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JESSICA: Good morning. Welcome to Greater Than Code. I am Jessica Kerr, and I'm happy to be here today with Avdi Grimm.

AVDI: Hello. And I'm happy to be here today with my friend, Carina Zona.

CARINA: Hi, I'm Carina Zona. And I'm excited to be here with Jamey.

JAMEY: And I am very excited to introduce my friend, my local friend, actually, PJ Hagerty. PJ is the founder of DevRelate.io and a board member of Open Sourcing Mental Illness (OSMIhelp.org). He is an organizer of DevOps Days Buffalo,  CodeDaze, and ElixirDaze. PJ is a developer, writer, speaker, musician and Community Advocate. He's known to travel the world speaking about programming and the way people think and interact. And he's also known for wearing hats, which you can't see but he is right now. 

PJ: Absolutely, 100%. There is never a time when I'm not wearing a hat.

JAMEY: Welcome to the show.

PJ: Thank you for having me. It's so great to see you all.

JESSICA: Did you wear hats in the shower? Or is that too personal?

PJ: That's not personal. I do not wear hats in the shower because that is not how you wash a hat. I don't wear hats to sleep. Although recently, I did get this cool Bluetooth headband thing. It's like a face mask and kind of a hat, but it also has these earphones in it and you can listen to like calming, relaxing music while you sleep and it's pretty awesome. So, it qualified as a sleeping hat.

JAMEY: Well, PJ, I'm going to start out with the question you may be expecting that we start our show with. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?

PJ: My superpower is convincing people that karaoke is a good idea.

JAMEY: Actually, that's true. I've experienced that.

PJ: It was acquired in an odd karaoke accident in the mid-80's when a truck carrying many karaoke machines collided with a truck carrying radioactive waste right in front of my mom's '75 Pinto station wagon that didn't have a floor because it was a '75 Pinto station wagon.

[Giggling]

PJ: So, the acid-based karaoke machine splashed upon my 10-year old self. And the next thing I knew, I had the ability to make people mentally think that karaoke was a good idea any time, anywhere. And I tried to use my powers for good, but I can't guarantee there's always a good outcome.

JAMEY: Can I tell PJ's story?

PJ: Absolutely.

JAMEY: This happened at RailsConf Pittsburgh. What year was that? Two years ago.

PJ: A couple of years ago, yeah.

JAMEY: I went to the karaoke night, which PJ had so graciously organized for us. And I showed up and the karaoke DJ was like someone I knew from Buffalo.

JAMEY: And I was like, What are you doing here? Yeah. PJ brought me. Yeah. Rein had his own deejay karaoke with him. Two events from Buffalo.

PJ: Yeah. I try to whenever it's possible. We have this great guy here who I think some of you have met, Tony. I always try to bring him to events, bring him out so that he can meet the people. We have such great things here in Buffalo that, I do DevRel but at the same time, like the one client that I have that I never get paid for is the City of Buffalo. So I try to bring a little Buffalo with me whenever I can. There's a great conference that I was helping out with earlier this year called Title of Conf run by Aisha Blake, and we had a whole setup. She met Tony last year at Abstractions because we were down in Pittsburgh again, and we had this whole plan to bring Tony out to Detroit, a whole after-party for the entire conference that was based completely, 100% on doing karaoke for hours and hours and hours with his entire musical-infused tech conference. Then it was going to be awesome. It's just another way to kind of showcase the city and say, "Listen, we're good people. Bring us wherever you want to go. We'll show you a good time."

The karaoke thing actually in reality started at Ruby Lyon many years ago. I was there with with Chris Kelly, who was at New Relic at the time. And a lot of you know Terence Lee from Heroku. And there was this weird dichotomy. There was this weird wall between the attendees and the speakers. Like they were putting us on these pedestals, like, "Oh, they're speakers. We can't talk to them. They're too cool. They're too rad. There's no way." "We've got to stop this. We're just people, too. We want to have fun. We want to talk to you. We came all the way to France to meet you and nobody is talking to us." Oddly, like complete non sequitur, Terence says, "Man, I wish there was some karaoke around. I love karaoke." And I'm like, "I love karaoke, too." And Chris Kelly is like, "I am 100% into karaoke."

And so we Google. We find a place. We invite the entire conference after day one to come with us to this karaoke bar. And that's where Ruby Karaoke was born. About six months later, PHP karaoke started at FOSDEM. Then there was like a whole DevOps karaoke, the JavaScript community started doing karaoke. Jamey sent pictures from a Ruby karaoke in Australia. I got them in the morning, which made me feel very out of place with the whole like, "Why are people doing karaoke? It's nine o'clock in the morning. This is insane."

But yeah, it just became a thing. It's a great way to break the ice with people. Have a good time. You can drink. You cannot drink. You can sing. You cannot sing. You can go to a quiet place and have a conversation or you can sit there and sing Bohemian Rhapsody with 60 of your closest friends. It's just kind of an easy icebreaker way to get away from the, for lack of a better term, the very broey parties and things that sometimes go on at conferences. And I know since a lot of us have been at those broey parties that we know exactly what I'm talking about, where it's like drink, party, shots, loud DJs, and you can't talk to anybody. And it's like, that's not really fun. People there wear t-shirt, cannons, and shit. Where is the enjoyment there? Where's the personal interaction? I'd much rather hang out and sing Panic! At The Disco with Jamey at a tiny bar in Buffalo than listen to a DJ and then go home and think, "I don't know any of those 250 people who were in the room with me." But that's me.

JAMEY: I'm glad to be higher up on your list. Thank you.

PJ: [Laughs] All the time, Jamey. All the time. But yeah, it's interesting. I mean, when we originally started talking about this episode and coming on Greater Than Code, Carina and I were having conversation about a lot of things in the DevRel world. And it was interesting to me because I unintentionally became part of the DevRel world. That was kind of where this whole story began.

JESSICA: Does it tell a big plan to drive more of the world into Karaoke? 

PJ: It was not. Okay, so maybe that was my insidious under plan. But in reality, it was all an accident. It all started, again, I don't know. Every story is going to start with Pittsburgh for this entire episode. But I was at Steel City Ruby, the first one, I think it was like 2012. And whenever there was kind of a localized or not too far away, you could drive to a conference, Jim Weirich would send me a message to say, "Hey, bring your guitar. We'll just skip lunch on day one or day two." We'll bring our guitars to the conference and we'll mess around. And for those of you who remember Jim, he was an amazing guitarist, ukulele player, bass, harmonica. The man was definitely suited to do many things well. One of them playing six stringed instruments. But we were sitting there at lunch and it was myself, a guy I worked with named Bill Chapman, Jim and Corey Haines, who a lot of us also know. And Corey comes up to me and I'd been working at Engine Yard about a year at that point in time, working in support. I was a Ruby developer, working support because everybody else was an infrastructure person or an ops person. And I was the dev. I was a dev to their ops. We created DevOps. Thank you. Engine Yard, everyone.

