We're going to have a lot of fun here. So I want to get started as soon as possible. Thank you all for finding us down here in this crypt. But it's really heartening to see a good crowd here. So anyway, I'm going to start by just briefly introducing myself. My name is Obi Fernandez. I'm known in the Rails community for writing The Rails Way and subsequent editions of it. Rails Four Way is out as a beta book. You can get it on Lean Pub. And it's going to be out in print within a week or two. That's one of the big reasons I'm here. And I want to introduce the rest of my panel, starting with Alan Grant. Hi, my name is Alan Grant. I'm one of the co-founders of Hired, formerly called Developer Auction. You might have seen us here last year. We're a pretty young company. We're about a year and a half old. And actually started out of my RailsConf trip to Austin three years ago, where I tried really hard to hire engineers from my previous startup and failed and came back and over drinks. This idea was born. And I was like, oh, I can hack this out in a week. And let's see if it works. And here we are today. Hi, I'm Chad Pytel. I'm a developer and the CEO of Thoughtbot. We are, in case you're not familiar with us, we're the creators of Factory Girl Shoulda Paperclip. And we work with early stage startups building products. OK. And over the last two years, we've gone from 19 people just in Boston. We're in our 11th year. We've gone from 19 people just in Boston. And we're 81 people across eight offices now in the world. They're only two people. Yeah. Yeah. And it's been a lot of fun growing. And we've obviously hired many Rails developers over those two years. Jeff Kazimer. I have a company called Jumpstart Lab that I started in 2009 to teach primarily Ruby and Rails programming. Since then, I started a program in DC called Hungry Academy, a living social program in Denver called G-School. And most recently, a training program called Turing, the Turing School of Software and Design. And over the past two years, I have helped about 72 new developers find great jobs. So hope to share some of that today. Wow. I'm Corey Haines. I post pictures of cats on Twitter. I'm the CTO of a local company called Viewpoints. That is a ratings and reviews site for consumer products. I know a lot of developers. And I've worked with a lot of developers, sort of Rails developers, sort of on their code bases and stuff, seeing the sort of evolution of the skills and all of that over the last few years. I think that's why I'm here. Not the cats. Oh, yeah, and I wrote a book. Oh, we said I could do that. Go look at four rules of simple design. It's a good book. You should get it. Actually, I invited you because we'll start out with the red meat, because I'm that kind of panel moderator. How important is craftsmanship? I know that employers can generally be all over the map, but Ruby started before it hit the mainstream. I think it was very, very important to practice TDD and peer programming, all this stuff. And how is that evolving as we hit the mainstream? And you're welcome to start. Well, I think if you have the benefit of a team of very experienced developers, then you can sort of stray from a lot of the established practices. And as you gain more experience as a software developer, you start to be able to question and be effective using different techniques. There's no one true way that is the best way. But there are a ton of really bad ways to develop software. And I think experience is about finding out what are those ways that are bad. And so my opinion is that especially when you're sort of beginner moving into intermediates, so for me that's usually up to about five or seven years of experience, you should sort of find a way that a lot of other people are effective doing and do that until you're really good at that. And make sure, you know, it doesn't matter who, but if you really grasp onto somebody who's very effective, really study how they do it and get good at that way. And then eventually you figure out where are the corners and the holes. So I'm going to give the rest of the panel a chance to respond to that. Well, so here's the thing. You mentioned that for the first five to seven years. But Rails has, you know, everyone's talking about 10 years. It's really, I don't know that a significant number of people started doing it really until 2007, 2008, where we could really, and it's really not until the last few years that's really become a mainstream phenomenon, right? So does that change your perspective of his answer, any? What's really important to me and my team and what I think is the foundation of craftsmanship is not that you are good or that you are the best, but that you were always trying to be better at what you do. And that defines a really high functioning team of people and high functioning developers who are crafts people. What if you start out being really bad at that? Well, if you don't have a team of people supporting you, then you should seek out those people. But if you're just content to sit back and be poor at what you do, then you're not going to accomplish anything. And people aren't going to want to hire you. I think, or you wouldn't want to work at the place that would. So a question for Ellen. Given that there seems to be a lot of Ruby jobs and if all of you guys go to the center of your pamphlet here, you see an infographic that Hire provided. It seems like there's an extraordinary demand, especially in San Francisco. How many people are poor programmers that are trying to cash in on the fad? Is it like the dot com era all over again? There are no poor programmers. Just programmers at the start of their careers. It's actually, it's an interesting question. And I want to kind of go back to the previous question for a second as well and kind of do really a question for a bit on craftsmanship, which is a word that I only know a little bit about. I aspire, but I wouldn't consider myself an expert. I feel like there's a cultural element where different companies define it very differently. One of the things we talked about was pairing. There's companies that have very strong pairing cultures and there's companies that have very strong like no pairing cultures and remote cultures. There's still pride, different types of craftsmanship. So to some extent it becomes a, are you a fit, so to speak, for the environment that you're gonna be performing in. Now, different aspects of culture, what you just mentioned as far as wanting to always be better and not wanting to be selling your job, also cultural elements, I feel like they're much more universal. I don't think that there's a company that's like, I wanna hire the developer that's stagnating. That's exactly who we're going after. But I guess before answering your question, we see a variety of different candidates and we curate the pool that actually participate and hired. And so to some extent the people that are participating have already passed some sort of bar there. But I'm kind of curious as far as the audience, like what brings people to this particular panel? Cause I think that'll help us better understand what we should be talking about. Maybe as a show of hands, how many people are here because you're hiring Rails engineers and you really wanna figure out how to hire Rails engineers? Like how many are here from the company side? Okay. And then how many are here because you're interested in sort of the future of jobs from your own perspective as an engineer? Okay, so that's the overall majority. Cool, that's good to know. So then why is there so much, if everyone here is looking for a job, then why are there's apparently so much demand for Rails developers and it's so hard to hire them. Well, so a better question then on that is how many people that raise their hand that are here from the company side are currently employed and how many, actually how many are currently interested in job opportunities that are not currently employed? Right, right. So I don't think people are here because they have a hard time finding Rails jobs. I think it's just because, you know, what you said, everybody wants to continue to keep learning and leveling up. What's the next step? There's also the idea that, you know, right today people aren't having jobs and there's a lot of Rails jobs, but what's the landscape look like a year from now, two years from now, five years from now? You know, if all you know is Rails or you entered the industry primarily through Rails, where are the places that you should be going? I don't know if this was a later question, but what should you be studying? Are you gonna be able to find a job in the future if all you know is Rails? Thank you. Let's save that one for, we got about half an hour left. Let's save that for the last quarter, but here's another microphone. I have a quick comment on that. While we're on that, it's actually kind of hard now to get a job doing just Rails, right? We had an engineer that started recently who is extremely smart, passed all of our coding tests just stellar, had no Rails experience, and after his first week, he's like, wow, I am really, really challenged. I'm like, why? He says, well, I knew I would have to learn Ruby, and that's cool, and I knew I'd have to learn Rails, and that's cool. But now I'm also having to learn CoffeeScript because you use CoffeeScript instead of JavaScript, and I'm pretty good at JavaScript, but I'm not an expert. And Angular, and Capybara, and RSpec, and all these different ecosystems, like it is a really, really rich ecosystem, and some of those ecosystems are Rails-specific, like the RSpec, Capybara, but some extend beyond that. So I feel like even today, it's hard to just be a Rails developer. Yeah, totally. I think that's been one of the big barriers to, it's one of the things I scratched my head about, so maybe there's a chance for Jeff to jump in. You are teaching, you're teaching people ostensibly to be hireable as Rails devs, but to be a Rails dev, you have to know SQL, you need to know JavaScript, you probably need to know some CSS, or at least understand the asset pipeline, which is really hard as a beginner. It's really hard, period, yeah. Yeah.  I think the first problem is that it's really difficult to understand how many pieces there are now, right? Like when I started writing Rails applications, and you started writing Rails applications, it was like download the Rails gem, generate an app, and go. And now it's like you can't even just do that. You need v8, so the asset pipeline will do this, and you need all these header libraries, so Postgres Gem will build, and now it was set up Postgres, and like good luck with that. And it's just there are so many pieces just to get going where one of the central premises was like, this is fast, this is full stack, like everything's ready to go. We've kind of lost some of that just from the physical setup of getting going. But then also mentally, you can't, when I learned Ruby, the question was, how little of this Ruby stuff do I need to know to build Rails applications, right? And I think. Actually, let's riff on that. I want each of you guys to answer this. How little of the Rails stack, the greater, let's call it the greater Rails stack, do you need to know to be hireable? Like to actually be productive for one of you guys. Very little. I would say very little, and I actually, when I do tutoring and stuff at the schools is I tell them to stop learning JavaScript and stop learning all of the other stuff because if you're sort of at the beginning of your career and you join a place where you're expected to be proficient in all of that stuff, that's the wrong place. You're not going to be really effectively learning there. So I tell them learn a little bit more depth, have a surface knowledge, but learn the Rails stack. Learn how to spin up a Rails app and build just a raw HTML type of thing. And then when you find the job, hopefully there's people there. You're at a place where they know that already and then they can bring you in. The rest of you guys agree? Yeah, very much so, but you need, and I would encourage people to be very upfront about what they do and don't know, but don't spin it like I don't know these things so I can't do it. Spin it in the context of here's what I've learned and it's much more important to demonstrate that you can learn than it is that you know things now. And that's what we do every day, we learn new stuff from the smallest things to the biggest things and being able to do that is being part of being an effective developer. Yeah, and I would agree with that as well based on what we've seen as far as hiring activity on the hired platform, specifically like how much Rails knowledge the employers look for. I think that to me or your point, it's very important to be accurate about it.  