notch.


My name is Mark Ridge. I'm Chief Executive of My Society. My Society is a 15-year-old civic tech organization, and we operate in three different practice areas, Freedom of Information, Better Cities and Democracy. Over the past 12 months at My Society, we've been working on a number of new initiatives. Probably most significant is the work we've been doing to support journalism through our Freedom of Information practice. We've launched a new service called What Do They Know Professional and Alavatelli Professional, which is our international FOI service. And those services help journalists basically make more use of Freedom of Information to create more impactful, better evidenced articles and news stories. More broadly, that type of effort, you're specifically focusing on how can we identify individual audiences and support them with either new tools or adapting existing tools to better serve their needs, is certainly going to be a key part of what we do in the future. Within our democracy practice, we're expanding our work around every politician. Most significantly, we have decided to turn every politician around to really embrace wiki data and Wikipedia. The reasons for doing that are we can achieve much greater reach and much greater impact by supporting the efforts of these communal services rather than trying to entirely focus on our own efforts. So we can bring our technology skills, our understanding of data, our understanding of politics and power and influence, and we can help contribute to the wiki data project in turn that will have much greater reach, it will be much more complete. In our better cities practice, we're normally being focused on expanding FixMyStreet. In the past two years, really, we've created FixMyStreet Professional, and FixMyStreet Professional really is there to help local governments better manage issues and reports that are sent to them by citizens about non-emergency issues. And the critical element of this new service is we really help close the loop to make sure that these issues are actually dealt with and the status of those issues are reported back to citizens. By doing that, it's more likely citizens will be comfortable using these digital channels to make reports. But more importantly, the issues will actually be dealt with in a timely manner, and generally that will help the good relations between citizens and their local government. Over the next 12, 18 months, we're particularly keen at my society to consider how we can further contribute towards policy discussion around some of the practice areas that we operate within. You've been able to actually not just understand how our services contribute directly to getting things changed, but actually how we can contribute to the wider policy discussion to see more substantial changes at scale really taken up by governments around the world. That's a particularly challenging problem, but again, it's one that requires evidence, great case studies and a commitment to make those kind of changes. So if my society in a small way can contribute to those debates as well, I think we'll be doing a really good job.