But I was at the conference and we're sitting there and Corey's like, "You know, you're a pretty smart guy." And I said, "Thank you." And he said, "Why don't you ever do a talk? You're so outgoing." And I was like, "You folks go up there and you deliver these amazing deep dive technical things. I have a half an idea about a talk. It's kind of related to this, but it's not." And he's like, "Cool." And he goes out and I thought maybe he went to the restroom or maybe he was going to get more pizza or a soda or something. He comes back and goes, "Dude, I totally signed you up for lighting talk." And I'm like, "What?" He's like, "I signed you up for lighting talk." I'm like, "I said I had half an idea. I don't have slides." "You don't need slides. You'll be fine." "I'll be fine? I haven't done public speaking since college because it's not really my thing. As a musician, I play the drums and I had a full wall between me and the rest of the world." He's like, "No, you'll be fine. You're going right after me." And I'm like, "Oh, that's even better. Thanks, Corey. That's awesome."

So, there's like eight people. He's seven. I'm eight. We go on. He does this great talk about, I remember the person before him talked about lightning. Corey talked about like the importance of properly using class structures. I can't remember exactly what he talked about because I was kind of in a state at that point in time. I don't know what's going to come out of my mouth. I have no slides. I've no idea what I'm about to say. But I knew that I wanted to talk about meetups because we'd just started working on rebuilding the Western New York Ruby Brigade. Remember when we used to all have Ruby Brigades? Those were fun.

So I got up and I was like, "Listen, the thing is meetups are like an open source project." And then I just spoke nonstop for five minutes. I thought that would be the end of it. But as luck would have it, if you call it luck, I get off stage, and a gentleman named Wes Garrison from Kansas City in Missouri comes up and says, "Hey, I would love if you would give that full talk at our conference, Ruby Midwest. Would you be willing to do that?" And I said, "I don't even know if I can." I don't know if that's something I can do. That's not my job. Talked to my boss a couple of days later. He said, "Yeah, absolutely. Do it. Make sure you're wearing an Engine Yard t-shirt." And if I remember correctly, there's one very clear voice in the crowd every time I made a joke and it was Jessica who is laughing. Like the room was full.

JESSICA: That sounds about right.

PJ: Yeah, Jessica was there, and that's where I met Carrie and a bunch of other people. [crosstalk] Yeah, it was incredible and it was amazing. I was like, "This is cool. I want to do this more often." It just so happened that some of the folks from Ruby Lyon were there, so they invited me to come speak in France. Then I was going to Israel. And then the next thing I know, a guy named Eamon Léonard, who I think a few of you have met, who is a very good friend of mine and a very interesting individual. He came to me and he said, "Hey, we're going to start a community team." And I said, "Cool. What's a community team?" He goes, "I have no idea. We're going to figure it out." And that's kind of how I started doing DevRel at Engine Yard. We created a team and made up all the rules as we were going along. No one had really done it before. Before that point, if you were doing -- it wasn't even called DevRel -- if you were doing community talks and things like that, you were an engineer, or you were a VP of something or maybe even a C-level. And you'd go out, you would go do your slides and give your talk. There is no formal job for this.

So, of course, the first thing that we had to do is convince people to pass money to do this. Luckily, we had Eamon and he's very convincing. He convinced Engine Yard to buy his company based in an interaction in a pub in Ireland one night. He convinced Engine Yard to buy Orchestra, which was a platform as a service for PHP. And that's like an incredible thing.

So here we are, almost 10 years later, of doing DevRel. I now own my own company that does DevRel as a service. We're the first people to ever do that. In between, I've worked for startups that were small. I've worked for startups that lasted about a month. I've worked for big companies, some of the oldest companies in the tech business. And all, really focusing on how people interact with the machines. Why is code important? What are the things we do? What's innovation? What does all this mean?

I've seen each of you speak and each of you has been an inspiration for some of the things that I've done. I do remember one thing that particularly stands out is being in Brazil with Avdi, where we happen to give two talks that completely meshed into each other perfectly. And it was like the ultimate conference moment. But these are the kind of things that I think people live for.

I know we're recording this during a time when a lot of people are kind of on self isolation or furlough or or all kinds of things, locked down. And this is, I think, a major thing that's missing. You can have a community and you can have an online community. It could be very vibrant, but it does require some sort of physical interaction at some point in time. You need to see people. You need to maybe not embrace them physically, but embrace them mentally and emotionally to really understand what's the importance of a community. And that's kind of why I do what I do.

CARINA: Plus one on that. This is [inaudible] as we move to online conferences very abruptly overnight, I'm struggling with what that's going to mean. Because to me, so much of what makes conferences important is the influence it can have on your career, to be able to talk directly to people, especially people that you do feel are above you. To have some time really discovering that we're not ranked and that you can really learn a lot from people who are both junior and senior. And to be able to build networks and have really spontaneous conversations that just don't happen when you're having to focus on some of your particular problem today. All those things, including, like you said, sort of the emotional labor of it is really important, actually. Someone needs to do that and someone needs to be able to really talk to community. And those things like the body language of it, when someone's sort of pausing to ask, "How's this working out for you?" All these little things that are really only discernable in-person and only can be rewarding in-person. How are we going to either replicate that or do something else that delivers that part of the experience, even just the focus of it?

There's an online conference going on today. It's the day two of [inaudible] Dev live, and the interaction was so different. Even people who were saying, "Oh, I'll come back later and watch that morning talk at lunch." And one thing that really helps me is that I'm somewhere where I can only focus on just one thing because otherwise my queue of talks is unlimited and I never really circle back to them if it's on video because there's always tomorrow that you watch the video.

PJ: Right. We have this joke in Buffalo. It's like, "You know why I never go to Niagara Falls? It's because it's always going to be there. I can see it whenever I want." People in New York City don't go see the Empire State Building. Why? Because it's always going to be there. It's not a big deal. But it is kind of that same idea when a talk is recorded. That's great to have it there for posterity. And if someone needs to dig into that information really deeply, that's awesome. But I think the difference in a live conference is the talk is almost less important than what the talk stimulates. The idea behind the talk is you've got 30 or 40 minutes to say, "I'm going to plant this idea in your head. I'm planting this seed." Then you're going to get a 10-minute break or half hour for lunch or whatever. You're going to go out that hallway and you're going to see people who weren't in this talk. And you're going to talk about this. Well, they talk about the thing that they learned, and that's how you grow a garden and that's how you grow a forest, that's how you grow a community. You just keep planting these seeds. 

I like what you said about the body language, too. I've seen some of these videos for these online things, and it's just like we are now. So we're on Skype, and you can basically see people from the clavicle up. Granted I'm animated and my hands are flying all over the place because that's how I talk, but that's the kind of thing that you miss. Someone's passion about something, you can't see it that much from the clavicle up. You can't tell if they're really into it. You can try to intone and you can try to do different things.

I used that example when I spoke at Ruby Midwest, and I knew Jessica was there because of her laugh. If I was to just be in a video call and Jessica wasn't visible and she laughed, I wouldn't know because I can't see how her body's reacting. Is she laughing at me? Is she laughing with me? Is she laughing inappropriately at something that isn't even happening around me? I have no way of knowing. And that body language, those interactions are key, key to delivering the message you're trying to deliver. I mean, if not, we could all have the most boring monotone voices to just sit there and say, [in a monotone boring voice] "Here's the content. We're going to talk about DevOps today. DevOps is the concatenation of development and operations." That's great for NPR, or a podcast or some ASMR video. It's not great for delivering tech talks. 

CARINA: For me, conference is the most important part of Hallway Track, for all the reasons that you just described. And also, it's funny that you mentioned Steel City of all places, because I was at Steel City in 2013 and it was the only time that I crossed paths with Jim Weirich and it was outside of a talk. My talk was coming up, and so I sat in the hall getting ready. And there I was somehow, all of a sudden, alone with Jim Weirick, Konstantin Haase and some third person who I also just looked up to tremendously and -- I know who it was! Avdi, it was you!