But I think the thing that employers care most about is that do you know how to program? And it's language independent and I think that it's actually more about Ruby than about Rails. Do you know how to write a loop? One of the things that we've seen in our own interviews that actually happens more with Rails developers than I would say with other kinds of developers is not knowing how to loop over an array of elements or not knowing how to loop except for each. So then you're like, oh, I need the index. How do I get the index for each with I? And then throwing that away. Those are the things that I feel like people stumble on more so on interview than Rails stuff. Like I feel like people expect you'll learn the Rails things on the job. Are you guys seeing candidates that can't write anything but a fundamental loop? I mean, back in the Java days I had everyone and their grandma was doing Java because it was so hot at a certain point and I had a candidate and the second question I asked him was, can you tell me what an interface is? And he just absolutely could not tell me what an interface was. And I was like, what are we even doing here? Like, are you having that kind of experience? So at Thoughtbot, full developers at Thoughtbot are experienced Rails developers. They've shipped multiple applications. They do test driven development. They're very good with, we don't have, we don't have front end developers, so they tend to. Do you help your clients hire as well though? Yeah, and we do. And what I tell them is that if you're serious about hiring and building a team, you need to provide an environment of training and support. Because these people just didn't appear magically. They don't just appear magically and you are, you're trying to hire two people. No one knows who you are. It's gonna be very difficult to attract the kind of level of person that you're setting your standards to. So there's still Thoughtbot and Pivotal and Hashrocket and other firms that attract top talent. It sounds like you just said that it's difficult for some of these startups and smaller clients to actually attract, let's say, quote unquote, top talent. Is that a fair statement? Yeah, I mean that's what we see with people that we work with. It's not to say that it's not impossible, but those people have their choice of where they're going to work for. And so they are very choosy. And what's it take to hire some of those people? And any of you can answer. I think one of the things we see that doesn't work is salary. Although engineering salaries, developer salaries start off with a high floor. You won't find many developers under 60K. It does top out relatively quickly and that's something I try and warn our students of. You don't find a lot of people who are doing full-time programming that are making over 200. And so it's kind of like you start quick and you ramp up and you're two years in and you're making 110, 120, 130 and then it starts petering out. Now there's also the flip side of that is once you really get up above like $100,000, the relative value of those dollars starts diminishing really quickly. And so I see not it frequently people turning down more money to do a project they're more interested in or work with a team they're more excited about. Which makes a ton of sense to us, but to business people, that's incredibly frustrating because they're like, no, I wanted that guy. Like I will pay 20K more. And it's like, pay 50K more, it doesn't matter. Like he's not coming. So I do a lot of counseling to our students about picking a job. Most of our students are fortunate to get between like two and five job offers. And if they really have a hard time choosing, I ask them to pick the job where there's a person responsible for them becoming the person they wanna be. And so like whose job is it to make the team awesome and you as an individual awesome. The great Jim Wyrick, that was one of his responsibilities at NEO, like he did not work on production code. He worked on making sure the team were learning and becoming the developers that they wanted to be. I think I have this like long talk rant about why developers quit. And I think one of the reasons good companies lose good people is because doing the work isn't good enough to get you to keep you growing. Like just doing the work. You don't see hate sports analogies but like players can't just show up to the game to get better. Like you have to practice. You have to have that learning and like that mentoring built into the company or else after a little while people are gonna leave because I get good enough at the job I'm doing. And then Corey's like, hey, we're selling clothes and trunks. And I'm like, yeah, let's do it. Like some new challenge I don't know about. Some area of growth for me. Yeah, I agree with that. Especially the first part with salary not being like the primary consideration. We've seen this actually in data. So when we started the company hired it was originally called developer auction. We quickly changed our name because there's a misnomer here where we're saying, oh, you're putting people up for auction. It's all about the money. Do I have to go to the highest bidder? And it's like, no, it's not really an auction. All it means is that you get to see salary up front and the companies that make you an offer see the other offers. That's the only part of this like an auction. But what we saw very early on is 70% of the time the highest bidding offer is not the one that gets rejected. The candidate is not even interested in going on an interview. I mean, there's big companies in Chicago not to name names that have sometimes very, very aggressive offers. And people a lot of times may not be interested in moving to Chicago or working for that particular company. Now the part. Oh, just really quick. I do advising for like startup founders looking for technical talent as well. And one of the things that I try to counsel on Amon is there's a very good chance they don't need quote unquote top talent. Like you're building a crud app. You probably don't need this like fancy computer scientist. You can probably get away, especially at the beginning with somebody who knows how to build that sort of thing. And then counseling them on figuring out what the right technology is for that specific thing. And then you can get away with a mid-level experienced person who's aggressive and really wants it and is getting better and better. So let's talk some numbers. What do you pay a mid-level experienced person that you just mentioned? How many years? Well, you have it in Chicago. Corey, you just described, you just kind of painted a picture of someone who can definitely do a crud app, but it's not a computer scientist. So maybe DHH. How much? I'd like to see what I did there. I don't have an, it depends on where at here in Chicago. I would probably, I would probably 60, 70. 60 or 70? I would think so. The rest of you guys agree with that? That's a little higher than that. Your answer would be higher. Yeah, a little. I would say somebody who can like effectively build a crud app, use the mic. If you can effectively build a crud app like independently, I would say you're gonna be in like the 80, 90 range in like a normal market, Chicago or DC or whatever. Sounds like Chicago's a shitty market. But there are different factors though. So like a startup company that's giving people, you know, an opportunity to work on something that they actually care about, then you would be able to get people at, you know, 10 or $20,000 less than 80 or 90 because you're gonna be able to make a compelling story, let alone convince them to work for almost nothing for equity. Yeah, and I mean, from a numbers perspective, I don't get into that a lot with the people. So that's sort of like what I would probably offer. So probably no better on what the market is. Okay, so like off in a galaxy far, far away known as San Francisco and the Valley, it's like completely different story, right? Like what do you see in terms of numbers? Yeah, I think it's very rare to see a number like below 100K for kind of a mid-tier, mid-tier even junior developer. I think, you know, we see, we actually see people's expectations get elevated. So we have a number that we asked for, which is how much are you looking to make that we don't reveal to anybody? And we see a lot of times people getting like 30, 40% more than what they expect, specifically when it's in the Bay area. Of course it's a very unique market. So 110 to 130 is sort of the range. So that's not necessarily for in what we see now that we have offices in eight cities all the world is sort of like the same effect that it tops out pretty quickly. There's actually not that much range. And so you get into situations where the difference in salary that you see in San Francisco doesn't actually match the difference in cost of living. And you see people not making anywhere near that because they have been convinced to work on a startup or they really a thought bot like we make certain sacrifices in order to work the way that we do. And people want to work at thought bot because of that. Okay, I want to shift gears a little bit. So, two minutes. Yeah, I want to add one point to your original question, which I think will actually be useful to people looking to hire. So the question was, you know, if you want to get the top engineers, what makes the difference to them? And I think all the points were spot on. But one thing that I feel like it's easy to change a lot of times is the interview process. It's crazy how many times we see great companies miss out on great candidates because like people are too busy to interview or something like that. Like, oh yeah, sure. Like we'll talk to you next week and then the next meeting the week after that that like that is the one thing that every company can fix that shoots a lot of companies in the foot. So given that most of the room here is not employers but employees like if you're on the other end of that situation, is there anything you can do about it? Don't apply through the website. Or if you do apply through the website, you have to find the person who's, that website probably dumps into a box that somebody checks once a week or something like that. And almost every student of ours that gets hired at a place, it's because we're able to introduce them to someone on the team, whether it's a engineer, senior engineer, VP of technology, whatever it is. Like someone who's not in HR that can like circumvent all those slow, slow processes. Okay, true or false and why? It's a dirty little secret of the industry that most of the great jobs are not gotten through recruiters and websites and stuff like that. All industries. Like you advertise as a last resort, right? Like you've already maxed out your friend network, anyone at your meetups that you knew, et cetera. And now it's like, okay, now we'll advertise and like get some random people. So you guys agree? Okay. The meetups, Ruby meetups, Rails meetups are very, very important to not only finding a job, but finding people. I can't stress that enough. That's where a lot of stuff happens. And it's not even just at the meetup, but it's then going out afterwards and socializing with those people. Because that's where, if you have a company that you're passionate about working for, you really care about them and you think they might be the right fit for you, and seek, you know, not in a various way, but seeking those people, the people who work out that company and building a relationship with them is gonna make it so much easier to actually get the interview or be persistent with them. And really quick on the flip side of that is going to a lot of meetups and building your network of people around. That's also a great way to discover what jobs are out there.  