So Mark May, I forget the date, the Octane Event is May 18th. May 18th. Is this the Innovation Showcase? It's the Innovation Showcase and VC in the OC, so May 18th. So I hope that you come to the incubator and you come to the Innovation Showcase and get that launched. So with that, we'll start the proceedings today. Ronnie Hanekek, Director of the Transfer Office and the Associate Vice Chancellor for Technology Transfer will do the interview today and she'll introduce Greg Weiss. Thank you. Please help him welcome them. The format of this is I'm going to be asking him some questions and he's going to be telling me about himself but we'll try to reach him in time at the end so that you all can ask questions that you might want to ask that I didn't ask. So good afternoon and welcome to today's Entrepreneurs Forum. Today's forum is sponsored by Octane at UCI Office of Technology Alliances, UCI Extension and of course Cal IT2, we're in their space. I'm Ronnie Hanekek. I'm from UC Irvine's Office of Technology Alliances. We manage intellectual property for the campus if you're not already familiar with us from the conception of an idea to an invention disclosure to marketing and licensing your technology for commercial development. We manage about more than 800 inventions for the campus. The office also assists faculty with startup companies. We license technology to the startup companies and we can also put you in touch with the business community that can help you with business plans and space needs and other needs that the company might have. Today's program will introduce you to one of UCI's innovators, Greg Weiss, his career path experiences with industry and also his perspective on technologies and how they fit into the future. It's my pleasure to introduce Greg Weiss. One clue as to his broad interest is that he is a professor of chemistry but also molecular biology and biochemistry. His approach to science interfaces with various, many different fields including engineering and he's received numerous scholarships and awards. I'm not going to go through them all here today. He's distinguished himself not only in research at UC Irvine but also in teaching which is very nice. We are a teaching university too. He is co-director of the chemical and structural biology program of the Child Family Comprehensive Cancer Center and he also serves on the scientific advisory boards of several companies. Professor Weiss is also co-chair of the Global Young Academy and we'll be talking a little bit about that later. Greg, you seem to have started out as a chemist and I don't know if you were born a chemist or if you could tell us how you... I think I was born a chemist. You might have been. When I was a little kid I was fascinated by the periodic table. My mom actually is the one who showed me a periodic table at the age of six. At the age of six? At the age of six. Did it happen to Amazon or was it the real thing? No, it was the real thing. She told me that everything in the universe is on this table and I was so blown away by that. I couldn't believe it. I kept asking her what about this book? Where is the book? No, the carbon in the paper, oxygen, all of that is on the periodic table and that left me in awe so I wanted to learn more and I've always wanted to learn more and I just kept wanting to learn more. So I think I was a chemist from the very beginning. Were your parents chemists? My father was actually a chemistry major and then became a physician. Oh, that was a physician. Right, which meant I had also a great chemistry side as a kid as well. This led to both fun adventures and misadventures and fortunately I have all my fingers still which amazes me to this day. So you did blow a few things up? Just small things, but... Not life. No, nothing like that. I made it through that period of my life and I wonder whether there's other scientists who are kids that are now labeled anarchistic pyro-mediacs that don't get a chance to do that stuff and I think it was a really important part of my childhood, just exploration of just trying different things.  Sometimes doctors want your sentence. I was definitely headed towards the course of wanting to become a physician when I was a kid and I spent a lot of time volunteering at hospitals and I developed this tremendous aversion to the way they smell. You know, you step into the hospital, they all smell the same and I don't know what it was but all of a sudden one day I just realized I can't go back anymore, this is just not my thing and I started thinking about other things and about that point I was entering college. Oh, okay. Yeah, you're right. My father definitely was enthusiastic about having me become a physician. I think we would joke about joining the practice or something. So you received your bachelor's degree in chemistry. And that was from UC Berkeley. Can you talk a little bit about how that experience might have influenced your career? Yeah, so, you know, at the point that I was thinking about having second thoughts about becoming a physician, I was taking this class called organic chemistry and it was 8 a.m. But the professor just loved the stuff. He would show up at 8 a.m. and he'd come bouncing across the stage and I was hooked. I thought, well, if this guy loves this stuff then he's the honest, famous professor and this must be worth learning. And then I started thinking about it more and I just became absolutely immersed and at that point I decided I wanted to be able to teach this class someday. And the amazing part is, I taught it this morning. From 8 o'clock to 10 o'clock. But I know you love it. Yeah, yeah. So as an undergraduate I had this tremendous love of chemistry and fortunately at University of California you're given all these great opportunities to pursue your dreams. And should we talk a little bit about the project? Okay, so as an undergraduate I wrote a computer program for discovery of drugs. And so the idea is, you know, if you have some pharmaceutical that is a pretty effective drug and you want to come up with the next generation drug one strategy that would work is if you have a similarly shaped molecule and so while I was an undergraduate at Paul Bartlett's laboratory at UC Berkeley I wrote this little program with him that would let us predict molecular shapes The amazing part was, it took off we sold it to something like 200 different pharmaceutical companies So you had a product earlier on? It was a product. Yeah, an actual product. And the great thing about University of California is they returned back to the mentors some portion of the proceeds actually a substantial portion and the other amazing part was that my professor shared it with me an undergraduate at the time and it was amazing, it was really nice and so the money started rolling in when I was a graduate student they're not talking like enough money to make me rich it certainly didn't make me rich, but still as a graduate student, living right on the edge this made a huge difference and this became really influential. I think the University of California tries to incentivize people with their inventions to disclose them and help them become commercialized and one of the ways it does that is by sharing income with the inventors. There is a region's policy and the inventors for the most part receive 35% of the income that their inventions bring back to the campus. And this includes the graduate students undergraduates and professors? There was an inventors split between the inventors. And also the inventors department so 15% also goes to the inventors department and you can get access to that for your lab so it's kind of, it's to stimulate more interesting innovation and bringing your technologies from the bench to practical application. So at some point you started to play your interest in chemistry in the field of biology. Can you talk a little bit about how that universe came about? Right, so we were applying this ring structure, this thing that would predict ring structures of pharmaceuticals to a compound called FK506. This was, this is early 90s and this drug had just been its use as an immunosuppressant for a suppressing immune system allowing liver transplants had just taken off. So this was sort of a golden age of the dawn of liver transplantation. So this drug was incredibly influential and so I was applying my program to understand how this drug works. And while I was doing this I was reading all these great papers from biologists such as the guy I ended up working for as a graduate student and I was just, I was you know, the more I learned about this the more fascinated I became that this idea that you can have a pharmaceutical that gets into the body and then specifically inhibits one and only one target and then suppresses the immune system which then allows transplantation of livers, that really impresses me. So that's sort of what got me interested in biology. And was your, this was your during your PhD? Yes, that was when I was an undergraduate and then I went and did a PhD with the professor who was publishing all this stuff about immunosuppressants. His name is Stuart Treiber and he's actually going to be here on campus next week, highly recommended. He's very famous. He's a great scientist. He's going to give a great seminar. For your postdoctoral studies you decided to go to industry rather than continue with an academic institution postdoc. Can you talk about what it was like making that decision and I know you're a lot younger than I am but at the time that I was looking at these things there was a lot of pressure not to go to industry for a postdoc to get experience in academic. I don't know if you felt that at your time but you were working for some high end scientists. Yeah, well I did have friends who told me your career is over once you go to industry. Oh dear. So I definitely heard that but I proved them wrong. Anyway, so as a graduate student working in Stuart Treiber's laboratory I was trying to make large collections of different molecules and then we'd sift through these collections to identify new drugs new immunosuppressants. I was specifically focused on how the immune system figures out whether a cell has been infected with the virus and I wanted to control this for autoimmune disease and it was a lot of work. I think my students have looked at my publication record from my graduate time and they know I have a lot more failures than successives as a graduate student and I started realizing there's gotta be a better way to make combinatorial libraries and this technique called phage display had just been described in sort of the late 80's. So this is a technique where you get the cells to make the molecules for you rather than you doing all the synthetic chemistry of mixing the molecules. Instead you get bacteria and viruses to do all the hard work and I started looking around for one of the best labs that are doing phage display and I got one of the best labs happened to be in industry. So my advisor guy named Jim Wells at Genentech happened to be at Genentech and if he was at University of Alaska have you ever gone there? I would have followed him to Alaska and just got a warmer coat. So that's what sort of got me towards industry. I think I was really lucky though. Genentech was an amazing place to do a postdoc and had this tremendous freedom to be innovative and to come up with new things and the postdocs actually are given the tremendously privileged job of doing something that no one else in industry gets to do which is not worry about baking products.  