[Laughter]

CARINA: That's right. You were on my right, Konstantin was on my left, and Jim was across to me. And I'm standing there going like, "They are three people talking right now and they're making eye contact with me and I don't know what to do." And Jim was just so full of joy. Here is somebody who was a real leader in the community without in any way trying. He just was someone that everyone loved so much. I say 'was' because he did pass away. I think it was even a few months after that. It was not that long, whatever it was. But he was just the most joyful person and a little kid. His talk -- actually, it wasn't a talk. He was just showing off a drone. It was just him giggling over a drone. Only he could get away with doing that, and it was just wonderful. But those kinds of spontaneous things, there is no way for that to happen except in person.

And I think aside from conferences, that's also our every day. And I think one of the reasons why right now a lot of us are struggling is that you don't have that kind of interaction, those opportunities to just be in a room with someone and have a conversation happen that would never have happened if you set out to do it deliberately. It would never be an agenda item. And to ever hear things. When you're too afraid to speak, but you overhear something, that just blows your mind, like, "Whoa! That person has like been doing this 10 more years, is struggling with the exact same problem I am. I had no idea it's okay that I'm struggling with it, too." Those are wonderful moments that usually only happen at conferences or meetups.

JAMEY: Yes, I totally agree. I've heard a lot of people discussing how can we emulate the Hallway Track in these virtual conferences, which I do think is an important conversation to have because right now, we have to do these virtual conferences. It's the only choice. And we should try to emulate that as best we can. But there's been a lot of debate that I've seen about, like, "Well, can we emulate it to the point where it's like as good as." And I think the answer is no. I think the idea of deciding that you want to do the Hallway Track is something that people do and I've done, and that can be a conscious thing. But even if you're not deciding that you want to do the Hallway Track, like some of the most interesting people I've met, we just happen to be standing near each other in line when we were getting lunch and you can't emulate.

PJ: Exactly. It's those kind of random interactions. It's finding out you're there by yourself, "Oh, I'm just going to grab a table." And you randomly sit down with somebody. This was my first actual conference experience before I ever started speaking. I was a developer and the place I was speaking, we did Visual FoxPro. Should I pause for a moment so all the youngsters can look up what Visual FoxPro is? We converted to Ruby. And this conference called Voices That Matter was happening. So, I go to this conference and up to that point, I've only been to Microsoft events. So buttoned down shirt, khaki pants. picture that. You all know me. Picture me wearing that outfit. It's not likely.

I walk in, I'd been told to meet this woman. I can't remember her name. She was like the organizer. And she said, "Okay. Have a seat with these folks." They're part of the Ruby community. And so, I sit down at a table, and it's Brian Liles, Sandi Metz, [inaudible], and Obie Fernandez. And I did not know what any of these people who had written books that I was working with looked like. And Brian looks over at me and he's eating his, like porridge and oatmeal. And he's like, "Hey, you look uncomfortable --" Of course, they're on T-shirts and jeans. And he's like, "You look uncomfortable." I'm like, "Yeah." He's like, "How far away is your hotel?" I was like, "Not far." He's like, "Go change." He's like, "If this is your first Ruby conference, you probably don't know. We're starting 50 minutes late at least. So go change. Come back." He's like, "Don't worry. My name is Brian." Brian and I have been friends ever since that moment. And it was just kind of like, these were four of the biggest names in Ruby at that time, short of like DHH and Matz. And they're just like, "Yeah, you're cool. Here, we'll save your your eggs and toasts," or whatever I had on my plate. "Go steal a shirt from Pivotal and toss it on and go put some jeans on because you don't look like you're actually comfortable." And they were right. I was not comfortable in polyester khakis and a dress shirt. I never was.

That's the kind of interaction. People are never going to know or understand if they can't have that big interaction. And it's also the moment that I kind of realized, finding a community is about finding the right place, the right fit for you. I've since been able to travel through a lot of different communities, code communities, different philosophical and theoretical things around development and architecture and operations and everything. I've been very lucky in my career that I've been able to do that, but I've never had the sense of welcome that I ever had when I first joined the Ruby community. I know Avdi has talked about this a lot, like that feeling that when RubyConf or RailsConf comes up, it's like homecoming. It's like old home days. You'll go into the reunion, you're going to see all your friends. You're going to make some new ones. It's almost a guarantee. And I miss that a lot. I think that's something that these virtual conferences, they can't compete with that. There's no way they can actually equate what they're doing with that experience.

JESSICA: It sounds like we're just bragging about conference stories and all the cool people we've met and aren't we cool. But the thing is, we are where we are because we ran into people at conferences before we were speakers. 

PJ: Right. 

JESSICA: Before we had this podcast. And we're speakers because of that and we're podcasting because of that. And we're not special. We're lucky. And this is one way we were lucky. And it sucks that it's gone right now.

PJ: Absolutely.

CARINA: Thank you for saying that. I could not agree more strongly. I am in the unusual place that my very first conference was the first time I spoke. So, I was over my head. And I'm grateful that I was scheduled to speak the second day because I didn't know I was over my head until the first day.

[Laughter]

The first day was when I realized I was in trouble. I thought I was prepared but I was extremely wrong. Sandi Metz was one of the people who spoke that first day, and that's a great way to find out that you're way over your head. 

I agree so strongly that nobody here is extra cool or extra important. What we are is extra visible. And that visibility provides such a platform to help other people as well, to make sure that their voices get heard as developer relations people bringing those voices back to the company, to the engineering, to product that there is a full circle going on. And those signals are hard to pick up in any way other than in-person. There's certainly a lot that you can through things like forums and Slacks. But the reason that I'm in DevRels is because of conferences that they provided me all sorts of different opportunities to both do good and to be seen and heard. I don't think a voice like mine was going to be heard any other way than conferences forcing people to sit down and hear, and that means the world to me. And I know some of the other people like Ashe Dryden organized AlterConf for years, and the specific purpose was to give underrepresented people, some of them very far outside of tech, a platform and a voice to be heard by people in tech. And that was transformative. It still is transformative.

JAMEY: AlterConf was my first time speaking.

CARINA: Yeah, legendary. 

PJ: That's the key. I think that a lot of people look to it and say, "Oh, these folks in DevRel, first of all, they're leading such glamorous lives, traveling the world just to talk about stuff they already know. How awesome that must be. First of all, let me tell you, not awesome. When I know when I land in Detroit which gate is I'm at, determines how far I am away from the Popeye's Fried Chicken place. And I know this inherently as soon as they say, "You're at Gate A36," I'm like, "I'm only like four gates away. I know I can get there." These are things you know when you know exactly how to pack how many cubes into your -- you have so much knowledge on things you shouldn't. You spend so much time in airports and cabs and hotels. And sometimes you go to a city and you never see that city. And it's not as easy as it sounds, but it's also our responsibility to use the platform that we have to change the way the platform looks.