Can I throw in real quick? If you do apply to kind of a top tier place, knowing somebody can be a way to stand out, but you can also find other ways, like we've had students that they wanna get to a place, I don't know people there, but we find one of their open source projects and like send them a poll request. We had a student get rejected from this company, I think it was called Thought Bot, and in the rejection email, the guy who rejected him had a PGP signature. And so the student replied back to him and said like, oh, thanks for your time, I'll apply again in the future and encrypted it with the dude's PGP key and then got interviewed and then got hired. So it's like, when you're applying to a place that's getting like hundreds of applicants, when everyone else is getting no applicants, you have to find a way to stand out. And persistence is key. So we have an apprentice program and we have over 400 people waiting to even get their application reviewed. And unfortunately the people who really stand out are the people who get back to us every month or whatever. And they say, I'm really interested in this, in this opportunity and it makes a big difference. And it's a well-established fact that if you include with your email at least one picture of a cute cat, it will get noticed. At every company. I wanna throw one more piece on there, sorry. Another thing that I tell students is like companies who are hiring are hiring. And a lot of tech companies, it's very rare that it's like we have these very defined roles of we want two mid-level engineers, whatever. It's just like we wanna add people to the team. And if you find a company you're interested but they're advertising a job that is not the job you're a fit for, they're interested in hiring you too. Because if they're hiring anybody, it shows that they have money and they're growing and just nobody advertises junior jobs. People don't really advertise them any mid-level jobs. Everybody advertises senior jobs. But you find a company that is hiring for senior people and you consider yourself a mid-level or junior person, apply anyway. They might hire you anyway. Would you say that a strong Rails developer, maybe five years experience or something like that, can easily find work as a freelancer for $100 an hour? Just consistent work.  So, yes. All right, so maybe even 125, 150. As a freelancer, I don't think you can build under 100 an hour and even cover it. Okay, so if you're working full-time at those rates that's equivalent to two or $300,000 a year. Who in their right mind would go work for an employer in that kind of market? So, it's hard to actually build enough hours to actually make it add up to that. And the act of getting to the point where you can build that many hours is pretty difficult. And then you have to deal with that many customers or invoicing them and the headaches of contracts and all that stuff. So, there are people in their right mind who just don't wanna deal with all that stuff and would rather- But it's worth $100,000 to them. Yes. I think freelancing is one of the worst jobs on earth. I would never, ever go back to freelancing because it's all on you. There's no one ever shares the burden. No one, there are all these jobs that you're not qualified to do. You're now reading, writing, editing contracts. You're doing accounts payable and receivable. And at first it's like, oh, it's not so bad. It's so fun. I can wear my pajamas and stuff. And then a year into it, you realize there's this big entrepreneur myth of start your own company, be your own boss. It's amazing. And I'm sure it was the same for you when you guys were starting out. When you're in charge, that means you worry all the time. What's the pipeline? What helpful is the pipeline? It's okay. Now I know what I'm doing three days from now. That's cool.  It should be two months. It should be six months out. Oh, maybe I'm not billing enough. Maybe I'm billing too much. This client, they're not paying on time. You send out net 30 invoices and they get paid in 90 days.   I know what, I can't, I can't. And besides that, I mean, there's also like, what about mentorship? Who are you going to learn from? Or are you going to be your own mentor? And then what about the projects that never go anywhere? Like I came from that world and had a consulting company for a number of years. And the thing that kind of drove me crazy and eventually got me to do product despite a massive pay cut was never seeing projects launch. Like working on something and I was like, it doesn't go anywhere and you're working on something else. Like what about that feeling of creating something that's really, really quality? Corey, anything? Any thoughts on that? No, no, I'm just checking my case. So it seems like, okay, so between hitting the mainstream hard and the efforts of people like Jeff and other and apprenticeship programs at some of the consulting shops, is there a possibility that over the course of the next couple of years, we're going to see a glut of talent on the market? And what basis do you have for that? I mean, are we immune to like all the other kind of historical trends that happen in any sort of market? I wouldn't take it that far, but I worry of course, like if we're training developers, we're going to graduate over 100 developers in 2015. And at what point do you reach saturation? But the reality is when you compare it to like Java developers, how many Java developers are coming out of college every year, it's tens of thousands. So like all the training programs all put together, it's not even a drop in the bucket. I'm not as worried as much about a glut as much as a severe drop in skill level. As you start pushing beginners out like crazy, Debu Camp here puts out like 20 people every three weeks and they are nine weeks in, they're absolute beginners. And from what I understand, they're graduating and making like 60K or more. Yeah, I mean, I don't honestly pay much attention to the money because I don't think that that's important. What I think is important is the fact that you start to see more rescue projects and you start to see there's ideally these people come out and they join a company that has either an apprenticeship program or a very heavy culture of mentoring and learning. There's only so many of those companies that have effective apprentices. And then they started working, they need a job so they go work at a company where they're sitting in a cube, cross-trained into another language and basically just set their writing bad code because, and so that's what I'm afraid of more than a glut where like, oh, salaries go down or anything like that. It's just across the board, the general skill level is gonna go down and then you're gonna start seeing projects failing. There's going to, I know that there's more and more sort of contracting companies that consist of basically people out of schools. Chad's not afraid of this trend because he does rescue. I don't want that work. No, we get, that's not what we exist on. That's not our primary business and we don't want that either. That would be really bad. I would be bad not only for the industry but Rails specifically. But I mean, it really seems like these programs are popping up in every single city. They're starting to come from overseas. I literally got an email two days ago from a program that's coming over from Spain and it's setting up shop in Miami and there's a new one in Atlanta now.  If the people can actually, if people are graduating from the programs and can actually do the work, then there's really, there's not an issue because there's more than enough jobs. So, you know, we're just nowhere near how many jobs there is or will be and so the bigger concern would be that those people are actually not able to effectively do a good job. Is it self-regulating, you think? Well, I don't think it's self-regulating. I think there's a lot of responsibility on what I consider like our generation of developers that got into this community in 2005 to 2009 who at the time were developers and are now VPs of engineering and CTOs and CEOs and so forth and there's the pressure on us. Like we know that apprenticeship works if you do it well, right? And like we know how to build the teams we would have wanted to be on as junior developers and the question is like will we follow through? There are, you know, Prentice I.O. of course is a great example of like companies that are doing it right and bringing through people and you get high retention and you get high loyalty and there's so many benefits to it but you have to be willing to make a three-year play, a five-year play that it's not the most profitable thing for the next six months and that's where I think everyone outside of San Francisco has a big advantage. Like we see if you're in Denver for instance where we are like there isn't the focus of get out, get out, right?  