Let's get a new antibody, a new drug, a new therapeutic, we're going to get out into the clinic and then along the way the scientists are turning up all this interesting science, right? So they would hand it off to the postdocs to track down. So I don't know anyone who tells you that doing a postdoc in industry is a disaster for your career. It's totally crazy. Because I think you can really do great stuff. You probably have to pick the right company and you chose a company that emphasized publications and research. That's right, that's true. So you weren't going to be a cog in the wheel of a product. That's true. And you know, something else I also tell students who are considering doing a postdoc in industry is to pick the right projects as well. You have to choose, you have to be sort of your own agent in choosing projects that are publishable because the scientists are constantly sort of farming out these projects and some of them are really important from a standpoint of therapeutics. But if you get involved in one of those you'll never get published because the lawyers will tie it up and you won't be able to talk about it on your job talks when you leave there. And so you kind of have to choose the things that are just intellectually interesting and not necessarily going to lead to a therapeutic. And you know what, that's a good strategy for the company as well. Can you speak a little bit to the pluses and minuses of working with any company? I know you were a postdoc there and there's mainly research but you have to observe some of the things. Right, well the huge plus was as a postdoc I didn't have to worry about raising my own money. It was fantastic. Money was no issue. Well practically, I figured out that if I stayed below about 300K per year no one noticed. This was an amazing thing. I figured out that in a large company like Genentech I could be really innovative, do new things and as long as I was doing that then they were happy. So as long as I kept them as long as I was generating science they were happy about that. The downside is I really started to miss students. I miss seeing students showing up every fall. There's an energy that we get on campus in the fall when the undergraduates, the new crop of undergraduates show up and they sort of show up all pushy-eyed and pushy-tailed and they're ready to learn and I just love that. They take all the parking places. They do take the parking places and it gets more crowded on campus but I love that. I just love the energy and I also love teaching and I miss that as well. I miss that component as well. So the pluses are enormous and the minuses are there as well. Did you find a collaborative spirit there? Yes. Ronnie, I think I told you this but let me just digress for a moment for the audience. About 6 months into my postdoctoral at Genentech, my advisor took me to breakfast and I knew something was up because my advisor Jim Wells wasn't in the practice of taking us to breakfast so he takes me to breakfast and says, Greg, there's this black diamond run that I've always wanted to take and Jim always speaks spoken ski terms, big skier and so I'm thinking wow okay we've been headed to Tahoe and now what he really meant was he was headed to start his own company so he started Cinesis Pharmaceuticals and left Genentech about 6 months into my postdoc so I was basically left without an advisor and I was really fortunate that I was able to work with another postdoc who was left behind and the two of us networked like crazy because we had to basically find a niche for ourselves, we had to justify our existence of the company without you know, yeah exactly so we had no advisor, we had this terrific well equipped lab, I already said we had amazing funding and we basically our strategy that this term has really successful is basically other postdocs, other scientists to work for us and so we did sort of grassroots networking to set up collaboration after collaboration we found people to do the DNA sequencing I found other people to do the bioinformatics we found other people to help us with the cloning and someone else made all the buffers you actually built your own project team it was great, exactly it's a good experience and it's one of the great things about an innovative company that they really encourage that the last thing you want to do if you're at a company like that is to be off as an appendage all by yourself you know, because then it's easy just to lop it off and get rid of it so you always want to be in or at internet work with lots of different people and I found that really easy to do with genetic techniques all kinds of activities to encourage that sort of thing or all kinds of research offsites and retreats and things that would just encourage you to think about how you can get your stuff involved with other people so it was really really really fun this is a little bit of a digression but you did experience that environment and I wonder if there are things that management things or the way that industry was organized or the way things were done that you applied to your own research programs here well, I could tell you about an experiment of conducting this quarter management experiment of conducting this quarter I'm a strong believer in constantly reinventing yourself and constantly trying to get better so a crazy management experiment that we're trying this quarter that I adopted from Genentech is one of the things I really liked about being a scientist in industry is you get feedback on an annual basis and they tell you exactly where you stand and what you're doing well and what you're doing wrong and so this quarter, as my students know we actually conducted annual reviews where I sat down with every student in the laboratory and told them okay, here's what I like about you and this is where I think your career is going and here's the stuff that you absolutely need to change if you want to get to that next stage of your career and then I handed them now the valuation forms and anonymously had them hand me back some very interesting advice on what I need to change so you got feedback yeah, and this was actually I think this was a successful experiment in the sense that I really learned a lot I really learned I found out, for example that all the bad habits that my own advisor used when I was a graduate I adopted everything that I would complain about from the bosses I've had in the past I actually do and it's really useful to get that kind of feedback you can't get that honest feedback though unless you're willing to put yourself out there and the truth is, you also have to have a little bit of thick skin my wife is sitting in the back knows that when I first got the reviews I brought them home and I was like I'm in trouble that was hugely informative it was a really really useful experience so that's one of the things I liked about it what's the advice consistent with the feedback you get from your wife or was it funny you should imagine that it wasn't totally consistent actually but you know it's something that I saw when I was in industry I really really thought it was very effective and getting honest feedback that's not great inflated that's where they're telling you here's where you rank in the company I thought that was a tough experience but I thought it was a really good experience as well and it's something I'm trying to adopt in my own laboratory and so far so good from what I've seen in the last couple of weeks we've only done this, this has now been week two so far I think there's really positive energy from it it's good so you were at Chan & Tech and then you were talking about your advisor leaving, starting a company and you didn't go with him so you must have been thinking I actually was almost totally confident that I was going to go and start City since Pharmacy it was a great opportunity and actually as a graduate student I took all these classes at Harvard Business School from people like Clay Christensen who's like a professor of entrepreneurship so you were primed I was totally primed I mean in fact my friend and I as a graduate since wrote a business plan we were totally sold on starting a company together we had recruited a bunch of HBS students to do this but at the moment that I had the opportunity, I have to confess I pulled back from the break so I could have gone with Jim we went to Redwood City we opened up this empty warehouse just no benches it was right next door to a junkyard Jim said welcome to City since Pharmaceuticals and at that moment I had the toughest call of my career employee number two employee number four it would have been good they actually ended up doing okay don't even look back I know but it was a tough call so I remember this is probably the most stressful part of my career so my wife Kim and I spent a lot of time walking around our neighborhood and just talking about what our dreams are what is our future what do we see ourselves doing where do we want to be in 10 years and at the end of it I really wanted to be teaching students I really wanted to be in front of a classroom talking to students training them on how to be scientists and I was much more passionate about that than I was about working at a company even a starter company I would have loved to have done it but it was a tough call and I'm glad we did when you probably made a good choice weren't you the teacher of the year for the graduating class or one of the departments or one of the schools here so the undergraduates voted me outstanding professor so you must vote me thanks it's really fun it's amazing to have the mixture of passion for teaching and passion for research I think it's nice to have that and I'm a professor here so it's one of the great things about the job yeah and so then you applied for university positions academic positions and you chose U of Irvine hopefully you're happy every day I'm really happy so when I go visit some other university I think jeez I can't believe what great colleagues I have that's some other place and you're eating dinner and they don't like talking to their other colleagues so they think that not they're going to come back here this place is amazing people get along really well our students are outstanding I can't say enough good things about UCI so I feel really lucky but I did a full search we sent out like 45 applications I went on some ridiculous number of interviews and we almost ended up in Iowa I can tell you in Iowa we came really close I'm really happy to be here four and a half miles from the ocean with this great group of colleagues in this innovative atmosphere so I think it worked out really well a lot of your work is your collaborations you're still bringing in other expertise into the various projects and problems that you study that's been my philosophy for the longest time I guess going back to my genetic days when I was a graduate student I was off by myself and I would tell you that was really unsatisfying because when a problem happened there's only one person in the spot to solve the problem and that's really really frustrating so after that I wanted to basically set up problems where you constantly working with other people and by doing that I feel like we can go further with those problems if I bring in say Ed Robinson an