It was an awesome experience, and the first time I’ve spoken on technical and non-technical topics at an industry conference.

The talk I gave is available on Speakerdeck . I’ve also embedded it below:

I think that the one thing that I took away from Devops Days NZ 2016 was this.

It’s very easy to get wrapped up in your own problems in this industry. It’s very easy to feel like your problems are unique, new or otherwise unreproducible. Unless you’re Google, Netflix or of that ilk, this is very unlikely. You and I, we’re not so different. Maybe it’s health, maybe it’s media, maybe it’s any other industry. We’re all going through the same things, at different times. It’s important that we continue to work through these diverse issues as best we can, while knowing that someone out there has felt, is now feeling or will feel your pain.

You are not alone!

In the spirit of DevOps and all the baggage that that word contains and frees us from, let’s keep helping each other, let’s keep sharing, we’re a community of like minded people.

He spoke about how each time he became invested in a belief of something greater than himself, he was inevitably dissapointed. Each time he entered a different phase in his life, he believed in something new, and each time that belief was broken. He began to believe in doubt, he believed it might not be possible to believe in anything at all.

He compared his belief with ours.

There is a great hunger in our generation for purpose and meaning. Dan Pink describes it in his studies on human motivation, mastery, autonomy and purpose. That purpose is more and more, coming to be at odds with the society we share with other generations.

Casey realised that he was the dialysis for a country that needs a kidney transplant. His voice had stood in for those who had no voice themselves. This time the false saviour was Casey.

Some of us belief in the bible, or the Harvard Business Review. We hardly realise the human cost of our beliefs. We dare not question the founding bricks of our belief, lest the cracks at the bottom bring our whole facade crumbling down.

Why, with all the power we hold in our hands, are people suffering so?

He’s speaking about capitalism. He references the titans of our capitalist western world, Harvard, the New Yorker, ‘We see suffering as a necessary act of the capitalism that is our god’.

With his closing words, he says ‘And this doubt, it fuels me, it gives me hope that when our troubles overwhelm us, when the paths laid out for us seem to lead to our demise, when our healers bring no comfort to our wounds, it will not be our blind faith – no, it will be our humble doubt that shines a little light into the darkness of our lives and of our world and lets us raise our voice to whisper or to shout or to say simply, very simply, “There must be another way”.’

And he’s right. There must be a better way. There are hard questions we need to ask, that our politicians need to ask, because we live in a more prosperous time then any other throughout history, and yet deprivation is growing. The amount of inequality is increasing and more and more, a sense of resentment in those members of our global economy who are left behind is becoming apparent.

It’s that sense of resentment that people like Donald Trump are exploiting for their own benefit. It’s the reason why so many people in New Zealand rabidly hate John Key. People are being left behind, and becoming more desperate. Desperate people are in New Zealand are changing our political landscape. From attacks on MP electorate offices, to assaults on cabinet ministers.

We don’t have good answers for anything of this nature. That little light in the darkness needs to shine a bit brighter.

Heather Armstrong, for those who do not know, is internet famous. I didn’t know that. I’m not her target market and of course, that’s okay. But what is she doing at webstock?

She’s telling us that she’s worried. Sure there’s humour, there’s some old war stories about pissing off sponsors, something about goats, and hairy vaginas - maybe I’m overthinking it, but I don’t think she is happy with the way the internet has become homogonised, white-breadified or, in Heather’s own words, “white privilege gone mad”.

I agree.

Like it matters what I think. But then, this is designed to be a critical analysis and you’ve read down this far, so let’s assume that it does matter.

At first I thought that Heather was speaking about how she loves the shit life throws at her. She loves talking about the ugly parts. The vomit filled car and car sick kids, the not having slept for two days on account of goddam slumber parties. At first it seemed that Heather simply wanted to tell us how satisfying it is being a whole human being, complete with all the flaws that humanity entails. I was a simpleton.

There’s a problem with social media these days.

It’s fucking fake man. That’s the crux of it. How many times have you not posted how awful your day was, because you didn’t want to be seen to be fishing for attention or sympathy? Believe me, if I’m posting about how crappy my day has been, there’s a pretty good chance I’m just venting, and don’t actually want any of your pity.