It's more of we're building a company for five years, we're building a company for 20 years so it's worth the investment. Like we want these people to be around in five years. Anyone, we're coming up on five minutes. Anyone have any burning questions they want us to discuss or broach? Okay so the question is a mid-level developer, a lot of his experience is just personal projects. How do you get an employer to recognize that? I think you have a great privilege in programming almost unique across any field, any professional field that you can demonstrate your skill very quickly and if you can get a few minutes with somebody, I can sit down with somebody in half an hour and tell you how good a developer they are like pretty accurately. And so how can you get them to see your code, right? The obvious answer is like open source work. I think a lot of people are intimidated by open source that getting into projects is too hard and all that. You can just publish your own projects. We have a- So the answer is get hub, get them to show you stuff. If you're wondering how to, you say I can't, I don't even get the opportunity to come in and sit down. Don't do it under the context of an interview then. Contact the company and say hey, can I come in and like pair with one of your developers for a day or a couple hours and you'd be surprised that the company should say yeah, that's great. We'd love to have you come join us for the day. Yeah, actually if I can plug an old blog post of mine, one of the ways to hire senior people sometimes, even if they're working for someone else at the time is tell them hey, can I get you to come in and just consult for a few hours or maybe a day and give them like a high rate for doing so like maybe a thousand bucks or something. And if you start making that a habit before you know it, you've hired a senior person. We had another question in the room. So the question is how do self starters, people who are self taught who have a mentality of continued learning compared to people who are coming out of programs where there was more of a curriculum and they were kind of, were force fed a certain way of doing things. Is that fair? We've seen people out of all different kinds of programs and the people who get into the programs largely have the same drive and everything as anybody else. And the programs aren't so structured where it's mostly just building applications and pair programming with people and doing programming. So it's not like going to school in the same traditional sense. Can you, can I get a show of hands for people that pair program every day? Someone said used to, how many of you used to pair program every day and don't anymore? Okay, well it's not necessarily, is pair programming a big part of the future Ruby jobs? No, I don't think so. I think diversity is important. Like there are some people that love pairing and some people that hate it and I think both opinions are totally valid. Right, I agree, but I just, it's not a big problem. But you don't let anyone pair program I thought about. No, so people pair program whenever they want. I think the future is understanding the benefits of pairing in different situations like senior, junior, peers and applying it when it's appropriate. There are places like Pivotal that do it 100% of the time and are very effective at it. There's places that don't ever do it and are still very effective. But if you can really understand it and not look at it as what we have to pair because Corey said so and instead look at it as what you get out of it, then you can find those situations and not have to say we do it all the time or we don't do it. I would be surprised if there was any company that never paired because if you don't have a situation where you go, I can't figure this out. Hey, can you come over here and help me figure this out? Which is pairing. I would probably think that's not a great place to be. Okay, so final kind of future facing question. Are we, as a community right now, are we Java like in 98 or 99 or 2003, 2004 where still a lot of growth left, a lot of excitement, a lot of growth left or is something gonna disrupt us in the next couple of years? I mean, obviously I'm asking you to predict a little bit, but what do you think? Is it Go or JavaScript or something? I think based on what we're seeing on our platform, there's a lot of growth left and the reason I say that is because we're seeing the early stage startups a lot of times, Series A, Series B funded, they're growing their early teams and they're making investment in Rails and that's not going away and those things are gonna take years to unfold. I mean, we'll see what happens, but I think that based on the number of companies that are just now starting to adopt Rails in a really big way, I think we're still in the early days. So I think you're absolutely right in terms of the growth. I think that they're, I don't think the thing that's going to attract people to switch away from Rails, especially experienced Rails developers to switch away from Rails really exists yet where it's gonna happen in large numbers, but I think that we are on the cusp of something potentially coming along that does that. I see people at Thoughtbot, myself, and people just in our community who are very, very interested in other things and are actively seeking them out. Do you attribute that to maybe just being burnt out a little bit on, we're approaching 10 years for the oldest members of this community. Are we just kind of ready for something fresh or is it more global? I think that's part of it. I think that it's Ruby, Rails. I think it's the leader of our community getting up on a stage and telling 70% of the audience that they're doing something wrong year after year might wear on people a little bit. So all those factors combined cause people to look for other things. I think that Java's the wrong analogy. I think we're actually the PHP. And I don't mean that in a negative way. It's hardly a positive way to know that. So if you look at what PHP does is it allows people with very little experience to write an application, get it up there, have it running more so than Java, like spin up a new Java web app as a new person but spinning up a new Rails app, getting your idea out there. You end up oftentimes with very poorly written systems and difficult to maintain systems which we already see in Rails. But what it is is it's giving people the power to put their idea out there. And it doesn't, it's not exactly conducive for building really long-term maintainable applications if you use the standard set of ways of developing it and you are not a highly experienced developer. And, but the beauty of PHP was that you can just load up, install PHP and have a website running. That's an amazing amount of power. And when you talk to people who are just starting programming, like the thing I tell them is you wake up in the morning and at the end of the day, you've created something that is not there yesterday and that is beautiful and an amazing type of thing. And Rails, you're able to do more in a more effective way than you are with raw PHP. So I think what we're seeing is Rails going into what I think is its natural state which is taking the problems and the frustrations with PHP, layering on these sort of productivity enhancers and then putting it back into the hands of the people to be even more productive than they are. If you look around you at a conference like this or at your local user group, it's really just the tippy top of the iceberg, right? In terms of the people who are doing Rails at this point. I mean, it used to be that you went to Rails and you were with like a significant portion of the worldwide population when we first started out. Nowadays, what do you think that you're seeing in a conference like this? Like percentage? Yeah, I agree. You know what I'm saying? I mean, just it's a self-selecting group, right? So it is the people who are most engaged with what they're doing. If I can add on to the previous question real quick.  The thing I fear most is becoming a guy that I met and I was talking to him about Rails and he said, oh, I use wheels. And I said, what's that? Have you ever heard of this? No. And he said, oh, it's Rails, but it's implemented in cold fusion.  And so whenever I see people in Ruby rebuilding stuff that already exists in JavaScript or already exists in Elixir, I'm like, oh, shit, it's wheels. We're wheels. And that's the thing that I worry about is if we are too stuck in our little world that we'll lose the perspective of what's really happening. I think that Ruby and the Ruby generation are probably the last great programming communities. Not because something is gonna- Like in the end of history kind of way? Yeah, because it's too easy now to get started. It's too easy to bootstrap a community and application framework and all those kind of things. And I think from now on we'll only have micro-communities. So we're like Bitcoin and everything else is like Doge. Well, not so unevenly. But when I think you look at closure, great small community, people that love doing closure, it's never gonna have this rocket to the top. Elixir not gonna have to go. I just don't believe that there are too many good options. Yeah, but people said that about Java. Java had the marketing machine, right? Like you tie in the colleges and the AP tests and now you create this pipeline of developers. And I just don't think there will ever be that concentration again in one place. What is the rest of the panel thing? Yeah, I agree. I think I disagree with that to a certain extent because when you look at closure, it's a language that is very good at solving specific problems. So it's not going to get to a general audience in the same way that Ruby did. I gotta disagree with you too. It sounds like a recipe for getting blindsided by whatever comes next. Let me make one thing is that I think it's important to realize that as I understand it, he's talking you're gonna have a lot of these micro communities that build up. And it's not to say that it's going to be only a hundred people and forgive me if I misunderstood you. But it's not that there's a hundred people, but you're not necessarily going to get this massive group of people who all come together and all of that, you can have these small, and you already see it in the Ruby and Rails community where you're starting to see them splinter off into these small. And people identify as Rubyists, but also participate in micro communities, right? So what percentage of Go programmers only program in Go? Probably almost zero, right? They have some other home that they came from and now dive into those micro communities. And I think if you don't pay attention to those, that is how you get blindsided. You do need to be participating in Elixir and JavaScript. And it doesn't matter which other thing you try as long as you have some outside perspective and some outside connection. I think it's very likely that there will be a venture. I mean, we're working, it was only 10 years ago where Java was this huge thing. I think it's very likely that in 10, 20, at some point, it's very likely that there's a new language or something becomes very popular that lots and lots of people use. It's too short to the end of time, never have anything else. You realize that's this year. And I think the point that Jeff made was about the acceleration of adoption. And that point has been made about a lot of different things, social networks, about a lot of things. Like this is the last one because nothing's gonna grow as fast. But what we've seen with everything is that adoption gets faster and that doesn't lead to more clustering of community. At least a point where when something fundamentally has more value than anything that's come before it, that it will take the world by storm at a much faster rate. So I. And then Facebook will buy them.  That thing's gonna be PHP by the way, it's gonna wrap back around. It's gonna be fooby. All right. Well, I wanna thank my panel. Thank you guys for providing entertainment.