expert on HIV to collaborate with us on HIV drug discovery this is great because that means then I don't have to worry about growing the HIV virus myself I'm turning to the world's expert who happens to be here at UCI and handing him our compounds doing our own synthesis and handing him stuff to test and it's just so much more satisfying because then he said we don't have to do every aspect of the project so I would say almost every project in our laboratory involves a collaboration of some sort can you give an example of one in particular that interfaces with multiple disciplines yeah I'm really excited about the interface between electronics like this and the biotechnology world so these are two technologies that have reached this very advanced state of development yet never the twain shall be in biotechnology proteins and molecules communicate by touch the small molecule vines to the protein or doesn't so it's sort of like a real communication and then in electronics the communication is entirely electrical so I don't need to hybridize those two universes so to do that I don't know anything about electronics at least I did until we started this project so I turned to collaborators people like Rich Penner who's the world's expert of electrochemists people like Phil Collins who's a physicist who's been building single molecule circuits and so we provide the biology side of things they provide the electrochemistry the physics side and then it's just really exciting because you put creative students together in these rooms together in a room and all kinds of neat ideas come out it's nice to get the students together from different labs to work on projects and actually one of the things that we do for all of our collaborations is have weekly joint meetings between the laboratories that are involved and that's actually really important for any sort of 50-50 type collaboration it also keeps things on track because sometimes there's a tendency to drop those collaborations if you're not in your collaborative space and sometimes they forget about you or it gets less lower priority so if you meet every week with your collaborators you're going to be a lot more successful because then they're everyone's accountable right and people like to know that other people are showing interest in their project and I'm sure they depend on each other in some ways because sometimes you can't do this till that's done can you talk a little bit about the features that you see in a collaborator? because you probably do collaborations outside of the campus too yes, yes we do so for collaborations I like to find collaborators who make a commitment from the outset so this is really important that the collaborator has to tell me and I in fact will ask them how important is this project to you and if they can't tell me that it's going to be when we get the material that they're going to treat it as their highest priority then I drop them because we can't collaborate with anyone who's not going to make this stuff really high priority because if it's just a low priority item we'll do all this work we'll get to the handoff point and then it will die so that's one thing the second thing is I also tell all collaborators in advance that our collaboration has to generate either papers or proposals going out the door one of those two we have to have deliverables at the end of this we have to either be discovering new things or we have to be we definitely have to be discovering new things supporting them or sending them as proposals and again if I don't have the commitment from the collaborators then we can't continue and some of those projects end up dying by the wayside so we definitely need that from the outset has your success rate been pretty good with picking the collaborators? How many projects have been left out? we've been amazingly successful I think over the last five years so once I figured out those just being very upfront at the beginning here's the expectation we're going to do this the papers are going to be jointly co-authored the proposals are going to be shared in this way working out all those details is really critical people don't go in with the same expectations it's a recipe for disaster it's true in business too you really need to get everything on a table or it just goes round and round and a lot of people have different expectations and there's a lot of friction so the business of science is the same and I like just being really upfront telling people we're going to send out a grant your laboratory will get 50% my laboratory will get 50% when we write a paper we're going to share co-authorship in this way so even before the paper is written that we know exactly what's going to happen because those issues become really tricky and that's where collaborations fall apart in business I imagine you've disclosed several inventions to the office one of the inventions Office of Technology Alliance is licensed to a company a company in Southern California and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that technology and how you hooked up with the company because actually the company I didn't find the company you found the company and brought the company to us and we licensed the technology to the company and that's very typical usually our inventors our entrepreneurs are connected in some way with someone someone's called them someone's seen an article published in a journal and people will usually call a company or an investor will call the PI first and then the PI is what would bring them to us so we do get a lot of context that way oh I didn't know that, that's interesting well that's exactly what happened in this case so in this case the invention is to develop sensors for disease markers and it goes back to that whole business about hybridizing biotech and electronics is we're we're wiring viruses directly into electronic circuits and so the idea here is you can engineer the viruses to recognize arbitrary molecules cancer markers cholera toxin if you want to detect cholera and then we wire them directly into the circuit and then watch send electricity through the viruses and then watch in real time as the cancer marker disease marker binds so we licensed the first generation of this technology to molecular express a company that's headquartered in Dominguez Hills, California just up the freeway and in that case it's a really random event that actually brought us together so in this case actually the Dean of Biosci, Sue Bryant she was then Dean of Biosci she was meeting with the CEO of molecular express and Gary Fuji and Gary is one of our distinguished alums I think for a while Gary was on the CEO round table and that might have been where they interact we have a group of CEOs that meets with the deans and the vice chancellor he may have been on that group but that's how they connected well somehow Gary started talking to Sue about a problem that required a phage display that's the engineering of the viruses technology that I alluded to earlier that I learned at Genentech and it brought to UC Irvine and Sue said oh you're in luck we have someone here who does phage display Sue is thinking sponsored research that's right because Sue put me in touch with Gary Fuji and we sat down it turned out that we actually had really different ideas Gary wanted us to develop drug delivery systems for targeting cancer I wanted to develop diagnostics for cancer and what we ended up doing was sort of meeting in the middle so that we'd discover binders to cancer markers it would be useful for drug delivery applications and at the same time useful for a diagnostic so by meeting in the middle we ended up both getting our goals accomplished and we did this by raising SBIR money to do that okay so you wrote SBIR grants and you helped with a scientific plan yes so these are R43 Small Business Innovation Research Rewards for STTRs and other series something technology transfer research anyway so we ended up writing a whole bunch of these and the format that we use that's actually been really successful it's something that we've done quite a number of times is I write all the science so it's either me or students in my laboratory working with me who write the science portions and on the academic PI Gary writes all the business plan stuff so you always have to show some commercial applicability and a plan to get the stuff out the door eventually so Gary takes care of that the phage display aspects of science aspects sometimes we even bring in another collaborator we brought in other biologists to test things that are coming out of the laboratory to test them in various animals so we have all the collaborators together and the ward itself that goes to Molecule Express the ones we've gotten awarded comes to the business SBIR comes back to the business so the money goes to the business contract, back to UCI back to our own laboratory and that's worked really well it's been a great way for us to support research that is sort of applied it would be a really tough sell for this research in a basic study section of the National Institutes of Health that would be a really tough thing but to an SBIR study section where they're looking for research it's going to get out the door eventually and go to the clinic they're really much more interested in this that's right and it also has an engineering component too for those engineering components we even collaborate with people here in engineering people like GP Lee we've collaborated with Mark Bachman so we're necessary for whatever expertise we need I wonder if you could since you're working at the interface would it be possible for you to speak a little bit to how you see chemistry and engineering interfacing in products and addressing problems, societal problems or technology problems that we have I'm glad you're asked, Ronnie because I like to call myself a chemist and the reason is chemists solve problems we're not just studying the universe our goal is to synthesize molecules that are going to go out and solve molecules or solve problems we're going to make new molecules that then have some new virtues that solve problems so one of the areas I'm really excited about are technologies that are hybrids of organic chemistry and biology so for example, polymers that have proteins directly incorporated in them and these proteins could be for example, enzymes that are catalyzing some reaction and the polymers could be things like electrically conductive materials so you basically then have wires that have proteins directly incorporated in them and I'm really excited we have some work coming out of laboratory now that's reporting that sort of thing and I think the applications for biosensing are going to be really exciting but I also think the applications for directly sending electrons into these catalysts could also be really exciting for things like hydrogen generation hydrogen gas generation for clean energy where you might have electricity being generated by solar and then enzymes are amazingly good at doing efficient catalysis in some way then of feeding the electrons from the solar energy directly into the enzymes materials like that I'm really excited about so I think chemistry at this interface of biology organic synthesis and engineering is a really exciting place right now so there are some really neat clean tech biotechnologies medicine and organic synthesis as well because enzymes are also