I was working again with my friend Eamon Leonard. We were helping the folks at Web Summit because this is just at the beginning when large scale conferences were starting to say, "This diversity and inclusion thing seems kind of important, but we don't understand how to do it." And we came to them with a simple statement. We said, "Here's what you're going to do. Put people on stage that don't look like us." They're like, "What do you mean?" White bearded older Gen-Xers, just don't put us on stage." They're like, "Well, we have a log rhythm and we have this whole thing that we're doing to build these cross AI research machine learning list of speakers." I literally provide them with a list of 28 speakers that weren't white men in a matter of 20 minutes off the top of my head. I'm like, "These are all great speakers. These are all A-level speakers. They are killer caliber." And there's no way that your algorithm works if I can do this and make a spreadsheet faster than you can come up with three speakers. I mean, we are lucky enough to be out there in the world to meet these people and take the opportunities to kind of break down the barriers.

I gave a big speech to people that I mentor. My job is to look for people who don't look like me, reach my hand out, pull them all the way up. And if I'm lucky, I can throw them higher than I got. Granted I shouldn't be throwing anyone in the air with my bad back, but what can you do? But in all seriousness, that's our responsibility. That's a heavy responsibility. So when people come and they say, "Oh, DevRel, you're just chilling stuff. You're just living a fancy lifestyle. You're just sucking on the money of an organization or a corporation to live and influence your life." It's like, "No, you've completely missed the point." And if that is the reason why you're doing it, you're doing it wrong. And I wouldn't say that there's no one who's not doing it for those reasons, because there are. And I've met them and I don't appreciate them at all.

JAMEY: In the course [inaudible] you actually started to answer the question that I hadn't asked yet. But I'm still going to ask you, which is I agree with something Jessica said about us being very lucky. I do agree with that. And listening to your story about how this happened to you, I can see, things fall into place. It wasn't necessarily in your planning. That's how it happened for me, too. I think that's pretty common. And so my question is, how do you, and this is what you started to answer, how do you pass on that "lucky" to other people, but also how would you recommend that other people pass on that "lucky" to other people?

PJ: Sure. Part of this is a very active activity. I know that's like a weird way to say it, but it's a very active thing you need to do. You need to find the people. Again, I'm lucky I go to 25 to 30 conferences a year, including the ones I organize. So, I get to see the speakers. I get to meet the people in their natural, where they live, at their point of origin. So I can see someone in India who is just out of university and says, "I've never had a voice before. How do I get up on stage?" And starting with, like, "Let me tell you about CFPs." But all those things and just helping people share knowledge. I'm lucky in the fact that I get to meet a lot of these people firsthand, but it's also the network you create in doing this.

I'd be willing to bet almost every single one of us has been contacted by someone that says, "Listen, I appreciate what you do. I think it's awesome. I want to be in. I want in." Whether that's learning how to code or learning how infrastructure works or how do you get a job in tech when you have no experience, how do you get experience in tech if you don't have a job, or how to become a speaker at a conference. It's a really simple thing to just say, "Yes, I'm willing to donate my time. I'm willing to give you a couple of hours a week to work through your talk proposals, to look at your code and review it, to help you write tests," whatever it is they need. It's going to take a couple of hours out of your time. It's not going to hurt anything. It's going to make all the communities you work with better. That's all there really is to it. You have the privilege of time. You have the privilege of notoriety, those things.

Well, how I got here is luck. Those things aren't luck. Those things are things that have been given to me. And the only thing I really can do is give them to other people. Granted, I make it very clear because I run a company. I'm just saying, if you're a white guy and you come to me and you say, "I need you to teach me how to be a speaker," cool. There is a cost associated with that. You're going to pay me. If you are anybody else who I'm not going to see commonly at a conference, I'm willing to do it for free. And some people might say that's a double standard. But, hey, there's a double standard with the fact that there are still conferences out there that are 90% white males as speakers. So if you're a white male, you could probably get on stage. You don't really need my help. That's my platform.

CARINA: [Inaudible] make a similar offer, I do anywhere between one and four sessions per week that's devoted solely to giving free speaker mentoring to underrepresented people in tech. It's not necessarily that you're excluded as a white man, but that there's such a long list of people who are not white men who get that attention first. And there's never a shortage of that need, to help people get their first opportunity. Because the second one, they always just are fantastic. They run with it. The first one is the hard one.

PJ: Exactly. It's like catching a fish, non-Animal Crossing. That's super easy. Just want to be hip with what the kids are doing these days. But catching a fish in real life is kind of difficult. Or also riding a bike the first time, it's tough. But once you do it, you've done it. And it's like, "Oh, I get this. This is 100%, I understand what I need to do. Now let me replicate what I've done, deleting all the bad steps that I took and moving forward." And I think one of the things that makes me happy about doing it, like I think the bigger reward, isn't like the first person getting their first talk or getting their first job, getting their first DevRel position, whatever. That's cool. It's when they then use it to help someone else. And I see someone saying, "Oh, hey, I have a mentee now." I'm like, "Yes!" This has been victory. I've done something positive. The pyramid scheme of using privilege to bring people up to the platform is successful. Thank you multi-level marketing scheme people. You weren't wrong on how it works.

CARINA: Earlier you had mentioned Prompt. And I would love to circle back to that because that's been a really important influential thing. The first time I saw a Prompt speaker was, and I can't believe this is the third time it's coming up, but Steel City Ruby and it was Greg Baugues gave a talk on depression. And this is one of the things that online can't replicate because he asked how many other people have experienced depression. And it was the most earthshaking thing to see how many hands were raised. And there was no camera to capture that. But it was a wake up. It was a validation. It was extraordinary. And it wasn't the speaker's words that were that transformative. It was what was happening in the room and how they even felt. You could feel something shift in the room. And those kinds of talks, they're never listed in a CFP as something we're looking for, but it is something that's needed. I've seen a couple of other mental health talks over the years and every single one of them has been that same kind of transformative experience. So what you do with Prompt is so important and I would love to hear more about what that is, what you do.

PJ: Yeah, absolutely. To give a little background, Prompt started as a project between Eamon Leonard and I. We realized when we were building that community team, there were two huge, huge, huge, huge issues in tech. One was diversity and inclusion. And we were working on it. We are already working on something with Ashe to kind of deal with that first internally and externally at the events we were involved in and [inaudible] we're involved in. So we knew we kind of had that one taken care of. The other was mental health. And this came about partially because when Eamon was looking to sell Orchestra before Engine Yard even came into the picture, he was traveling the US and he found out a good friend of him had committed suicide. She'd never knew that there was a problem. And this is where Prompt got started. 

Nine times out of ten, and that's not a strict statistic. Please do not take that as a literal statistic. People in tech are unwilling to face the fact that they have a mental health issue. Our brilliant idea was, "Well, let's get people who are willing to talk about it up on stage and talk about it." Surely before we started Prompt, we were both at a conference and we saw Ed Finkler speak. And for those of you who'd seen Ed speak, Ed is very open about his mental health issues. At that point in time, there was no Prompt. There was no OSMI. It was just something he was doing because he felt that it was necessary. So we got back to the office. We sat down together. We said, "How do we how do we tackle this?" And in 2013, we were throwing a conference called Distill and we launched Distill and we said to Engine Yard, "Give us 10 grand. We're going to let these people speak whenever they want, wherever we can get them up on stage, anyplace, anytime, anywhere. And you're going to give us the money to do it." 