Welcome everybody back to Segal Talks here at the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center and my name is Frank Henchker and it's week 18 of our talks with theater artists from New York, the U.S. But mostly from all around the world to get an update how this moment of the time of Corona is experienced by artists as human beings as in their everyday life and their days but also what consequences it has for their artistic work. And also of course for their thinking and how they use this time and what is going through your mind when we had Eugenio Barba on our talk he reminded us that the time before you shoot an arrow the time of incubation, Susanne Kennedy said at the time this is the important time not when you already is launching so in case there is a time after Corona now is the time where everybody is thinking or what we are doing what's essential was not an artist always have been on the right side of social justice on the complex fight for freedom and freedom and liberty and and it is of importance to listen to them but to really listen to them what they say is important and we have to take notice and perhaps we did not listen carefully enough because all the works artists have been presenting about the state of the planet the state of the world as we call it. Our motto is a bit battle breaks dictum new times need new forms of theater definitely we are in a new time on planet Earth at the moment we are inside a catastrophe movie but you're not watching it we are inside and nobody knows what will happen where it ends we have over 4 million infections here in the United States the CDC the Center for Disease Control says it's 10, 13, 15 times more so 40 or 15 million are infected we have 150,000 people who died most probably it's much much more and last week it's been a thousand death every day so numbers are going up as everywhere in the world even China is experiencing a serious outbreaks again and so we are all very very concerned if there is ever a time and art needs to speak if it has something to say perhaps it is now and we all read look at images films poetry recordings we know what we are missing and theater is a form of live art of the community at the center and at the moment we do not have it so what is changing what has already changed what will be changing a big big question with us today we have a significant worker in the vineyard of theater performance and especially dance someone from the great country of Indonesia Indonesia which is a country all should pay more attention to in Asia and not only because it has the largest Indonesian population at largest Muslim population in the world with 17 almost 18,000 islands 5,000, 6,000 inhabited but also how they are able to combine contemporary modern post-modern post-traumatic work with significant traditional art we already had Ria from the paper moon company and with us and so today we have with us a helly minority and it's a great pleasure to have you with us helly where are you what time is it I'm in Yogyakarta or we call it Jogja shortened and it's 11 it's a 11 hours difference so it's 12 hours difference so it's like 11 o'clock now close to close to close to midnight yeah it's about an hour flight away from Jakarta if you go in a car if I understood right with all the traffic is going to take 10-14 hours but these are two two significant cities of course in Indonesia let me tell you a little bit about helly she's Jakarta born and she works as an independent dance scholar and curator and she is rethinking radical strategies to connect theory and practice and it is important for us to know what our Asian colleagues are doing how they are influencing our work how they have been influenced by you know the theory that comes out of the Western world but now they are adapting and creating something new she's interested in histiographies of choreography as a discursive practice vis-à-vis the electric knowledge of the human body nature connection and her ongoing equatorial project is jizak tabi exchange if I say that right wandering contemporary Asian performance and she holds a PhD from Indonesia actually in Georgia if I understand right that's where you got it no from the Hampton University in London in London and and she is setting up right now Ling Ling Karani and choreography yeah the collaborative research platform focus to expand the critical notions tell us a little bit about the situation in the moment in Indonesia what is happening can you hear me the last week we yeah I can't hear you can you hear me yeah so tell us a little bit about the situation in Indonesia and what is happening so in yeah in terms of the pandemic in regards to the pandemic it's been in in the last seven days or yeah a week over a week we we we've been seeing again like increased cases nationwide and I think it now is like almost 100,000 you know affected infected and I think our national rate that toll is is like 5% or something but I think Georgia because it's small compared to Jakarta Jakarta is 14 million people while in Georgia is not even half million like so for Indonesian it's it's dim small maybe not not compared to Europe so it's in Jakarta is I would say we're faring much better than than all those big cities because we are small and the culture is slow we so we were attuned to to being slow anyway so when you know when in March we would like we have to quarantine ourselves. I think it's compared to my friends in Jakarta because I am Jakarta and I mean I spent most of my time most of my whole life in Jakarta. It's a different you know it's a different take on emotionally and psychologically. So yeah. Now in Georgia we have like 500 almost like almost 587 I think positive but with recovery rate higher than the national national ones because I've been watching it like every other day and the local government is kind of like open relatively open because they they put the figures like every day at four o'clock and then they also created this website so I could I can actually check within my neighborhood like how many people you know positive or what they call it they have this several categories like you know like patient in observation and people in you know being observed because they were like exposed to certain things or waiting for tests. Usually the government is doing a good job is it some sense. National one. I think in the beginning it was like kind of like in denial. I think our ministry minister of health.  So it's a it's kind of like late. I mean we were not ready. Also like we although by February like you know you could see like some some yeah big cases after Wuhan but and for for a while I think is for weeks I think is they try to figure out so it's like so so so much confusion from their side is kind of like frustrating for us to really you know to really follow but I think I would say that there is this yeah it's just like the dynamic of Indonesian society I think and I think it's much it's much tense and much how would they say it in Jakarta because it's it's the center of politics in Jakarta is always prone to political feud and you know arguments and everything but I'm just lucky I think I yeah to have moved to to Jogja I think it's a it's a different space for me. Where were you when it all started? Was there a severe lockdown right away? Believe you me because I travel from December to early March and my itinerary was crazy so I was first I went to Singapore for the night for the talk and then I went to Reykjavik in Iceland for a month and that's where that's what we heard because you know the news was like 30th of December and I you know we all heard about it but didn't really think that it would be like yeah I was alarmed because I knew that my itinerary you know was kind of like crazy and after that I had to go to the Philippines in one of the island to do this project and that's where you start getting intense because I was in Rojas City actually a small city in Visayas region, in I think 40 minutes by flying, 40 minutes flying from Manila and just three days or one day before we opened the platform. My friend said oh really this you know there's a tree they they found these three Chinese they hospitalized these three Chinese person and they were tested but then before the test came out I mean they released the patient and it's only like you know the next city so it's only one hour drive. So then when after releasing the patient they they discovered that they were actually positive so then the police you know try to find yeah try to locate them so it was a bit like then my friend the Filipino artist was was like stressed about it and I was like okay then towards the in the middle of this for me is you know it's clear that it's bigger than it could be yeah a big a big danger for us so I I just read what I could hold you know hold on and then I just you know I just went to the pharmacy and then I bought some vitamin C because I think there's no other things that you could do you know apart from you know returning to your body and then paying attention to your body because yeah that's that's what I did in Rojas because after that I had to go to Yokohama for another meeting and that's two days after I arrived in Yokohama yeah no I arrived two days after the you know the cruise do you remember the cruise that discovered the patient like you know and I was like why this this this corona thing following me like you know Rojas city and in Yokohama and it's so close I mean you know I mean I stayed pretty close to the hardware and I could listen I could hear like you know the silence of ambulance like every now and then you know with people with medics medical team with that suit so yeah it's a yeah it's it's kind of like following me until until I arrived in my next destination and then then my friend called me that you know the first positive cases you know in Indonesia happened and believe you me three of I knew these people because it's a colleagues and friends actually it's a mother and two two daughters and the mother was my colleague in Indonesian dance festival so it's a yeah it's kind of like strange and weird and yeah alarming experience yeah so it's a real yeah so real that's the words yeah so I know I think we are from the paper moon company said there was some kind of a lockdown people were asked to stay at home did you do that too and what what what were you thinking about what was on your mind I think I did for a good for three weeks I mean I just I just did my shopping like once a week normally I you know I I did I did my shopping like once in once every three days or something so that three that three weeks between I think I think late of March until whole you know middle of April we yeah I I kind of like you know stay at home but then again Ramadan came anyway and in Ramadan people slow down in a way you know so it's a it's kind of like you know forum forum month we we kind of like you know absurd either you know you're Muslim or not it's the at least here and then and then I think I think I think exactly in 803 I I kind of like you know broke that you know said staying at home I remember we I met my friends like on the three of them and then we watch film at home so it's a yeah slowly slowly try to to meet people again but in small numbers and only yeah the closest one hmm so how's the situation at the moment for performing artists are spaces open do people rehearse so it's so funny I think during this quarantine it's kind of like everyone in that for example they did a lot of like video you know screening either home home home production and not and most of them I think took place in Instagram and I think even the government kind of like encourage that I think they they commissioned 40 dancer young dancers to make to create like five minute you know like pieces and then they kind of like I stream in in you know in in YouTube and I think for the few weeks it was like a bit too much because everybody was doing it and I was kind of like I don't know this elude yeah I find I found it very strange and I found I resisted to to accept that as you know because people start talking that this might be a new normal I was like what is normal what is new normal it's it's not normal I mean we're performing arts we should not be to me it's like why we why why rushing you know why rushing to to to change because it's too soon and it's too early you know I think my my response my personal response was to slow down slow down and really take time to so I mean I did a lot of like gardening or reading and you know things that I couldn't do while I was so busy with you know with work so yeah I think now it's kind of like calm down and now we we they start doing you know festival but but online but recorded I mean just before this I mean I watched this why young you know shadow puppet live stream from the university that I'm teaching because it's at the end of semester and it's kind of like tradition for them to do some you know performance like performance and now they did this live but then again the technology is not up to it because you you could see the delays it's not like you know so yeah I think people here