really effective at controlling the stereochemistry of the products at controlling regiochemistry and they do this using very low energy these are reactions that are taking place in water at room temperature without organic solvents without harsh acids this is the ultimate organic synthesis and I think that that future is going to be led by new sets of materials that are just coming out right now and I think it's going to be really exciting you're obviously excited about it I can't wait you're also co-chair of a recently formed global organization to bring together young scientists I think this is a pretty young group right? yes I'm the old guy do you want to talk a little bit about the origin of the organization and the niche that you think it's going to fill sure so about a year ago I was invited by the National Academy of Sciences to represent young U.S. scientists at the World Economics Forum meeting over the summer the summer Davos meeting in China and this was an amazing opportunity so we had about 40 scientists from 35 different countries and you never get to see scientists from Africa or Latin America at least I don't and it's just amazing to meet scientists like this so we're in this room and the motto of the World Economics Forum meetings is making the world a better place and so the head of this meeting and also the editor-in-chief of Science Magazine comes in and says hey we brought you here for a reason for your expensive trip to China because we want you guys to do something about making the world a better place so we go to the bar so we head to the bar and we start brainstorming like crazy and after two days we've generated enough ideas to fill this room no joke in fact we got a room about this big I had everyone write their ideas on papers and we paste them on the walls and we have a room that's just filled with ideas about how to make science more effective in the developing world how to reconnect the developed and the developing world together how to improve science education how to improve science communication to society so you have all these ideas all over the world it's global brainstorming and then I hand everyone some sticky pads and everyone gets three votes so we go through and if you want to vote then you put your sticky, your post-it note on the thing the amazing part is at the end of this our idea was we need some way to connect young scientists to empower young scientists with a voice in influencing science policy in science education and also the policies that affect young scientists because you see it coming out of the national academies of science the old guys the old guys did take tasks the policies that affect our tenure that affect things like maternity leave there has to be some way of empowering young scientists who are currently disenfranchised and giving them a voice at the table and I'm hoping that by doing this we'll also be more effective at communicating science results to society and also be more effective at improving science education at inspiring young future scientists in this way so out of this we set up a new organization that we call the Global Young Academy which is composed of it's capped at a membership of 200 of the best young scientists around the world to be a member you have to be nominated by your national academy you have to be around the age of 35 so I would no longer qualify and then you're nominated by the national academies of the home countries and then we'll have a peer review process to select the very best scientists and the idea is basically to then empower these young scientists to go out and do stuff we're setting up working groups that are going to focus on science education standards that are going to focus on how do we more effectively interface with the media as scientists and different issues like that basically it's our chance it's our chance to speak and be heard for once I'm really excited about it I'm sure they are too because they haven't really had a seat at the table and you know the amazing part is they're from the national academies the national academies are really interested in bringing in young scientists the people I see in this room and giving them a chance and hearing from them and empowering them and so our funding for example is coming from the national academies of the world so there's actually an organization an umbrella organization of all the national academies called the inner academy panel and they're funding us to get this started so that was my first venture capital raising experience it was a lot of work so yeah in fact actually the cell was I showed up at this meeting in London and they had the presence of about 100 national academies around the world including the U.S. national academy so they're all in this room and we have 10 minutes to make the pitch and they must have liked us because at the end they gave us our venture capital seed money that's getting us started it's nice to be able to make one stop for some money I thought of it if there are other meetings I'd show up at those we may be calling on you we're seeing you raise capital for our companies it's a deal so you're obviously very enthusiastic about your profession thanks but I just wonder if you had to choose another profession what would it be oh that's a tough call well I think my latest obsession is cooking and so if I had to do something else I wouldn't want to be a chef and I think this goes back to my intense desire to mix chemicals and unfortunately I think kicked out of my own laboratory I did have a bench for a while and the students kind of kind of cycled up to me and told me to get lost not in so many words but I could tell they weren't exactly happy to have me hanging out with them all day so I don't have this outlet of mixing chemicals which I really miss and so at the end of the day I like going home I have this scan mixer throwing a bunch of things and great stuff comes back out that has lots of calories and that's what I would do so are you just cooking desserts or oh no are you cooking different things I like both baking and regular cooking the kind where you're at the stove and mixing stuff it's just really fun but I have to tell you Ronnie this is my dream job this is what I've always wanted to do I've always wanted to teach I've always wanted to have this lab of creative people that I can go back to with my crazy ideas and the amazing part is watch them come to fruition that has been my absolute dream and I feel so so lucky to be able to do this I would do it I shouldn't say this too loud but I would do it for free I really love getting a captive audience of students to talk about science with in my classrooms I think that is just an amazing privilege and it's an amazing honor I've also always wanted to be part of the University of California I think what we do is remarkable that their students are given a terrific opportunity to learn from world-class people and to do it at an affordable level it's really an amazing thing I've dreamt about being part of the University of California and it makes me run to work every day so absolutely true but I think it also comes with a lot of pressures and you have to find jobs for these people places for them to go exactly I actually feel like we've turned a corner on that about a year ago when the economy was truly in the jolterms I had former students who were having a lot of trouble getting job interviews and I have to tell you over the last couple of months I've seen things turn around one guy just put a CD out and within literally two weeks he had three hits and I thought that was awesome in fact every place he's mailed a CD was an interview and that's really cool so there's actually some pent-up demand for talented people that I'm starting to see and I wasn't seeing this a year ago so I really feel like the economy is turning the corner at least in my own anecdotal indicators of just one professor and his former students so don't get too bogged down on what you hear based on what's happening there are some jobs out there there really are, there are jobs that are being created that I wasn't seeing a year ago and I think that's a cause for great optimism sounds makes me optimistic so I think at this point I'd like to open it up for questions from the audience if you'd like to ask Greg anything pretty much anything he can decide if he wants to answer especially questions I didn't ask any thoughts from anyone? maybe in the middle when you were conducting your academic job search how was your industrial postdoc perceived and did you have to explain it to interview in the interview process? well yeah that's a great question and that goes back to the fact that I thought I was going to kill the career so I didn't mention this but I had an amazingly productive postdoc so I published ten first author papers as a postdoc and so when I was conducting the search although my letterhead said Genentech on it could prominently display the other the papers and I think that was the currency that got me the job the other thing is I was working my advisor Jim Wells the guy who went to start Cinesis was elected to the National Academy when I was a postdoc and so he had this really prominent position about that point so he was a known quantity so having a letter from him made a huge difference as well so you know it could have gone the other way with credentials that were supporting me and really pushing hard for me so but it's definitely true I heard from other faculty who were on job searches that you know industrial postdocs people who were not very productive as postdocs definitely were not getting the hits and I was really nervous about that as well so your previous point too was published even if you're in an industry you had lots and lots of papers to show for it that certainly helped and you know the music part was when I was at Genentech the parking lot was spilled on the weekends the scientists were publishing like crazy there and that's the currency either they're publishing or they're patenting and I think if you're coming out of industry to come back to academics we're looking for patents because we know you can't publish a lot but patents are a currency well they should be and we definitely need the university to recognize those more than they do that's right I think we're turning a corner here so I was on a job search committee last year in our department and our attitude was if we saw applications coming from industry we were looking for presentations we were looking for patents we were looking for a different currency then just straight up publications which is what you look for if you're hiring new faculty coming straight out of academics and we gave them a shot opportunity so there and so how different is the work it takes when you go to like from academics to industry that's a great question well I just said that the parking lot was full on weekends these are scientists who are making a ton of money a year and are working just like graduate students they're working as hard as graduate students it blew me away I didn't expect that they're working 60-80 hours a week I was really impressed by that the work ethic at a place like Genentech where the employees feel highly highly motivated extremely well rewarded they were really impressive and what I found in my own laboratory here at UC Irvine is our students are equally hard driving I know if I show up on a Saturday evening that