How many times on Snapchat or Instagram, Pinterest or Twitter, have you retaken the same photo forty times to get the light ‘just right’ or to wait for the perfect background tableau? #Instafilter #VSCOCAM #IveOnlyTypedThreeAndIAlreadyThinkLessOfMyself. Is that real? Is that raw? Is the rather mundane picture of your home made spag bol with a filter plasted over it, an accurate representation of your day? It may well be. How about the adorable raccoon account you follow? How about that wedding list? Are those ideas that you’re judging the most important day of your life against, a comparable wedding, with a comparable budget and are there people like yours attending?

How do you tell the difference?

That’s the point Heather is making. There are so many beautiful, natural and real things out there that we could be seeing, judging, loving. But we’re not. We’re wrapped up in what the Beebs said on twitter. We’re checking out Kim K on whatever godawful service she uses the most (probably all of them, actually?). This isn’t a new thing, it’s been a thing with magazines for a while now, hence models eating salad and water and starving themselves. Hence men stressing themselves out because they don’t look like He-Man (ps most girls think He-Man is too muscly so be cool guys we good. Or my wife is being kind to me. Shit). Kids are covering themselves in makeup because cleo or cosmo or whatever told them it was the right thing to do at the age of 8 (which is when most kids these days first see porn on the internet by the way - but that’s a different talk).

The rub is that the world (mostly) knows that these magazines are curated and unreal, that is, they misrepresent fundamental aspects of human nature. They lead us to believe that some highly idealised, highly managed and largely contrived set of circumstances, are real and normal and what we should all aspire to. And it’s wrong, dangerously so.

Heather knows this, she took great delight in pointing out the fakeness of it all. And she challenged us. I didn’t really realise until afterwards. There was this anecdote she told. She had a contract to write a thing about travelling with her kids. They didn’t want to be dragged out away from their lives, they resisted, and it put Heather in a position where she couldn’t write the bit. Because doing so required the involvement of her children even against their will. Now the children were part of her contract, before they had only ever been involved willingly. It felt like exploitation Heather said.

That begs the question, how far are we willing to create fake lives for the benefit of others? Surely it would be better for our own wellbeing if we were just honest that, yes, sometimes life is shitty and for no good reason.

Surely we would be better off as a society if we didn’t feel the need to ‘clean up’ the picture on the front page of whatever fitness / fashion magazine we hold so dear.

Of course we should, but money, but sex! But how will I prove that I’m doing better then $NEIGHBOR?

I feel like I’ve put a lot of words in Heather’s mouth, I want to be clear that this is my own interpretation of the message that I think she was sending. Communication is hard man.

It’s so hard that sometimes we have to fake it. That was okay in the past, because moderation and because an individual couldn’t influence the world back then in the way they can now.

Maybe in this modern age of instant communication and empty social media moments, we need to work a bit harder to be real, to be honest, but above all, to be human.

What I do know, is that I want to go back to webstock next year, regardless of whatever else is going on in my life at the time. These words are coming out like treacle right now, I don’t usually have a problem communicating like this.

Last night I said something that resonated with the people I was with. In a rare flash of brilliance, I said something that my friends were so affected by that they specifically mentioned it to others - “You have to hear this, it was amazing not shit 2deep5me interesting, come on and talk to Alex about it”. That’s not really something I’m used to

So what did I say? And more importantly, What did I learn?

What I said can wait until later, my exact words feel slippery, and at the edge of my vision right now. Rands said that writing helps teach how to order thoughts, and build opinions. He also said “Just hit publish” and he gave me this pen.

So here are a few things that I learned at Webstock:

1. The speakers of webstock, are at the top of their game technically. These are the gods of of our industry. People breaking new ground in user interaction, CSS, responsive design and content, the works. All these people, focused on the user, they focused on people. There were no java devs speaking at webstock this year (though I’m sure many of them knew java). This is important, I’ll address why it’s important soon.

2. The attendees, were people from Spark Ventures, Xero, Trademe, Digital Arts Network, and a huge amount of other companies. If the speakers were gods of the industry, the attendees were all minor deities, everyone who I spoke with was a leader in New Zealand - incredibly skilled developers, designers and others. What could we learn from the gods at webstock, that we couldn’t learn more easily through a technical blog? Why bother with it all?

3. The attendees were mainly technical people, but not a single technical talk was given. This initially confused and upset me, before I gained time and context around webstock. This is webstock’s 10th birthday, and that’s also important.