start embracing this as a new form but to me is I I need more time for example you know the the job to be that I did so it's basically we do like the way we do is to to to connect to cities in in the region meaning that what you created right yeah but it's actually one city it actually the festival itself goes from city to city normally companies no yeah yeah but we it depends so we started with questions for example like this is the second edition the second edition we like to we like to connect Rojas city it is Visayas Island actually it it it it was Rojas was not the first option it was Negros, Negros province in in in the Philippines and Naha in Okinawa so we we like to look up and close about these two cities in terms of like performance practices and because there there are some similarities but not quite for example like both are like islands like you know and archipelago thing and both both have this historical historical connection with American imperialism like Rojas city and Visayas archipelago and Naha so I mean there are some issues like political and cultural issue that seems seems to be like connect them then we start with questions and then we start meeting the artists and curators and you know and in in in Rojas city we collaborated with an arts collective called Green Papaya it's actually visual arts collective but one of the members is dancer and choreographer so it's you know and then so we kind of like program with them and then in Naha we collaborate with Masashi Nomura is a curator used to be based in Naha but now lives in Nagano then so it's like in January it took place in Rojas and the Naha should have should have been in in August and of August early September and now it's that yeah that was fun yeah it's cancelled and so I mean go ahead yeah so it's a in the beginning we're thinking to resort to this online online platform in October but then again we were like hang on you know like at that time it's also the practicality is because of the funding the main funder said you have to do it like you know at the latest by October but when they considered and then they said okay you can actually stretch it until next year we decided to take time so I mean we still hope that we can do the big thing like you know life as we plan some sometimes next year but in the in the meantime we managed to we're planning to launch the archive of Rojas because the idea is to connect this Rojas and Naha so I mean we will launch the archive of Rojas maybe by December and also the idea is it's not only festival in terms of like performing arts I mean performances but more like the artists the artistic practice of the artists you know in the region so we kind of like also we've been following some artists process making work so for example I don't know if you know you die Hamisato from Tokyo yeah I mean he's been following us he's been following these platforms in the first one in Jogja two years ago and now he did the follow-up of this he did some residency and research residency in Bangkok and he kind of like shared it in Rojas his research and then he just performed the next stage is an audio play I think two weeks ago in the other format Germany a Sea of Islands festival and then he's thinking to develop to something you know with the feasible I don't know what he's working on now but we kind of like follow him and also the other artists yeah so it's more like process based than product based yeah yeah so tell us a bit about the contemporary scene in Indonesia and this emerging Asian network of theater companies festivals platforms do you think something new is emerging there something that is different from European or American initiatives is there a specific Asian theory and practice combination we should know about I think is I think we look I think I think we're looking for different connection to to just of course you know we intimate I think by we I think we it's in theater it's it's happening more happening more than in dance because in dance we're not really we haven't really done our homework when it comes to theorizing it like you know or philosophizing it like you know and connecting it to the global the global discourse but in terms of theater I mean you know the connection has been always there from art to breath and to unique barba and you know and but then again I think the present generation they try to to connect also by looking at Indonesia beyond beyond Java you know like I think I think theater garasi and Johnette who help you know our connection connection they they they they they try to do address some issue like drama 2g for example they have this this group now like study group to talk about about drama 2g but then again localizing it and in terms of localizing it not only focusing on Java but also other islands because I think the communities in Indonesia is huge like really huge I teach them by I teach them by calling them congregation like church congregation instead of because that's so big like you know like and it's very rooted like you know communities rooted because we don't have like professional companies like you know but then again it is more like communities but community of collectives but then again yeah so I think that kind that there is this has been a sense of how to say it, consolidating in terms of like how to connect and how to discuss and then how to do how to do other practices yeah I think exciting times for theater now in Indonesia but I think it would be maybe it's about planting seed like now I don't know maybe they're back to D word I mean because I'm kind of like outside yeah not really insider although now in Rojas you know we look at of a specific specific history of theater in Negros Island because yeah tell us a bit what is history on that oh gosh I think Negros Island is it was they have this there was this time in 1986 so one year after no I think in 1985 there's a small town it's called Escalante in Negros Island and if you know the Negros Island I think there are two Asian American artists you know researching about this and Zoe and Emily they were part of our platform as well I mean if you can give you some link later and it's Negros Island is known for it's sugar as a sugar land it's a sugar plantation and we just which is has a lot of baggages from the colonial era because it's a it's a you know it's the landlord and the the landlord and the passion relationship that is always been tense and it's so in 85 there was this massacre of a patient farmers in Escalante and I think at a time 20 people instantly dead but then again more victims you know yeah how to say more victims in the in the coming days and it was only one year before Marcos fell from from the power and this starting from 1986 I mean they have this grassroots the grassroots farmer's it's called theater of railroad which means like and they do this they've been doing this reenactment of this particular incident tragedy every year every every year until 2016-2007 even 2018 but last year it was then you know the politics the the present politic I don't know if you followed you know Philippines politics they they try to they try to intervene this this tradition so it's yeah it's it's so it's this kind of like theater as movement as political movement is really rooted there and but also then we reflect on on a bigger how to say a bigger movement from the Philippines which dated back in 80s then it's yeah actually it's they they have a big influence in in Indonesia in Singapore and in in Indonesia and perhaps also in in Thailand really so during the last platform we asked artists to do some research about it and then to present these findings yeah so it was quite a special moment for us do you feel it is a moment in the Asian region instead of looking to Europe say we want to be in France or Berlin or in Rome or to go to New York do you feel it's a region in the moment is is connecting to itself it's discovering itself and is experimenting with forms without necessarily looking to the outside world but to more towards towards its own tradition and new forms of of experimentation I think I think because I think I think the legacy the connection the Euro-American influence is there always and the connection I think in the in the 80s at least in Southeast Asia the connection already started like you know or even much earlier like maybe in the 70s but then again I think what what's so different is the distribution the distribution of the work like because I think starting maybe I think in 2002 for example Singapore opened this explanation like big art center like you know in following the likes of Lincoln Center I mean and then really the intention is to be the center of of Southeast Asia which I think I would argue that Indonesia already did it in 68 with the same vision but it was a different time and also the Philippines also did one year even one year before like you know the center of Philippine arts like they they built this really beautiful center but then again there's a new momentum you know the the last of four or five years when when maybe you heard like you know in Guangzhou they they built this Asian cultural theater like you know really big and then in Taiwan they have even like they built two already and they're still building one another one so and then so all this sprouting new centers across Asia then they need production and this also this new I don't know awareness consciousness that you know we need to really know we don't know anything much about about you know about each other we know more about about from Singapore for example and why is that so then we kind of like you know if you said that kind of like changing our practice and maybe our travels and our priorities and maybe also the desire to to to get to be to get in depth with it you know across the region instead of like jumping across the water like you know straight away so yeah I think that kind of momentum not so much about yeah of course I mean along the way the aesthetic you know questions the aesthetic exploration came along but it's more more about you know there but recognizing that there are a lot of localities and also the awareness of not looking not really thinking are just international terms so there is no such like Japanese theater but you know but more like who are the person and what is what is the history and is that anyone writing the history because you know that's more interesting than than yeah than only looking as a as a national block as as before. So in a way you look at the region as an archipelago so there's lots of islands that are connected and not just belonging to one nation but to one cultural or artistic sphere. Yeah because the question of Asianness has been there like in dance I felt it like you know in the 20 you know since like early 2000 like 2002 we start asking about this Asianness and the impossibility of of of this term because you know once you travel to Europe or you know outside Asia you are first of all I mean you are recognized or identified and an Asian artist and but for us what that's supposed to mean because we don't even one English even English the way that the language that we communicate is not our language you know like so it's it's yeah we start realizing the impossibility of using that kind of term. Yeah. Since you said since the early 2000 that the question of the Asian is what what did you discover what did you find out about the work in the region and what it's in your synchrocies what what is the I can only I mean maybe in general like you know like you enter you survive the intercultural practices in the 90s because not only because intercultural practices in the 90s among Asian you know like you know you have you watch this kind of kind of what like King Lear by by