I'll find someone in my laboratory working that I can come in at 7 a.m. on Sunday and there'll be someone here I mean it's amazing you know at 6 p.m. I see people just starting to set up experiments because they're going to be here for a few hours and so I guess at the companies that you would want to work for sort of though you'll find the work ethic is pretty similar it's not like a paradise where everyone just kind of kicks back that those companies are great because their scientists are charging hard and are working really hard and pushing stuff out the door and that's what you would want you'd want to be at a place where you can publish like crazy and to do that as you know you have to work really really hard in a small company you can't really get lost very well, people know where you are and there's a lot needed from you and you have to wear a lot of hats as well at a smaller company they don't have an expert in biophysics or whatever you have to be the expert in biophysics and the expert in protein synthesis or protein expressions you have to be very proactive in your project forward even if the expertise is not at the company you need to take charge of your project that's right, that's right in one minute and very quickly find some way to find equipment or whatever and I saw a question in the back I was almost asking a similar question but then I changed my mind I was trying to ask you how many hours a day you work as a graduate student and I posted on the wall but then I changed the piece and I asked you my question is right now how you arrange your time as a faculty and also your life for your kids work-life balance work-life balance is a huge issue plus the cooking that's the vice president of Nicaragua yesterday it's a huge challenge that's actually one of the issues that our global young academy wants to discuss because I'll be honest it's out of joint I think in this job you have to work amazingly, amazingly hard so I get up at 5 in the morning every day I work out for an hour read the newspaper really fast and then I start answering emails and the downside of being a co-chair of this global thing is that all the emails from Asia have accumulated in the middle of the night and you wake up in the morning and there's like 50 emails that you have to dash off for supplies to so I do that for like an hour and then I come to work I teach 8 to 10 and then I stop by the lab that's the fun part of my day it's actually the fun part is just walking around the lab and saying hello to people seeing what they're up to and then I try to make it home by a reasonable hour I go home to dinner with her every night and that's sort of our balance and so I'm always home by 7 o'clock because I have no complaints and yeah if I'm not too tired I cook and then I go back to work by about 7.45 to 8 or so and then I work for another hour and then I have 10 minutes of fun I found I have to set aside some time to read read novels or something otherwise I'm up all night you have to keep a 5 again so there's a little bit of time but it's very regimented it's what I'm trying to say and it's imperfect but the great thing I did I started doing when I was a graduate student and I've always encouraged my own students to do this is to take one day a week off and I don't care what that day a week is it could be Monday if you like to take Mondays off or it could be Sunday but during that Sunday I really don't do very much work at all sometimes I do a little bit but I really try very hard to keep that one day in reserve off and I feel like for me that's enough to get me reset otherwise if I try to work 7 days a week I start to feel overwhelmed I start to feel depressed so the one day a week really makes a huge difference but I think then it's been a constant experiment as a graduate student I didn't take the day a week off and I almost went crazy probably no one else did either but the great thing that happened was my friend who had the bench next to me took me fishing one day so this guy takes me out fishing and I was able to realize that this fishing actually made me more productive when I got back to lab I wanted to work hard I was working too hard at that point where my productivity was going back the other way and so you didn't catch anything? is that what it was? you don't have to catch anything I'm just happy to be standing around and standing in nature not thinking about anything but the flies that are landing on the lake see that's why you're a good researcher you don't have to catch anything we just studied message to the students it's true I think that's one of the biggest challenges for doing something that you love and it's all consuming is that you do want to do it almost too much to the point where you become less effective at it and it's a huge challenge and it's something you're constantly tinkering with and I haven't quite figured it out to be honest I think if I had kids I don't have kids if I had kids it would take a different formula that I really haven't figured out yet and I'm in awe actually of my colleagues who are not tenured who are pushing really hard for tenure and are having children and I think kudos to them it's really challenging it's really impressive thanks for asking I think it's a tough question I was wondering if you went through some last times during graduate studies did you talk or as a professor and how you come and be focused back into research thanks for asking the question was what about the rough times and I would be totally lying to you if I said that we didn't have rough times we're constantly having rough times as far as science and Sharon Rowland my colleague who won the Nobel Prize in 1995 in chemistry told me that the difference between winning the Nobel Prize and being in the dumps of a career feeling completely unsuccessful was about the width of a bicycle tire it was about that the difference is so minor between the highest of highs of total success and the lowest of lows and my strategy is I celebrate everything so when we send out a paper I celebrate that I don't like to celebrate with the students to give them false hopes but my wife and I usually have a candy bar or we'll go out to dinner with my wife I'll celebrate everything that's possible to be celebrated sending out a grant proposal not even getting the grant proposal funded just sending it out that deserves a celebration not even getting the paper published that deserves a celebration so any opportunity you have to declare success because there's plenty of other opportunities where you're going to feel walloped and kicked in the stomach for the things that get rejected or don't fly the experiments that you thought were going to work that don't get to work and as a graduate student I had a lot of opportunity to experience that as I'm sure everyone in this audience who does science has experienced it but my strategy has been one to just carry you through the lows because one of the things about being a scientist is it's so topsy turvy you feel this euphoria of ultimate high and then you feel like this incredible depression that sort of hits when so to try to moderate those out just by taking the highs and trying to use the highs to fill in the gaps between the lows and I will tell you we've had rough patches in every stage of my career so there's been no I'd say even month where we've gone and it's been complete success but there's been stuff that's failed that I didn't want to fail and rejection after rejection that I didn't want to see it's just part of the job and I think one of the things you have to learn pretty early on is develop kind of a tough skin a tough exoskeleton as I like to think of it stones hit you too hard you kind of have to like take them learn from them and then just move on yeah just move on because if you get too fixated on those things then you really don't go on to the next thing so you let the good things carry you you don't get too fixated on the bad things and another thing is surround yourself with positive people so if you're surrounded by people who love what they're doing then it also helps you because they're telling you about something that they did great in their day and that helps carry you through those things so try to cultivate a support group I found this especially important when I was a graduate student because you know as a graduate student kind of all fun your own I had an advisor who was amazingly hands off I talked to him maybe once every three months or something like that and so you're always kind of feeling like things are down in the pits and so surrounding you so all those are my advice so take the highs try to moderate out the lows surround yourself by positive people and above all don't get fixated on the negative so thanks you mentioned the importance of meetings especially in collaboration I was wondering could you give me your opinion especially from a student postdoc perspective on the balance between time and meetings and time working on the project in the lab so it's definitely I think you phrased the question exactly right which is the perspective of a graduate student slash postdoc is totally different than the perspective of the PI so from the PI's perspective you can't have enough meetings because the meetings are the only time I get to see the results there's only time I get to talk about oh did you heat it up to 37 degrees instead of 25 degrees did you try this other thing so for me that's the fun part of doing science and so for me I don't have enough meetings but having said that I know that it also is counterproductive after a while that if I'm meeting with people on a daily basis if I'm in their face constantly about did you do this experiment this way did you do it that way then the productivity starts to drop very very quickly and this is especially important for collaborations because if I start showing up over there and pester my collaborators in their laboratories it's going to create huge problems and it also is difficult many of our collaborations with scientists for example we have a collaboration with a group in Thailand and so we meet by Skype so we do video conferencing by Skype and it works surprisingly well but you can't set the kind of thing up more than once a month because people have schedules and it's a 14 hour time difference to Bangkok so it becomes really challenging to do so I guess you want the details to be an effective scientist you need to be obsessed about the small details but if you're getting the small details more than once a month or sorry more than once a week then that's too much that you're not then giving people a chance to figure out stuff for themselves and to develop as scientists as independent scientists themselves and I think I saw effective managers at Genentech also working at that level as well so even in an environment where you're not necessarily training people you know you're still informally training people and you still want that sort of level of contact you know enough contacts that you do get to see the details that you do, you're wired in, you're helping to the maximum efficient but not so much just slowing things down Exactly that's a tough thing and Miranda? The thing is we didn't after six months have an advisor at Genentech who tended to check up on you and how often that was an amazing thing so the lab was empty but there was one other postdoc there a guy named Deb Sidhu and Deb was senior to me so he was maybe a year or two ahead of me and Genentech said jeez we can't lose the stage, the slide technology so they immediately promoted Deb to scientist so Deb stayed on as scientist and I stayed on as postdoc and the two of us worked together basically I was the very first student trained postdoc trained in Deb's lab it was an amazing experience so Deb and I were a team and Deb has actually gone on to a great academic career at University of Toronto he recently moved from Genentech to University of Toronto which also illustrates that there is a directionality there is a bidirectionality to this between industry and academics but in addition Genentech assigned to me a senior scientist to kind of look out after me and give me my annual reviews the person who would tell me I think you're about a B plus scientist you know you haven't discovered any therapies for us and what you're doing is really interesting intellectual curiosity but not going to make us any money so they assigned a senior scientist to look out for things and sign off on the bills someone had to there was a controller involved and things like that so there was management that was kind of looking in on things but it was an amazingly hands off period I didn't have someone meeting with me once a week and Dev and I would meet daily for lunch it was just an amazing opportunity to expand as a scientist it was pretty unique though we should probably wrap this up thank you so much for giving us your time today very much for you I'm really honored to have you here it was very interesting my pleasure