We started with Ed Finkler, Greg Baugues, a guy from Buffalo at the time, Patty Foreign, now Patty Carver, and John Dalton, who was a database administrator working right at Engine Yard that we did not know was speaking about living with someone with bipolar disorder. And he'd been doing this for a couple of years down in Tasmania and Australia. He was at RubyConf Australia every year talking about mental health we never knew. So that kind of showed us how pervasive the issue was. Here's somewhat our own company covering the topic that we want to get out there, and we didn't even know. So we decide this is what we wanted to do. Prompt lasted for a while. The main thrust was to start a conversation about mental health. So, share your story. Get it out there. See if you can get other people to start talking about it. 

A year or two after we started Prompt, Ed started his own organization, Open Sourcing Mental Illness, OSMIHelp.org. And we were kind of working in parallel. He was producing surveys and write ups and little pamphlets to pass out to people to understand what mental health looks like, the importance of getting mental health, the importance of taking mental health first aid classes to recognize it in your coworkers and colleagues and things like that. And we were working to basically wrangle the speakers. We had a speaker [crail]. I think at the peak we were at about 18 speakers and we were managing to get them to two and three events a month. We had people giving direct donations. We did a couple Indiegogo campaigns. And it was amazing to see every time one of these folks would go on stage and they spoke about everything from burnout, which is a fairly common issue that people have, to Imposter Syndrome to ADHD, to bipolar depression, anxiety, everything, suicidal ideation, everything. And they were so, like you were saying, Carina, so raw about it and so seriously. They were like, "Listen, this is what's going on." And, "Do any of you think you have some of these problems?" And you see the hands go up. Or even not see the hands go up but see someone approach the speaker afterwards. It was kind of amazing.

Justine Arreche gave a talk at CodeDaze about eating disorders and people were like, "That's out of this world. I'd never thought about the fact this might be an issue that I have. Never thought about the triggers that might go on in my life and how the way that I treat my body is different in contrast with the way that I should, in the way that I should take care of myself because I've had these things take place." 

From an organizer perspective, it was tough because there were tears in the room. Two speakers had to leave. One of them was supposed to go on next. We had to have a huge break.

JAMEY: I left, and I didn't come back until the next day after that talk. But it changed my life.

PJ: Yes. I remember worrying that you weren't going to come back. You went out in tears, which unfortunately is often the response. But it's a necessary response that you have to realize there's things that are more important in your life than writing code. And I mean, the analogy I always make is people often say, they'll complain that their keyboard is crap or their hard drive isn't big enough or the memory is not good enough or the code just doesn't write the way. They'll talk about how their tools are broken. But no one in tech ever wants to say, "My brain doesn't work." There's so much fear behind that. There's such a stigma. And that was really the goal of Prompt was to get these people to talk publicly about it and the stigma. Do I think we've done it? No. Over the past couple of years, due to issues, we were out of the Travis Foundation. But Travis went through some changes earlier last year. We are now completely part of OSMI. So, the Prompt team takes care of the speakers. OSMI takes care of everything else. And it's nice because we're comfortable. It's also a nonprofit. So, all the money goes into getting these people places and making sure the message gets out there.

It's something I have been passionate about for a long time. I think it might be even more pertinent at these times when people can't get out and seek help. We have people that specifically talk about tele-medicine, tele-psychology, tele-psychiatrist, things like that and the importance of how they work. And it's interesting because I'll say almost none of the speakers are doctors. We do have one, Dr. [Janet Cooley], and she's very amazing. But she specifically focuses on the clinical psychology of people who work in tech, dealing with mental illness. Everyone else writes code or is a designer or database administrator or they work in tech in some capacity and are just there to share their story. I think that does more than written articles or things like that from medical professionals. In tech, that's very important. But until someone comes up to you and says, "Listen, I suffer from Imposter Syndrome." I go up on stage on a regular basis to talk about technology. And I feel like everyone thinks I'm a liar. That is true. That's something I have an issue with every time I go up on stage. But if I didn't say it, no one would believe me.

JESSICA: Yeah. Those are the talks that you probably wouldn't choose to see, but because you're in the place, you go to them and they had the biggest impact. And then there's all the talks about actual technical things, which are your excuse to be there. 

PJ: Exactly. I feel like in some ways, sometimes people have to trick their bosses or their managers into going to conferences because they see the talk that says, "Kubernetes. Isn't it great?" Which is the talk at every conference right now. Everywhere, I'm pretty sure, "Kubernetes. You can't go wrong." And what they really want to see is this talk about my personal journey through dealing with anxiety while working in an office, social anxiety while working in an office environment, open office or whatever. There's things that are key to being human because you're human before you're anything else. You're a human before you're a coder. You're a human before you're a technologist.

This is actually why I love this podcast because it points out that there are things greater than code and it's being a person. Being a person is so much more important. And to be a person, you have to feel complete. And part of feeling complete is understanding there's other people who are going through the things you are going through.

JESSICA: Okay, to be fair. To be a person, you have to work at feeling complete.

PJ: Yes, but you have to have that goal. That's the mountain you're trying to -- Oh, my God. Did I just quote Miley Cyrus? But that's your mountain to climb. You're trying to be complete. You're trying to be as awesome as you possibly can be. And in order to do that, you have to be able to relate to others and have others relate to you. So until you know that other people are going through what you're going through. Sometimes it's hard.

JESSICA: Yeah, because really the only way to be a person is together.

PJ: Exactly.

JESSICA: Which makes this isolation hard.

PJ: Absolutely. It's kind of like, someone used to say in relation to code, if you write a piece of code and it never gets distributed, no one else ever sees it, did it matter? Was it really code? Was it really valuable?

JESSICA: [Crosstalk] to write it.

PJ: Yes. But if you don't ever find out that there's other people out there, if you live this hermit life and you never interact with others, do you really understand yourself? I'm kind of getting philosophical. I had Oreos at lunch.

[Laughter]

CARINA: Oreos will do that.

JAMEY: I really like this. And I understand that we're talking about right now a lot in the context of talking about mental health, which I agree is really important. But I also kind of want to bring it back to what we were talking about earlier with diversity and inclusion in the industry, because it can feel really lonely to be like, "There's nobody here like me." I think that when I was first in tech, I felt that way sometimes. I still feel that way, sometimes, but less now. I've met a lot of other trans people in tech, a lot of other trans masculine people. And I joke about how all the trans masculine people in tech know each other, which is kind of a joke, but kind of not. And it's like because there's community and there are other people like me that are doing this. I'm not the only one. And also when I'm feeling bad about however I'm treated by the industry and people in the world and the inevitable things that happen, that there's other people that are also struggling and overcoming that same kind of stuff.

I wanted to mention it this early actually, because you were talking about -- I understood what you meant, but I think that it's important when we're talking about white men on stage that you actually meant like white cis men.

PJ: Yes. 

JAMEY: [Laughs] I knew that's what you meant. I'm not accusing you. But I do think it's important to say that because that's the kind of thing that sometimes makes people feel like that's the kind of thing that has in the past sometimes made me feel like, people will say like, "Oh, you're so seen, like white men." And I'm like, "I'm not seen." 

PJ: [Chuckles] You're absolutely right. I should have said white cis men. 

JAMEY: I understand. 

PJ: And when it comes to being seen, there's no one more seen than white cis men. Look at almost any conference lineup in North America, it's ridiculous probably. But, yeah. I agree. And I like the fact that use the term "seen" because the key is like -- I love AlterConf. AlterConf is a wonderful event. But in some ways, it's like, "Hey, here we all are. All of us who already know each other. A few people who don't, who are new. But we're all here in our own space." It's like, that's good. That's a great first step. But what we really need is all of the people at AlterConf on stage at RailsConf, on stage at Web Summit, on stage at AWS re:Invent. That's when you know the difference has been made.