on Kang sang and you know and yeah or Daniel Young or you know all this you know artist and now and now what you know like because and then you realize that maybe we still adopt the old you know the the same methods and the same approach that this Euro-American directors approaching Asia from previous decades so then you know then I think the process the thinking process of of realizing it realizing that as a moment and then then then also realizing that it's it has to be something with travel and encounter you can't just like imagine you can't you can't you can't imagine you know yeah we know it but the thing is before 2000 traveling across the region is so expensive I mean I remember thinking in early 90s when I was a student and I was working in a production company at that time traveling to traveling to from Jakarta to Hanoi the flight ticket is the same from Jakarta to Germany so you know it's impossible for us to to to afford that so it didn't the traveling across region internally inside the region it didn't happen until the budget airline kick in it is like early 2000 so that's that's I think that's how how it happened how it unfolded and then we we could you know we could start traveling even I mean to my ship I mean I haven't been to I mean Southeast Asia 10 countries plus Timor-Leste and I haven't been in all I think there are three countries that are still need to visit when you curate a theater agent theater agent dance site specific ensemble work what what do you look for what is of interest to you in that work what you see I think it's of course the how they say I've been working with Pat Mini to this choreographer from Chennai the last three years and I think because it different it's different in every context of course like you know because but the thing is I look for how to say artistic integrity of course I mean and a desire to a criticality I think a desire but also a criticality toward one one's practice and that that is based and informed by a by a reading a reading of you know because some kind of reading about the the the scene and the format itself so it's not like making word making word like you know but but okay I have I have something to say because you know the scene is like this and I think I still can say something about this you know like a map about what's going on in with the form and then say something about this but of course it it is but of course I work with a very young emerging choreographers and you you know the approach is a bit different it's more about I don't know it's more about I don't like facilitating the word facilitating more it's more about being being being a comfort zone being comfort zone with them you know like as as someone to comfort someone that they can comforts and talk about their work and it's it's long it's a long process because of the education and everything do you think this time we are going through now the time of confinement that also you know all Asian countries go through some of them doing quite remarkably well actually compared to the world of perhaps, especially to the US where we are suffering under a leadership where we feel it is not giving appropriate responses and actually you know willfully neglecting to protect its people but do you think this time of corona something will change will that within that network which you are trying to create do you feel something is changing is there a different atmosphere of their thoughts coming out whether they are theoretical aesthetically or creatively is there something you detect that is happening now I mean changes are happening now we are in the middle of it so it's a no I'm observing now for example like Taiwan Taiwan I think is the best country to handle this in Asia and they they they never closed theater they I mean theater still open until and you know but they they change everything like you know like like only 30% of capacity can be filled and then everybody has to be so it gets a totally different procedure what I heard but isn't that amazing that you know they managed to stay open like you know until until now and I don't know I think the Taipei festival will kick off very soon and maybe they will also do you know like so it's a it's just like after so much travel like I mean reflecting on my own travel the last five six years it's crazy and now it stopped and you know and because these four five years we know all these spots like you know okay every February you would like to try to go to Yokohama called Chippa yeah and then now starting from 2016 or something you would like to go to be in Taipei every August or something you know you have the schedule and then then we have Australia who start being active again you know the last around the same time so you know with all this dynamic and all sudden you know everything stopped and and it won't be the same because these these places these events like festivals it was so international because of us coming you know because of us visiting because it's not only because it's all practitioners and professionals and then they would do like artists lab and whatnot like you know so it's so I don't know now that if I still hope that I mean in my heart of heart I know I believe this is it will pass and we just to how do you say it some of us are to overreacting to you know to toward this and that's why is is we will kind of like we're operating from our fear and our panic what is the next thing give us an example what do you mean for example I mean anecdotal I mean my two friends in Jakarta is my ex-housemates and I think they they live in a flat and then so they they they once two of them went to this big stadium like biggest stadium in Jakarta and then they have a big you know park and there was like nobody and then they cycled they cycled and there's nobody and then the guards like from afar spot them and rush came rushing to them and then like saying oh you have to wear masks and you have to walk like you know certain distance and they were like it's only two of us like and then we've been like we've been like neighbors and then we we've been walking already in this close distance anyway for like you know the last 20 minutes or something so that kind of reaction is you know to me is like instead of like yeah returning to your body because I think that's what you have and that's what you can rely on instead of like you know I mean it's so funny in in Jogja the first weeks people all rush to buy vitamin C of course and herbs like ginger and kakurma and turmeric in you know it's it's sold out like very quickly because it's also our habit to do so and yeah I mean I kind like it but not not if it's coming from panic you know it's coming from yeah from from calmness like you know from yeah from a place knowing that yeah I know my body I know myself and yeah it's moving slowly yeah do you feel something changed in you your view of the field your view of performance of dance of choreography of curating are you going to do act differently do you feel there's something that will be different or do you think we just wait this time out and then we reconnect to creating this archipelagos this Asian networks of theater performance and dance I think this online you know this digital format platform has been has been always there like for like sometimes now but we never really think think it as a language I mean some people some artists already use it you know as a language so it's a but but maybe there's a lot of possibility in that I think there's a lot of how to say examples about it but I don't want to cling only into this as the as the new reality I don't in my heart of heart I don't believe it but of course it has a function it has it has a place it has a place in our conversation and it has a place in performances as well but it's not it's not like you know it's not it's not the only one while I feel that people now it's the shifting is too fast like okay I jump into this and then cling into this because this is the future so this is like that what frustrates me is like that you know the new belief that this is the future of performance but yeah I'm still I find myself resisting to that idea because I think it's too soon so that festival that was postponed you're working on you are not at the moment not thinking to present in a different way you hope it will open spaces will be available and with modifications of audience numbers more or less will be able to continue original plans no because our platform is intimate and small anyway so I imagine it will be easy because we created this platform precisely to respond all the big things that happening in the region because I've been into most of these big things and I think it is you know it is important to but to me it's like it can only serve you know system for purposes like you know like because it tends also to be market oriented and in many contexts certainly in my context I mean you know performing arts there's no market for performing arts in Jakarta there's there's no that kind of dynamic like you know maybe in the region only Singapore can say that and the rest of us are not is still still fairly community based and of course we so the market that we serve is it's outside our own context so it's always this negotiation and you know when you go back home and then you know it's you know you go back to your practice so I think this kind of like conversation is missing in this big you know big platform that's why we created this because I think if we really need to know if you really want to know the region you know what is the issue what is the context we can't you know we have to be there and we have to start small we have to and we have to we have to be intimate and safe space because just like you know and maybe only focus on one or two things like you know like like in the Philippines for example there's one or two issues and that's it you know so it's a yeah it's a it's a I think I still think it's possible because it's a if we keep it like considerably yeah keep it as is yeah so perhaps this model of what you say of the small things of the small spaces could be a model also for you know for artists you know in other countries so tell us a bit about the platform what is the ideas what's the vision what's the manifesto headlines you know what do you what is important for for that what you created already before but as you say maybe this will work well in Corona time what is the vision of it I think it's a process is more important than product so you know and then understanding the localities the local context in regards to the you know it's very also it's very also important then you know then then the bigger one because it started by thinking about oh who are the Asian artists that you know are known abroad and in the first edition back into 2018 we came up with two names like Pichet Klong Chiang and Padmini Chitul because both of them both of them would you know have been produced by big you know theatres like all over the world like you know Padmini was produced by Shobuna and Shesha Waltz as early as 2001 for example and they so they they have a present international presence but somehow we know that this market this international market failed to see their body of work you know Pichet Klong Chiang only is known by its collaboration with Jerome Bell mainly but Pichet has produced has created more much more than that you know and then there is a trajectory in what he created and also Padmini so we kind of like deficit it is I mean in the first edition the first edition because because our smallness we pick only that solo and even like we went to Jogja and Jogja is vibrant in terms of arts you know collectives and da da da but then again we knew that when it comes to fame news for performing contemporary