Hey folks, we are answering frequently asked questions from the Okta Customer Identity Cloud community, and today we are going to discuss troubleshooting the error message. Your account has been blocked after multiple consecutive login attempts. During this video we will cover how this error arises, where to see the error logged, and the available options on how to unblock the user in question. Let's get started. This error will be returned when a user attempts to log in too many times with incorrect credentials. The number of log-in attempts a user has is configured in the brute force protection section of the Auth0 dashboard. In this example, the log in threshold maximum attempts is set to 5. To see the corresponding log event for this error, visit the monitoring section of the Auth0 dashboard and select Logs. If the log is not immediately listed, you can search for the specific event by typing limit underscore WC. The log will show the blocked user. There are several options to unblock your users who have been blocked from brute force protection. The first option is to have the user use the unblock link from the email notification. This option is only available if the send notifications to the affected user's toggle is enabled under brute force protection. The second option is for the affected user to change their password on all linked accounts by using the forgot password link on the sign-on page. The next three options must be performed by the administrator. The administrator can remove the block from the Auth0 dashboard, navigate to user management and users, and select the user that was blocked. Under actions, select unblock for all IPs. You will notice that the user will no longer show blocked brute force. The next option the administrator can perform is to raise the maximum attempts log in threshold, navigate to security and attack protection, and open brute force protection, increase the number of maximum attempts for the log in threshold. The value must be between 1 and 100. The last option the administrator can use to unblock the user is by using the management API endpoints. Unblock by identifier will remove all brute force protection blocks for the user with the given identifier, username, phone number, or email. The other endpoint that can be used is the unblock a user endpoint. This will remove all brute force protection blocks for the user with the given ID. Today we looked at troubleshooting the error, your account has been blocked after multiple consecutive login attempts. If you found this video helpful, please like and subscribe to us on YouTube and join us for more content on community.auth0.com.


Oh my goodness. All I can say is that my, about my career as a professional musician and as an author of operating systems is that my reputation exceeds me. I made that up. I was so proud of that joke and then I googled it and somebody else had already made it up. Originality's dead. It's so sad. Anyway, well I'd like to welcome you all to the Aaron Patterson Memorial closing keynote and it's an honor, a naming honor, usually reserved for dead people. So that's something and to be invited to present after an introduction like Evans and and then Aaron's is really horrendous. So Genesis of this talk, this talk started one day my wife Cindy and I were talking and I had to do a talk and I picked out some really nice safe technical topic and I kind of said wouldn't it be, wouldn't be funny if I talked about how uncomfortable I feel at work most of the time. But you know I couldn't talk about that and she said I dare you to talk about that. I said no no seriously this is technical topic. I mean it wasn't even as good as no objects. That was an awesome talk by the way if you didn't see Sandy's talk. Page three of the speakers manual pander to the previous speakers. No seriously that was just a that's that's all you need to know about object oriented design in one easily digestible hour. So but back to my story my wife had just dared me to talk about how uncomfortable I feel at work and I had explained that no no I had a really nice technical topic picked out and she doubled dared me. What are you gonna do? So I said okay okay we'll do it. So this is this is the talk it's called ease at work and since it's late at the end of the conference I figured to put the TLDR right at the beginning this is really what this boils down to. Please pardon Mark for the sexist language we haven't even figured out better pronouns than this but a man cannot be comfortable without his own approval and I think that's really what all this comes down to. So if you need to go to sleep now you're fine it's dark I won't be able to see you the people next to you that they're probably gonna be asleep too so don't worry about that. Okay so story first half of the story again please pardon the sexist language this is how I learned the story and I haven't figured out a better way to tell it a farmer needs some help and he he interviews a number of different farm helpers potential farm helpers and one young man catches his eye the young man says I can sleep when the wind blows and the farmers like what you can sleep when the wind blows what does that even mean but young man looked eager strong like you could do the work so the farmer hires him now you got to wait the whole rest of the presentation for the second half of that story that things you can do when you have the clicker okay so ease is not the perfect word for what I'm trying to talk about remember I said I feel uncomfortable oftentimes at work but one of my mental habits is always expressing things in the positive so I'm looking for the word and the this word ease came to my mind but there's some some parts of the meaning that I really this is not what I mean I don't mean that you risk nothing at work that's not what I'm trying to achieve I certainly don't mean that I don't work hard I love working hard I love getting into a technical topic and having a naughty programming problem and pounding away on it and drinking more coffee and being really focused and finally giving up and discussed walking out the door of my office and going that was it turning around going back in finishing it I'm exhausted but I feel so satisfied so I'm not talking about ease like laying back in a in a lounge and I'm not talking about freedom from financial difficulty these are all dictionary parts of the dictionary definition of the word ease and that's not what I'm trying to get at here's what I'm trying to get at this is what I want at work I want this state of comfort in the sense that I'm where I should be doing what I should be that I'm free from this is nagging feeling that always is in the back of my mind that I really ought to be doing something else if I'm programming I'm I should be writing and if I'm writing I should be coaching and if I'm coaching I should be up shoveling out the goats and and that's such a waste of time somehow that's where I spend a big part of my working day though so I want that state of comfort I am where I should be doing who I should be doing what I should be doing second sense of ease that's what I'm talking about where I'm pointing what I'm trying to get to is freedom from agitation the programmers life can be filled with anxiety and I've certainly had my share and I heard a courageous lightning talk yesterday somebody who stood up and said hey I suffer from this too you know you're not alone well you're not alone either this is part of like oh is this really gonna work can I do this am I smart enough am I good enough dog on it do people like me that's that's part of what goes into my my daily work and it doesn't really help but again it's it's become kind of a habit and the last sense of ease and this is one that I love when I have it is this feeling of facility there are some athletes that make it look effortless and it could be a football player a basketball player a race car driver there are people there's just no extra motion in in what they're doing I remember one of the most striking examples was at a barbecue joint the the chef was this gigantic guy pouring sweat in a in a sweat-soaked t-shirt but watching him was like watching ballet he was so precise in his moment movements that he looked like he was hardly doing anything until you notice how much food was coming out and and the one that just got me was the way he popped baked potatoes because he'd get a baked potato out and he take the inside edge of the knife and just go puff and the baked potatoes cooked perfectly and so we just go like a flower every time exactly the same motion I just thought wow if I could only program with that level of facility that's something that I aspire to that's something when I have it when I'm using a tool that I really understand well on a team that I have strong relationships with wow it's just it's just magical it's like the hours that I spend there don't even count against my total because it you know you just look up and it's hours later and you've done something amazing so I aspire to that level of facility now getting there is really hard work but once you're there I just feel so good and practically speaking you get a lot accomplished so as I said in my life this has not been my experience for a wide variety of reasons none of which are germane to this presentation that's not who I was when I got to 23 and entered the workforce I was quite the opposite of ease and over the past I would say 10 years that I've actively been working on attaining a sense of ease and what I do I've found a handful of things that really make a difference and so that's what I'm going to be sharing with you today this is what I do to attain that sense of ease in the in the positive sense that I was talking about of facility and comfort and freedom from anxiety one of the big minuses of the virtual world that programmers