There's a place in Buffalo and I know Jamey knows about it called The Colored Musicians Club. It's an old blues and jazz club that's been around for I think over 150, almost 200 years now. It was about having a place to play if you were a colored musician because you couldn't play anywhere else in the city. Eventually, it was extended to Irish musicians because they were going through the same thing. But now it's for everyone, because everyone can play everywhere. In the musicians section, at least in West New York, that's a huge win because everyone's sharing the same stages all the time. Maybe not all the time, especially not right now. 

JAMEY: I have a story about Colored Musicians Club that's related to this. The first time I ever went there to see music, I got chatting with some of the people. It's the kind of place for just a bunch of people, like go and jam or whatever. And I got chatting to them and they were like, "Oh, so you play?" And I was like, "I don't know, a little, I guess. I play ukulele a little." And they're like, "Well, where's your ukulele?" And I was like, "Uh, at home." And they were like, "Well, why didn't you bring it?" And I was like, "I don't know." "Well, next time you will bring it." [Laughs] 

Yeah, that's how it is. It's like, "Oh, you're here? You're here to play. You didn't bring an instrument? You're here to sing." Me, I'm a drummer. It's like I cannot walk through the doors with drums. They're the least portable instrument, except maybe piano. But you show up and they're like, "Where are your sticks? Sit down, you're going to play a couple. I'm taking a break." It's aggressive inclusion. It's like, "What? You walk through the door. I don't care. You've got a banana stick out of your ear? Cool. What do you play? We got one of those, go play." 

JESSICA: Oh, yeah. We totally need an ear banana right now.

PJ: Who does it?

JESSICA: On stage? What sound does that even make? We'll find out.

PJ: It's kind of it's kind of flopping sound, at least to the person with the banana in the ear. But that's the kind of aggressive inclusion that we need. And it needs to be led by the people who are already on stage. When I first went to the Colored Musicians Club, I was 13 years old. A friend of mine from school who was also in a school band was like, "We're going to go there," because our teacher was always talking about how great it was, like they played the best jazz there. And when you're a drummer, you kind of learn jazz first. Doesn't matter that I played punk rock and hardcore and math rock for the rest of my life. I learned jazz first. And we went there. And just like you were saying, Jamey, their first thing was like, "Cool, what do you play?" I was like, "I'm 13. Nothing well." They're like, "What do you play? Come in." And literally, I was the only white person there, but I didn't feel unwelcome. I felt like I was part of the crew because they're like, "Cool, you're here, grab something to eat, then sit down and play. Get yourself something to drink, sit down and play." You were here to play. No one doesn't deserve to be involved. There's no one who should be excluded. Everyone should have, not just the opportunity to be part of the team, everyone should be on the team. This isn't tryouts. We're not going to decide who does and who doesn't. Everyone deserves an opportunity to get up and sing, to have an opportunity to pick their song at karaoke and belt it out, even if they barely know the words and they sure as hell don't know the key. That's what everything should be like. And I noticed some people were like, "That sounds real hippie dippy." It's not. It's actually simple. We figured it out when we were five years old. Have everybody sit on the same play rug and play. That's it. It's all there is to it. If you see someone who's not there, bring him in.

AVDI: I feel like this suggests a need for more micro opportunities to play. I think that one of the ways we set people up for failure, as I think about this more, Jess and I have been talking lately about how arbitrary, the after 40-minute talk framework or a 30-minute, whatever the conference is, but I think it's one of the ways that we set people up, if not for failure, then for like a breakdown between the people who can do it and the people who can't is to say either you or somebody who can get up and entertain for 30 minutes, 40 minutes at a time and leave people feeling like that was awesome. Or you don't need to be onstage at all. You gave your example of your first experience being a lightning talk that you got kind of checked into. And there's not enough of that, I think. There's not enough of small, whether in the conference space or elsewhere, just like opportunities to dip your toes into exposure.

PJ: Absolutely.

JESSICA: And be around people.

PJ: Right, especially to be around people, because if you feel like you don't belong there in the first place, even if you've got that lighting talk, even if you're able to get up on stage for five or 10 minutes, even if you got that opportunity, but you feel like, "Oh, the rest of the speakers are so above me," or, "All of these people are so different from me, they'll never understand where I'm coming from," there's no way to push your opportunity forward. And a lot of people, for lack of a better term, I said they aren't willing, but I really feel like it's more to say they're afraid. They don't feel like they belong. They have that Imposter Syndrome. They don't feel like there's going to be a good reception. It's everywhere in the way that we do things.

So you're right, micro opportunities, fix that. Lightning talks will always have, not just because of my experience, but they will always have a place in my heart because a lot of times they're the best, occasionally most ridiculous parts of a conference. Single lightning talk on lightning was amazing. I once saw a lady talk, five minute description of how to properly tie your shoes. Changed my life. Changed my life, because apparently I had been doing it wrong the whole time. But these things are important. They give people an opportunity to see what's going on.

I think one of the best examples of that is I think a lot of you had been to Madison+Ruby from Jim Remsik. He put that together in Madison, Wisconsin, which most people would not think of a bastion of open mindedness, but it actually kind of is like the Austin, Texas of Wisconsin. Very open, very nice. He allowed for so much time for people to take five minutes to get up on stage to tell their story. Whether it involved being in tech or not, being in tech wasn't important to him. To tell your story, why are you here? Tell us a little something about yourself. I thought that was one of the most amazing things ever. And he made sure everyone had the opportunity. If you came to him and said, listen, "I'd like to do five minutes and just tell people about what it's like to have grown up with undocumented parents. And now I work in tech." What it was like to to be black and poor and to literally -- he had someone talk about how they'd found a computer in the trash, figured out how to put it back together with a book from the library, ran Linux on it and became one of the most professional coders the world knows now. That's a different experience. Not an experience a lot of us have. You have to give those opportunities to people. You have to. And if that means I have to say, "Listen, I'm going to skip my slot. I'm a step down. I'm going to put somebody else in my place." Sometimes you have to do that. I mean, let's be honest. We all know that I'm not afraid of talking. If you give me an opportunity, I'm going to go on for a while. But I also luckily have a little bit in the back of my brain an understanding that there's times when I need to shut up and give somebody else the platform, the stage, the podium, the microphone, whatever.

CARINA: It's interesting because I saw a talk -- it wasn't a talk, actually. I saw a session at Madison+Ruby that was African-American adolescent girls showing off their basketball dribbling skills.

PJ: Oh, I was there for that.

CARINA: Yes, the little dribblers.

PJ: Yes.

CARINA: It was amazing. There's no way you could do that online. Well, I guess you could. You could put a camera at them and have them do it. But it was really more about giving opportunities to girls who were not being seen and giving them an audience that wasn't going to happen otherwise. I mean, that's something I think is really important at any conference, too, regardless of your format, is make sure that you're bringing in people who would otherwise not be seen, not be heard. It's not about diversity. It's really making sure that we're constantly expanding our universe as developers and what that brings. It's easy to say what it brings to the industry, make sure it's also bringing something to those people. And that was an opportunity to give those girls a chance to be onstage, to have the rewards of people really excited to see them. Some of them were fairly good. You could see different levels of experience showing but it was really fun. Every once in a while, they would miss and the basketball would go into the audience. And that was even more fun. 

