I recently gave a talk at LA Ruby Conf called “Quit Your Job. Srsly.”. I would like to present it a few more more conferences. After giving it once live, I’ve realized that there are a few places it can be refined. Like all performances, it’s a living changing thing. I want to give it a chance to evolve a bit, to breath and stretch its legs.

If you’d like to have me out to speak at your conference, email me at veganstraightedge@gmail.com. At least one person thought it was “keynote quality”. I’m open to keynote possibilities, but not just keynotes. Thirty minutes for a normal talk slot is good by me too.

Here’s the talk proposal.

Quit Your Job. Srsly.

“The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads.” - Jeff Hammerbacher https://buswk.co/eCdfFp

We can rewrite Jeff’s quote like this: “The best programmers of my generation are working on solutions to problems that do not matter.”

The crux of it is you are better than your job. You have a greater potential than your job is realizing. You can do more than you think. You are worth more than your job is paying you. You can make the world a better place.

You don’t have to be limited to building mobile/geo-based/social/ad-driven/gamification-influence/fully-buzzword-compliant bullshit to get people to buy things they don’t need while giving up more privacy to corporations and becoming less happy in the process.

You’re better than that. Quit your job. Build your dreams. Change the world. Srsly.

I’ve never put much effort into my speaker bio when submitting a talk proposal to conferences and meetups. I usually just slap one together. Last night I wrote up this little thing. I’m open to edits, suggestions, rewrites, etc. Get wild.

Shane is still vegan, still straightedge. Starting in the Mosaic days and for over half of his life he has been making websites for fun and for profit. The shipping of Rails 1.0 and the 15 minute blog screencast initiated his love affair with Ruby. Through building websites, designing logos, tshirts and stickers he has contributed to many open source projects (Rubinius, Nokogiri, JRuby, Cloud Foundry, et al). Shane can currently be found employed by His Own Damn Self avoiding a job™ like the plague. He is concentrating on the building of two big open source web projects focused on personal data ownership striving to transform culture.