4. In isolation, none of the talks had anything to do with each other, there were several talks that, at the time, felt like missed opportunities. Harry Roberts talked about making cocktails. Michael Lopp talked about pens and writing. Askew One talked about graffiti and growing up poor in Auckland. I was gutted.

5. When viewed through the lens that I stumbled on during the after party, every talk I had previously been disappointed in, changed. Remarkably so. Askew didn’t talk about growing up in Auckland, he didn’t talk about the regional differences in graffiti. He said words about those things, but that’s not the meaning that he was communicating. He taught us about community. About a group of people creating something bigger then themselves.

Keavy avoided all talk of her work at Github, because she was teaching us about identity. About who we are and who we want to be, and how that can and should change at different stages of our lives, in response to different stimuli. She spoke about growth, not of our technical skills, but of our minds as people. She spoke about the messy growth of flawed human beings, who get hurt, get better, get sick and well again, and how we can help ourselves grow in the direction we value the most.

Debbie spoke on rejection. Here’s a giant in her industry, one of the finest design minds out there, and she’s telling us about how she got rejected from every postgrad school she applied to, about how she was ousted from industry organisations. But what she taught us was very different. She taught us about determination and doggedness. About refusing to be refused. About every failure in our lives being a defining factor in our eventual success.

Harry could have spoken about CSS architecture, about his work as a consultant, about literally any technical topic he had on his mind. Instead, he crowd sourced his talk. He showed us how to trust in others, he showed us that there is more to life then a nine to five. He showed us that amazing people are literally everywhere, and all you have to do to see that is to flick a tweet out into the ether.

Casey Gerald. I think I had began to link up these threads by the point that Casey spoke, that or he was the one who forced me to drag the threads and weave them in to rope. Of all the people I have ever heard speak, he is the most memorable. He was the last speaker at webstock and by far the most impactful. He’s better then Petraeus, Obama, he’s better then any actor or actress in any movie I’ve ever seen. Every word held meaning to him, every moment, considered. It’s the most surreal situation I’ve ever been in. It was just.. right. I have never been as certain of anything in my life. But what he talked to us about, was doubt.

He talked about his upbringing, his education and his work, he detailed how each stage in his life was renewed by an earth shattering break in his beliefs. He taught us about doubt, about how examining a crack in our beliefs could shake the foundations about who we are as individuals, and who we are as a collection - whether that collection is a community, a nation, race or people. How could we not question everything? We live in a world where there is injustice, inequality and hate - but we equally live in a world where amazingly talented people care. Where people who can do something, do. Casey challenged us all to evaluate what we were doing was helping as many people as we could. He dedicated his professional life to helping people until he had the realisation that he couldn’t save everyone, then he gave away everything he had built, so that we could all save each other. He leads by example.

So what gives?

Why should anybody give a shit and what epiphany of yours was it, that affected people the way it did?

The point of webstock this year, wasn’t to teach us new technical skills. It wasn’t to help us get ahead of the pack or beat the competition. The goals of webstock 2016 felt much loftier then that. Webstock 2016 aimed for nothing less then to fundamentally shift the way that we, the attendees, interacted with the world. We had the best of the best, the gods of our industry; people of such astounding intellectual brilliance that we looked up to them as personal heroes, just.. being human. Being good humans. Good humans talking about developing the traits that we want to see reflected in our world. These people helped us see that as an industry, we are in a position to change our own futures. Whether that’s fighting global surveillance, addressing poverty and inequality, challenging and changing rape culture, domestic and sexual violence or just helping people be happier, healthier humans. It’s incredibly humbling to think that the most valuable contribution these people made to our lives was to help us think differently. A personality request rather than a pull request.

So what exactly did I say? I don’t know, but it went something like this:

What they taught us transcends any one technology, methodology or practice. These speakers are specialists in technology, yes, but more then that, they are world leaders in interaction. They showed us new ways of interacting with people, new ways of thinking about how things interact with people. Any technical subject would have been mundane by comparison amongst talks that taught about no less then a fundamental shift in our own psyches.

That sounds shit, and it doesn’t capture what I said or the inebriated eloquence of the thought I put out there. But it’s a start. And if there’s one thing I’ve learned this week, it’s that starting is the hardest part. It’s also the most worthwhile.