live in is you can't touch what we do one magnet could destroy my life's work if applied intelligently and and that always seems it was so different I remember I was driving around with a contractor and the in our little town in southern Oregon the contractor says oh yeah I built that house and I built that office building and I built that restaurant I'm just I was so jealous like you know when you send a message on Facebook that goes through code I wrote unless somebody's rewritten it since then twice Colin if you ever see this anyway so the the challenge here it did did my contractor friend know that his work mattered sure he could just point to examples of people living happy lives performing commerce you know creating value in these structures that he built he didn't have to have any kind of reminder that his work mattered because it just obviously did now what I noticed when I started paying attention to this factor does my work matter sometimes I knew that it did you know especially a crisis comes up and you know you're the person with the information to get the system back online does your work matter at that moment yeah yeah you have a pretty good sense that it matters but there's other times when you're not quite sure you're working on a feature and you're not convinced that anybody's ever gonna excuse me ever gonna use this feature oh now I'm just a little bit ill at ease or even things like refactoring you know I got some ugly code and I cleaned it up and it looks beautiful did that matter I felt good while I was doing it yes but did it matter there's more beauty in the world okay but did it really matter so I am now in the habit when I am at the least bit unsure about whether my work matters to go and find out I'm gonna go and ask questions I'm gonna perform experiments I'm gonna measure stuff to make sure that my work matters the I let's see 3 billion seconds is a 95 years more or less so that's given how far we've all gotten we're likely to make that probably as likely as not to make that so 3 billion seconds I like half of mine are gone and every second another one disappears I want to make sure that I'm doing something that's important with every one of those seconds because you can't get them back so practically speaking this kind of looks like lean startup stuff if necessary you know I'm building some feature some big feature and I'm not sure that anybody's ever gonna push the button that kicks off the computation that I've so carefully lovingly crafted well let's go find out is anybody before I carefully and lovingly craft the function let me go put a button in place and see if anybody clicks it now this means that I do stuff out of order I do things in a in a sequence that maybe doesn't make sense from an engineering efficiency standpoint because I'm spending the first part of any piece of development reassuring myself that my work matters now as I said sometimes it's no different sometimes you know somebody's demanding a feature or especially here's the downside of working on on consumer software is your wife gives you bug reports which may take undue weight in the prioritization process and I'll leave it at that but if I get a request like that and I know that I'm doing something that will that will contribute to familial harmony I don't have a question about whether my work matters so I can just go ahead and get to it but when I feel that tickle in the back of my head that says is this really is this really something that needs to happen I'm going to invest the time to go and find out before I just just dive in here's one that I didn't even know was possible when I started programming I was introduced to this model by a very large and successful 80s software company the Jell-O model have you heard of this the way you pick the version to ship to put on the CDs and ship out to millions and millions of people is softwares like Jell-O it's just always wiggling and then as an engineer you'll notice a moment when it appears to stop wiggling and that's the version that you send out come on that was the that was the highest level of confidence that an engineer could aspire to is a lack of Brownian motion in Jell-O to which I say no no in fact that nagging feeling that I have when I I'm going home at nine I'm thinking did that really work that's a choice I can choose to work again it requires me shuffling you know instead of doing the testing way at the end blah blah blah I say take some of that testing and I put a little bit before and then it kicks off large controversies and video chats with people all over the world and stuff no no that's not the point where exactly you put the testing but what is the point is I need to know that my code works I need to feel confident if I don't feel confident that my code works I should work in a different way and there's a wide variety of of different workflows that result in much more confidence than I ever imagined possible when I got started in this but I can choose to work in that style and whether you do TDD or somebody came up to me said oh I don't like doing unit tests that's fine like first is your coat it's not my code but but second it like if it doesn't help don't do it if it does help do it how complicated is this conversation actually but whatever if you're confident that your code works then ship it and if you're not confident that your code works then get confident that your code works and then ship it you can like I can do that and if I do that when I when I do that when I choose to do that like sometimes I panic oh well I'm in too much of a hurry to feel confident like that's gonna help but I do it but when I do it when I say well no let me make sure that I feel good about this going out that's another one of those consumer products things like when you have a bug it's a big bug and that can be very instructive but fairly embarrassing so I want to know that my code works before it goes live and I can do that and when I do that I feel at ease that level of anxiety just drops that much more my feeling of facility and mastery like this code works if I want to make this change then yeah I think here's what here's the small increment that I'll do that makes sure that my code still works that's a that's a great feeling to know that the next features one step away we're not robots I realize that shouldn't be news but a lot of the engineering management wisdom best practices there's a phrase that I hate having put it on my first book treats engineers as robots like here we're in some process and da da da da and we ship it and where's the celebration where's the acknowledgement that we're social beings much as we hate that where's like this is humans are doing this and one of the basic human needs is a need to feel proud of what you do this is a big part of my motivation for refactoring this is something that pushes my refactoring a little bit earlier now as time has gone on I refactor later and later and later it's getting close to the just in time just before I need to make some change then I refactor to make that change easy and then I make the easy change but it's a it's a choice and that feeling of pride in the work that I do is something that when I actively pursue it I feel better about what I do I am more at ease I have more of that sense of accomplishment more of that the lack of worry and anxiety because I'm like yeah this code's as good as it makes sense to make it right now cool yeah I'm proud of what I did now I can share with somebody else and away we go I was taught that this was not an issue early on in my career like it just doesn't matter what it looks like it doesn't matter if it even works as long as you have plausible deniability with respect to the QA department you're good I feel I feel terrible about doing this stop feeling terrible everybody acts this way well yeah everybody did and it wasn't a lot of fun but there were people though I certainly ran into people who for whom that wasn't good enough and fortunately for me I gave me good examples of working on a system until you feel proud of it so those emotions those emotions are valuable information emotions are noisy information but they're valuable information and that feeling of I'm proud of this means something and that feeling like oh I hope nobody ever looks inside this file that also means something and learning to figure out when it means you should go and fix something up before shipping versus fixing it up after shipping versus just getting over it that's the work that's why ten years later I'm still working on this stuff but that feeling of pride and pursuing the feeling of pride in my work that's something that puts me more at ease in the in the work that I do I do a lot of coaching these days bright young engineers and one of the skills that I teach actively is learning to trust your own sense of curiosity I say ideas are like little mice and there's a there's a hole over on the wall and the idea is just gonna poke its nose out and see if it's safe safe to come out and if if I at that moment say oh come on yeah come on out here let's we can talk and it's safe then the mouse comes out and we can have a little conversation and then it goes back in and it tells all the other mice is cool he feeds you corn and stuff but but if the little mouse sticks his nose out wiggles his whiskers and you go get out of here I don't have time for you then that idea pops back in there and tells all the other little mice ideas forget it man it is not worth going out there nothing's gonna happen and maybe six months into my now four years at Facebook I had a real crisis where I had lost myself confidence and I get these ideas and I go okay somebody's somebody's certain to have thought of that already I have another idea I'm like oh I probably don't have time to follow that up I was so mean to the mice they just stop showing up and I don't like that I like being an idea fountain and so I decided to consciously encourage my own ideas I didn't mean that I ran off and spent five years following each idea but an idea would pop out and I just think oh well I wonder if that's true here's some hypothesis about software development let me see if I could find some data I'll take a half hour I'm not gonna spend a lot of time but I'll take a half hour to figure out if the data supports this hypothesis and lo and behold the more of that idea the quicker I was at at vetting these ideas as they came out and the more ideas came pouring out you know which is a little bit of a challenge when you've got ideas popping out all the time you have to figure out how to be supportive of your ideas without spending all of your time just going from one thing to the next to the next it's a big motorcycle anyway so last night I went I wonder if rails is structured more or less like all the other repos that I've ever looked at if we looked at the number of commits by committer are we gonna end up with this power law distribution the way we usually do so lo and behold yes short answer yes there's like remember the exact numbers 3,000 people who've committed to the rails repo once and a third that many that have committed two or three times and a third that many that have committed four through seven times and then it goes then the slope changes about half half half half and then this one is interesting because there are Aaron you win by the way for the moment DHH up your game I mean I'm an outsider here