PJ: Exactly. 

CARINA: Because we get to toss around the ball a little bit, getting it back to them. You mentioned something earlier about sometimes having to trick employers into letting you speak. And the reason comes down to travel costs.

PJ: Oh, yeah.

CARINA: [Crosstalk] that one of -- and time off. I mean, getting to wherever you are at minimum during the conference, there's a whole day of you not being at the office. And usually, it's considerably more than that to attend a conference. A two-day conference, I'm usually gone for five days. And then there's the day of sleeping straight through. But for an online conference, someone can participate literally for that 30 minutes or hopefully more than that, but it's not nearly the same kind of time expenses. Definitely not the same kind of monetary expense, which provides an interesting opportunity to be giving talks that employers normally wouldn't green light because you no longer need that green light. Or a much smaller one, we just need to have permission for the topic or whether your company logo is going to be associated with this topic, but you can cover all the expense of speaking. So I hope that we use that to get people in to the pipeline, to get talks that aren't being heard because it's too hard to get through all the institutional barriers normally. And the barriers have just been dropped for a time, and let's take advantage of that. I would love to hear, for instance, more mental health talks. And those are definitely ones that are hard to get approved.

And it strikes me that one of the nice things is I deal with a fair amount of people who, because they're beginners, stage fright is a big thing. That sense of like always staring out into an audience and all see them reacting and they'll probably be reacting in horror or something at how bad I am. But with an online format, you're probably not going to see the audience. And maybe that can help some people who have stage fright to feel more like it's an ordinary meeting that I would be doing anyway. It's just that I'm the only one speaking in it for 20, 30 minutes, whatever it is. So we have something really good that can come out of this very different dynamic that we're all in together to get some fascinating changes that can spur things forward that would not ordinarily happen. So I hope we look for more opportunities like that.

PJ: Absolutely.

JAMEY: I agree. I think that there are reasons why online conferences are really valuable. The ones you just mentioned, I think also, it's important to think about accessibility. Conferences have been doing better with accessibility. I mean, some conferences having [crosstalk] accessibility in recently. But I think that to some extent, there's only so much you can do. There's always going to be people who can't make it in person for whatever reason, maybe the cost. We are lucky we travel a lot and go to these things, but not everybody can. And I think you're going to get like a much higher level of accessibility on these online conferences. And I think that that's really great. But what's frightening to me is when people are -- I had conversations where people are like, "Yeah, it's so great. We're never going to have to do in-person conferences again." And I think that there's room for both. I really think there's space for both. And I think there's value in both that's slightly different.

PJ: Well, I think it's interesting. I think a lot of the conferences that are looking at going online, which is a great idea, there's lots of opportunity for that and there's much more accessibility. I think the one thing that people are forgetting too, is especially people like us who are outgoing and willing to talk to people and go to conferences and travel, this is a whole other sector of tech that never does that. They actually have always waited for the video to come out. They've never bothered with the Hallway Track. They're happy to get their content a couple of weeks later and repackaged, which is fine. I think these people are the ones that are going to be coming out of the woodwork and they're the ones that are going to say, "Hey, this might be my opportunity to talk if I don't actually have to go anywhere, or get out of my pajamas or take a shower. I might be able to get away with this. This might be something I could do now."

I think it also shows the proliferation of the concept of the extemporaneous talk. I mean, this is a podcast. People can listen to this podcast whenever they're ready to listen to the podcast, whenever they're comfortable. Once it comes out, they can do it whenever they want.

I talked to a lot of my clients about the value of podcasts over webinars. Webinars are a fixed point in time. They have the word webinar in them, which means no one wants to go. I think it's like, if you have people who aren't into that concept and they want something that's outside of time, like you were talking about lead dev earlier, Carina, and it's the same concept. I can watch those videos whenever I want, which is good. The positive part is that I can look at them whenever I want. They're probably going to be captioned, which is awesome. They're probably going to be highly produced, which is probably better. I think that a lot of these conferences are doing pre-recorded talks so people have the opportunity to say, "That's not the way I wanted to say that. Let me take it back and do it again." 

JESSICA: And as we mentioned earlier, I can do it any time means I do it never.

PJ: Right. That's the negative. I'm trying to be positive here, Jessica. There's a positive aspect of online conferences because [crosstalk]. This is true. At the same time I saw people tweeting, some people that all of us know, tweeting yesterday that they're already burnt out on the concept of the online conference. Like they've done three talks, and they're like, "I'm done. I don't get the enjoyment I do out of speaking, I'm not enjoying watching the videos." And this actually started on a conversation about Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, how weird it is to watch them without an audience. It's almost like you've missed your cue to laugh. It's harder to do a talk online with no audience and make jokes and have no response or make points that you think people would be like, "Aah," and there's no, "Aah." But at the same time, there's a lot of people that are probably getting very valuable content out of this. And if nothing else, it's a good time for people to up their skills. Honestly, my advice is if you feel like you have a talk in you, the one thing that you can actually do right now is not wait for a conference. Record it. Record the talk and put it out there and say, "I have this conference talk."  Push it out. Then maybe if a conference needs it, they'll pick it up and put it in the slot. It's a good opportunity for you to get content out there.

JAMEY: Can I mention, though, how hard it is to do anything right now?

[Laughter]

JAMEY: Because I agree with you and I'm trying real hard. I'm not working while in quarantine, so I have a lot of free time, which is rough, actually. And I find myself, I'm supposed to, I was accepted to speak at RailsConf this year, which I canceled. And now they're doing RailsConf Couch where they're going to release some of the videos of some of the talks that were supposed to happen, which I think is like as good of a compromise as we're going to get. And I agreed to do my talk for RailsConf Couch. And I haven't done it. I only even started it yesterday. And I've been really struggling. And I've been sitting around with nothing to do in my house, really bored and miserable. And I'm like, "I'm so bored," and I still haven't done it. 

PJ: Exactly.

JAMEY: I have no excuse as far as time. It's just really difficult time emotionally and it's really hard to do things.

PJ: Oh, it is. I have a perfect example. I have all the time in the world. And granted, I have two older kids who are at home, one who is in her senior year of high school. The other, he's in his sophomore year of college. And they're here and we're trying to stay busy. But at the same time, like last year, I was traveling and I managed to put out an album of songs recorded in hotel rooms while I was traveling the first half of the year. Right now, I have pretty much any time, all afternoon, all the time in the world to go out, just outside of this room, start recording drum tracks, bass tracks, vocal tracks, whatever. I've got all the equipment. But it's like, "Yeah, I could do it whenever I want. I guess I'm not going to do that right now."

JAMEY: It's just tough.

PJ: It is. This is the worst timeline.

JAMEY: There's been a lot of interesting discourse about like, it's okay to not be productive. We're in a crisis. You have to treat yourself like you're in a crisis and you're using emotional energy and all of your energy on that. And I agree with that. But also on the other hand, the other side of that discourse is also frustrating to me where I haven't got anything done and I've sat on the couch. I feel miserable. I need to do something because I will feel better if I do something. And then people will be like, "It's okay. You don't have to do anything. Give yourself a break." I'm like, "No, I do have to do something or I'm going to be miserable and it's going to be awful and I feel awful." And then I clean out my cupboards and go through all my dishes and I still don't do my slides for my RailsConf talk.