performing arts we don't have it so these artists have you know have to be patient to work with you know sometimes in impromptu fame news to present their work you know so it's a so that's also another experience for the artists you know themselves like Padmini said this is nice actually because normally I only come and perform and engage in panel discussion and go home but here you know she created such a program that she could meet other artists as well visiting artists who who presented their processes and she could meet local artists more and more time and because for example it was I really insist that you know there were only two small things like per day so there was enough time for people to really enjoy everything and not rushing and I think that this kind of rhythm you can't find it if you go to Yokohama in February because you always have to be on the move you know and then it's always in rush so it's a yeah it's but it can only happen in small city that's why we only go to small city and moving away from capitals and moving away from this yeah the usual art centers like Yokohama is small but because it's already like has one to big things we don't go there you know and so it's a yeah no so this is a quite a significant contribution and concept to say we don't go to the big cities we also finding out also in the US they don't fully work to support the artists long term or ensemble work because of economic conditions and to say we focus on small works and we also focus on the community artistic community but also the community of the place of the location where you are Jean-Luc Nancy the philosopher who was with us from France he said he didn't like sometimes theater it felt it's like a tourism you know you go you watch your home from the spectators where skiing doesn't really produce knowledge and but also from the performers who come in and then they fly back even the same night when the performance is over to go to the next place meanwhile to spend real time like to get to know a country or a place you know that that is something and many people we talk to also in seagull talks you know whether it is Virginia Barba in small places whether it is in Ravenna the company of from Italy of Marco Martinelli whether it's work done by Stacy Klein or others who say yeah in small communities it does work we are located there we are respected we can create conditions we do not have to serve the marketplace and they have a long life so this is perhaps a model and also you know in small groups it works like Peter Schumann and the Bretton puppet like models that have been there and perhaps with the corona virus what you dreamed up even before you know might be a way to think also to diversify and democratize the arts and to do so how are the audiences do the audience and do they come and see it do they connect to the work or do you have to build up and slowly educate how do you how do you it's easy it's easy because I think the arts the arts community is kind of like big in comparison to the city size and there's a lot of like this is like university city so there's a lot of students but the thing is I think visual art also performing arts community is is big here and vibrant but then again visual arts are more in terms of events and practices are more pronounced like you know there's a lot of ladies residencies and you have Vienna and you have a job which is like a kind of like art fair and but could it yeah with a difference that's that's how I would describe so but when it comes to performing arts it's not it's not on part to that so it's easy and it's easy for doctor when it comes to audience but in Rojas for example we found the audience is students not even student in college but you know high school students although they because it's small I mean but that's also refreshing for us because you know they they they they learn about the theater their own theater history because of course they were like encountered you know they they encountered they have their own experience but to have a deeper context for them is something so it's a yeah it's it's different and now how would be we are very curious I mean I've been only there once for research and Akane my co-curator before we decided on Naha she knew nothing about Naha she was like oh my goodness I didn't know anything I don't know anything about this and then so the last year I mean she start you know visiting Naha much more often and then we just we are just discovering Naha so it's yeah I just I still don't want to give it to give it up and then you know because nothing nothing can replace you know like I think another colleague trying to do that is another platform is called Karakawa I think is also Japanese and Southeast Asia because that's also the thing the last four six years Southeast Asia became the became the I don't know destination for for arts in Taiwan and arts in Korea Japan has been always here like through the Japan Foundation so we yeah they did you know the presence is here but you know it's because of the Olympic they set up that in 2014 special funding to connect Japan and Southeast Asia so this is like all of a sudden the last six years we were like oh my goodness we were in the you know in the at the center of conversation but what does it mean for us that kind of moment yeah no so this is really important for us to know that something serious is happening that perhaps instead of normal way that these kind of tourism comes and the group of Indonesia comes and plays La Mama on a sling festival that's no longer existing anyway but but just maybe to say go there and also spend time in some of the towns and regions where you present the work for create the work for and to also get to know a country and the context of of the work and your idea of the small or humble however one would say festivals with small productions and small cities I guess also was probably outside and some of the site specific work what you create outside the traditional theater spaces so this is a model that can be adopted perhaps also you know in an American landscape where it is also as you would say like the Chakatas you know of the of the world it is so much is in the big cities so much in New York even so Seattle Portland Los Angeles Austin you know are come up but still it's a very big country and there's so many places to be discovered so many places that have their own histories we not everybody takes a notice off and also performance history theater history and dance and music and there's a lot to discover it and perhaps it is a model that in the times of Corona certainly but so after the TAC as we say the time after Corona and that will get a second look to also produce art to live a life for an artist that is connected with the community but it's also a meaningful so what you do there what you are pioneering and what you are trying to connect is of important and it's good for us to to hear about and I hope I will be able soon to come and see some of the work you can prepare for a year in a small place with local artists with artists from other from significant artists but in communities so I think it is really a model of a of a new form for theaters in the form of producing and creating and and connecting and to give meaning to our lives and to also root the people in their communities so this is important we are close to the end of our talk and again I also would like you mentioned Junete so we had Moko Narwati for for for connecting us and to saying you know it is important we hear the voices you know from from your region especially from far away Indonesia and you know also that great traditional arts you have we also of course know more about so thank you what is the advice you would give to curators or choreographers artists or young artists how how should they use that time we are all in at the moment. It's because I just finished. You know, taking part of a course by online course by Pat Mimi. She did this course eight eighth session reflecting on her own artistic practice and it was really nice and some young artists asked the same question and I think she gave a golden answer because she said that yeah, take time. You, this is like this is the moment to take time, you know to to to slow down and to really think.  Yeah, her advice, I think it's. Don't rush and I don't know maybe it's easy for me to say it is because because I'm on the margin anyway you know in Indonesia we don't have such infrastructure so we know that you know when you are committed to do what you do in the arts and in some ways it's untouched territory and but then again, for example, you can also can be very easily seduced for example in physical arts, although we don't have this infrastructure but then again, you know, the market is dead in in in forms of collectors. We have lots. We have quite amount of Indonesian collectors and then you can easily distract it. You know, going, going all the way there and not really thinking critically about your, your own practice. So I think this is the time. To slow down. Yeah, to Indonesian way as you say and to learn from your, from your cultural artistic experience from your region and to really also take that as serious as a way of living theater is also a way of life theater artists shows theater also as a way of life and in the in the America it's a big provocation one of the biggest provocations today I'm an artist. This is already a provocation user why what why what does that mean and all that so so doing that what is the significance but also then to say yes we actually do slow time we take time we connect to our communities we listen and we engage and create something new so this is important. And tomorrow we will continue our journey around the globe if we have a demon matter from Lebanon to here from Beirut which is at the moment a very, very important but also complicated things in the last months seem really to collapse. There was some way to make things work after this devastating civil wars and you know the killings and politicians and fighting fractions and religious groups so it's a it's a it's a complicated time to hear what how do you make theater their performances and is that the Philippines the Philippines is also very very complicated at the moment. In front of we have a Richard Shackner with us as a closure of that four months experience what we have here and we also will take some time to think what to do how to process all that what we heard. So we will take a small break so it was really important to hear from you was good to see you again. Thank you so much thank you for letting. And I hope it was as inspiring for you and as it was for us and it is important, you know, to be connected and this is something we can do the world got so small we spent so much in our time in our apartments and we looked for windows but on the other side of connect globally was a link of a mail this one click we out with you and hear, hear your thoughts. So all the best for you and I trust and hope that the festival might work out the way it's organized it might have better chances and the Avignon festival because there's this much more complicated for them so thank you all things for hull around again for hosting us a VJC and to the Seattle team and the inside young and I hope you will be able to join us for the last two days. And I think we will be back in September October will see so thank you so much and we listen to you again. Soon I send healthy and to our audience stay safe do wear a mask it really really does make a difference and listen to what a healthy seven see how could that be meaningful in your own life to connect to the people around you and how to create a community to how to take steps and really also how to listen all my best and