so I can say these things it is unusual usual it's unusual to see this this the fat tail have five people in it the way it does usually there's one person who commits way more than everybody else in these kinds but so that's kind of interesting to me that there's this that there's a number of people who've committed a lot to rails but this is just like late at night oh I wonder I've looked at a lot of repos and almost all of them look exactly like this by the way the rate of the Ruby one looks completely bizarre by the way so if somebody if Ruby commit or could talk to me about it I would love to find out more about it but this was just an idea that popped up half an hour later I had a graph I could put it in and now the next time one of those little mouse ideas one of those mouse hypotheses about oh I wonder if we really don't use very many estimates in our development pops is its head out it's more likely to come out to where I can see it and encourage it try out a little bit of time and the connection with ease here's the problem for me when I when I'm scaring the mice back into the walls all the time I just feel terrible I know that there's this whole world of things that I could explore that I could learn about and and I'm just blowing them off because I'm so focused and so busy doing this one thing that I've no slack to pursue other ideas that that's a terrible moment for me and that conscious choice to begin encouraging my own ideas made a huge huge difference in my sense of ease at work this was a surprising one maybe I should subtitle this talk how I got over what I learned the first 10 years I was programming because this is another one as a young programmer I was told never give an estimate and if you have to give an estimate like maybe make an estimate for when you'll have the estimate ready and then try and bury any numbers that you produce so deep that nobody ever figures out to find them and you can't ever be called to account that's the next one and I learned quite the opposite now estimates for finishing features I think is a lose but that's a much longer conversation but you don't have to estimate how long it'll take you to do a widget in order to make a public commitment you can make public commitments towards shared goals okay I think we can increase revenue by 10% or I think we can reduce churn in our users by 3% and on this date we're going to measure and see if we actually did that now the first time I did this I was terrified because completely against all of my training don't say anything and say things as vaguely as possible and don't attach dates and if you have to attach dates set them way far in the future or like tomorrow so you're absolutely certain is something like this is the opposite of that no we'll make public commitments when I do make public commitments I immediately feel better oh look I got all these mice in the walls it's actually pretty accurate mental picture for me I got all these mice in the walls and when they come out if I have one of these public commitments I know how much time and energy to give them out a little bit I enough to encourage them not discourage them but I have this public commitment to make and if this idea is tangential to that then I'm going to do something else I'm going to get back on track and do what I'm doing immediately my anxiety level goes down my sense of purpose and focus goes up it is a little scary because I might not meet my commitments when I do that another scary technique for me that I found is just being accountable so that means to be accountable means you render account to someone else okay so you said the churn rate was going to go down to 14% and is still at 18% what happened okay pre this is the early young Kent would say well servers were down and these people did didn't deliver the thing and the Boba Boba Boba Boba Boba that's not what I'm talking about because immediately I'm like well what if they point the finger at me what if they blame me for this if instead I'm accountable I render account I did this experiment I did that experiment I wasted two days pursuing this idea that I really should have known better than to do that's scary to just go yeah part of it was I just screwed up oh hmm but as soon as I make that commitment to myself that I'm just going to be accountable just feel so clean because I know what I'm going to do I'm not going to blame anybody else I'm not going to point any fingers I'm only going to say here's what I did here's the decisions I made here the activities this is the account here's the accounting this is how I spent the time and now somebody else's response to that is their response right they can they can be angry they can they can be depressed they can say well let's work on this they can have an idea whatever somebody else's response though is their response the part I can choose that puts me at ease is choosing to just to be accountable here's what I did this this this which leads to the next habit that contributes to ease for me which is interpreting feedback I have the tendency to take on well it's either one of two things either when somebody says about me something good or something horrible I think that's about me or I just ignore them and and I kind of swing between these two polls generally speaking neither which is a very good place to be so this habit of interpreting feedback contributes to my ease because you can come up to me and say can't your you know your book saved my life and I'm going to interpret that I'm not going to think I'm awesome because I'm no more awesome the moment after you said that than I was the moment before you said that nothing's changed about me but you just told me this story about you know reading a book and it was and it made a huge difference to you so I interpret the feedback what a part of that is about you oh you had this great experience I didn't read the book for you you read the book for you I didn't apply it you applied it so there's a I can take credit for this much I wrote a book I did the best job that I could when I was writing the book and then there's this whole big bunch of it that's really about you and the stuff that you did and that keeps me on an even keel because then the next person comes up to me and says can't your books suck I tried to apply them and I got fired and I was a homeless tango dancer this happened to me this tango dancer well did I like you know the immediate reaction is oh you know like how can I get you off the tango floor but if I just remember this habit I'm gonna interpret this I got some feedback but I'm gonna interpret it what is that what of that is about me well who knows why you got fired I hope you didn't just get fired because this would be really depressing if you did could you like nod or something okay we're good I'm gonna help him find a job after this I can interpret this feedback I can say okay well I wrote the book is there something that I could have done better certainly true is there a lesson that I can learn for the next book maybe but most of that experience is your experience it's not my experience so that moment of interpreting feedback keeps me off of this in the memorable phrase of an former Apple employee keeps me off of the genius shithead roller coaster just that one habit well let me interpret this feedback this is the dumbest idea I ever heard well you must not have been listening very well because this is certainly not the dumbest idea I've ever said that moment of interpreting feedback puts me at ease even in situations of conflict which generally speaking I hate but if I can remember to interpret I can do closer to my best in that situation something else that I do that contributes to my feelings is periodically become a beginner at something so I perform in our local production of the Nutcracker Ballet and if you want something that will make you and your 50-year-old body feel stupid it's do ballet for the first time guarantee I learned Haskell a couple years ago it's absolutely antithetical to everything that I believe about programming languages I learned really valuable lessons I think about types in a completely different way than I had before but you know does it feel good to be a rank beginner when you're used to really understanding your tools no it feels dislocated and and confusing and you keep trying to grab onto the walls and the teacher keeps smacking your hand and pushing you out into the middle and you keep falling down it doesn't feel good in the moment but I can remember that feeling and I can get confidence like oh I'm in a situation I'm not comfortable I don't feel any sense of mastery but it's okay I can get out of it if I could learn about Haskell I can certainly deal with this situation and away we go so I consciously put myself in positions where I'm a beginner so that I feel uncomfortable so that I can remember that I can deal with the feeling of being uncomfortable and still do a pretty good job this last one is a habit that I've picked up and I'm this is not about any kind of religion or pushing any particular thing but something do something like this sort of direction when I meditate in the mornings I am one breath away from being okay for the rest of the day and I suppose the inverse is true when I when I you know I'm too busy to do anything in the morning I'm one breath away from complete and utter panic for the rest of the day so this is just something that's made it a habit and it's made a big difference for me the last of these techniques is this sense of service there is something that happens to my brain when I do something for someone else in a way that prevents me from getting any kind of reward or feedback or props or anything if I just do something for somebody else with no thought of of anything coming back to me I just feel better I am more at ease with myself I've been blessed I have the chance to do this and when I take a little bit and just put it out into the world I feel better I'm more at ease the the next thing that comes up in in the work world I'm gonna be a readier to take on and so that concludes my list of of things that I do to to put myself at ease now I'm gonna skip these slides about getting the the short answer there is if you wanted to start working on one of these yourself find a buddy and work on it together with somebody makes a huge huge difference so one night the farmer wakes up in the middle of the night I told you I get back to it you don't trust me he wakes up in the middle of the night and the wind is blowing and the rain is pouring down and the farmer gets up in a panic he pulls on his boots in his pants and he runs out to the barn and the the farm helpers out there in the barn and the farmer says we have to get the hay in so that it doesn't get ruined in all this rain and the helper says it's already been taken care of and the farmer says we have to gather the cows in so they don't spook and stampede and I'll kill themselves and the farm helper says it's already been taken care of we have to shut the shutters so that the rain doesn't come pouring into the barn it's already been taken care of and the farmer thinks a second turns around goes back into the house goes upstairs gets undressed climbs under the covers he tells his wife was all taken care of and the wife says now do you know what he meant by I can sleep when the wind blows that's what I wish for myself and for all of you thank you very much