PJ: Exactly. So, procrastination is still an issue. You can always find something else to do that isn't the thing you're supposed to be doing. But yeah, it's just hard. There's no answer to this. There's no, "Find something that motivates you to do and do it." You're not wrong for not doing anything. And it's hard to not do anything. There's no response to this. This was not in the playbook that I was given to explain to me exactly how to live my life. 

As we started at the top of the episode, I clearly planned out everything that I'd do. There's definitely like a 'How to be PJ Handbook' that I use, but this wasn't in it. This is not part of the plan. I mean, it is tough all over. IN DevRel, I'm watching people, the entire team at O'Reilly, the entire events team was just axed in one day. Lots of DevRel teams are being furloughed or just fired because there's no events. We don't need that much content. We don't need everyone producing content. So what do you do? What is it you'd say you do around here? At the same time, I'm running a business that is based entirely on all of that. So, it's interesting. We're doing okay. No complaints. I have a few people working for me that are nervous, but I'm not nervous yet. So, that's good. But yeah, we'll see how it goes. That's all we can really do. Hopefully, we spend this time reflecting and saying things and realizing. People who are listeners to podcasts are saying we can fix a lot of things in our community really fast when there's nobody active in it. And the next event we have is going to be the most amazingly diverse, open, cool thing that ever happened because we fixed all of the problems. We've figured out how to make things accessible. We've figured out how to be live and online. We figured out how to incorporate both worlds. This is what people should be focused on.

JAMEY: Yeah. I didn't mean to derail also with this kind of thought process. But one thing that I've seen and I think I agree with this, that maybe this time isn't necessarily when we're going to get our most done and be our most productive. But I do think it's the time where we're going to have some realizations about what we think is important.

PJ: Exactly. At this time, if anything, even if you're not doing anything, take stock. Just take stock in yourself, your friends, your family and what's going on around you. This is not a normal thing. We're going to come out of this different than the way we went into it.

It's funny because someone said to me yesterday, and I tweeted about it, it's funny that all of these developers and people are saying, like they have all these opinions and they think that what they do is the most important thing in the world. And 80% of them work at e-commerce sites. You're not innovative. You're not changing the world. You're selling T-shirts. Think about that as you move towards what you're doing right now.

JESSICA: Thank you for this conversation. It's healing to talk to each other about how things are and how things aren't right now. And this has been a long conversation. So, it's definitely time for reflections. Carina, you want to go first?

CARINA: Yeah, I still have that thinking about PJ's visual analogy to me of lifting a hand way down. And I think that way was particularly important to lift someone up and throw them into the air. That exaggerated visual is meaningful to me both the way down and the way up. I think we do have that responsibility. It's also a pleasure. It's really great to be able to help someone like that. It feels so rewarding. And thank you for that reminder, because right now, we're all in such a state of stress. And I know for me, being helpful is one of those moments where I'm completely distracted from the stress. And it's nothing but joy to see someone feel like they can do something that they [inaudible]. So, let's all be doing more of that. Lift a hand way down, lift them up and throw them into the air.

JAMEY: I'm having a little bit of trouble to give a reflection this time. And I think it's because my brain isn't working too real good at the moment. But I guess what I keep coming back to as I try to think about it is like, we said, I think all of us at one point or another during this episode, talked about feeling lucky. And it struck me because I do feel lucky while I also simultaneously feel awful right now. And so I think that holding on to that feeling. We talked about this actually. We recorded an episode specifically about the pandemic that will have come out, I think, a week before this episode will have come out. So maybe our listeners will have heard it, but we talked about being lucky in that episode also because we're all struggling, but we are also very fortunate to be in more stable positions than many other people. And so I think that holding on to that feeling is going to keep me going. And so, I guess that's my reflection.

JESSICA: Thank you for that, Jamey. Yeah. I also feel lucky, including that I just caught a dragonfly in Animal Crossing because Animal Crossing is one of those things that is totally getting us through the pandemic.

JAMEY: I completely agree. 

JESSICA: Yeah. And like many things, it is a social activity. I was only able to catch it because my kids taught me how to run yesterday.

[Laughter]

JAMEY: I've been going to my friends' islands and being like, "Hey, let's hang out. Want to come over?" And they're like, "Yeah." And then I open my islands and their little person comes over and hang out.

JESSICA: Yeah, it's a thing. I mean, we need to catch that where we can. That feeling of connection. My reflection is about constraints. We have free time. I have free time this week. And yet nothing comes out of me. What am I doing? I'm playing Animal Crossing. And I'm grateful for conferences, including online conferences. [Tele-ETE] is online next week. That gives me a push to make output because we do have a lot to say to each other, but we're not randomly running into each other in order to say it. I feel like I need to be squeezed. I need someone to either draw with questions or squeeze with a deadline the output that I do have to contribute to the world, even though it doesn't feel like it. When I could be doing it any time or I could be drinking Rosé on the porch because it's beautiful today. That's something. These conferences are both [inaudible] in a lot of ways. And we can push each other and we can ask each other questions and we can contribute to the world still.

PJ: That's awesome. So for my reflection, I kind of want to tie in everything that we talked about because that's the way my attention span works. But one of the things that came up a couple of times was a gentleman named Jim Weirich and what a great person he was. And he was so open and so friendly. And I always like to say that when Jim got on stage, even though he was in his 60's and had done so much, written so much code, given so much to so many communities and done so much work, he had a hello world attitude. I think that's what -- even with what's going on right now. The world's a scary place. It's horrible. And if you follow me on Twitter, you know that I'm mad and I'm frustrated. Like, it's pretty clear. I may have started vendettas against two different companies because that's how I spend my time on Twitter. But like, reaching out and being open to people is the most important thing in the world, whether that's time at conferences or tech communities or whatever.

I'm so thankful that Carina and I had this conversation a few weeks ago and it culminated in and you all get jumping on a podcast with me just so I could see you for a little bit of time and in a time when I might not be able to see you for a very long time. The whole idea behind human connection is super important right now, and I don't want to lose sight of that. It's very easy to to say, "Oh, I should be doing something," or, "I shouldn't be doing something," or, "I should be taking care of myself," or, "I don't want to take care of anything." It's really easy to say. But think about outside of that circle and outside of the normal things that you do day-to-day. Check out your neighbors, see what's going on. Try to figure out a way to -- my daughter is like a master of this. She's figured out a way to have kids come over with lawn chairs and sit on the driveway while she sits on the porch to hang out. And she does that regularly. Not super warm in Buffalo right now, but they do it and they sit there for three hours just chatting and doing whatever it is that 18-year old girls do in my front yard. And it's awesome. They are so much better at finding a connection than we as full fledged adults are. It's astounding to me. And I think we need to take that open mindedness that leads to things like that, that open mindedness that Jim Weirich had and apply that as much as we can to keep things moving forward while we're in this time of doom and gloom. It's not just conferences, it's everything. We need each other and we need to be there for each other. So I think, I want to focus more on that as time goes forward.

JAMEY: PJ, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was really great.

JESSICA: Thanks for this.

PJ: Thank you for having me. This was awesome.

JESSICA: Okay. Thank you, everyone. See you next week. And if you miss us in between shows, then come join our Slack. It's free at the moment. Just ping Greater Than Code on Twitter. Or you can donate to our Patreon and help us stay on the air.

JAMEY: Yes. We would appreciate it very much if you could donate. But if you cannot, you may still come hang out with us on Slack.

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