1. So Long and Thanks for All the Shoes

    Posted by Shane Becker on

    At the end of 2010, I quit AT&T Interactive. I wrote a goodbye email to co-workers and friends at the company. I published that goodbye letter here on this site. Continuing this theme, my time at Engine Yard ended at the end of 2011. I wrote a goodbye letter to them too. Here it is.

    My dearest Engine Yarders.

    This time last year, I had just quit working at AT&T Interactive vowing to never work for anyone else again. Instead, I would finally take My Dreams™ off the back burner to take a shot at them. Shortly there after, I got seduced by VMware to help them launch Cloud Foundry. After just a few minutes there, I re-remembered that me and BIG companies don’t mix.

    And then there was Dr Nic. He gave me what I had tried to get for years: working on Rubinius evangelism. For the past several months, we’ve succeeded at raising the profile of rbx in the Ruby community from an interesting toy project to a serious contender that everyone’s talking about. When Rubinius 2.0 drops, it’ll really shake the Ruby world up.

    Evan and Brian are the real reason that Rubinius is as awesome as it is. I just got to tell people about it. On top of everything else, I’m super grateful for the support from EY to give users, fans and friends so many and such quality shirts and stickers. Everyone always loves them so.

    Same goes for all the JRuby swag. Really quality stuff. Several times people told me that these were the best shirts they owned. Not bad, Engine Yard. Not bad at all.

    I’m especially stoked that JRuby and Rubinius are first class citizens in EY stack. Kudos to everyone that played a role in making that happen, both socially in the company and technically in the infrastructure.

    So, it’s the end of another solar revolution starting from some arbitrary point in linear time. It’s when we get all kinds of self reflective and make bold proclamations about who we are, who we’ll become and what we’ll do with the next revolution.

    Here’s mine:

    No more work on other people’s dreams at the expense of my own.

    To that end, I’ll be spending the next foreseeable future working on:

    If you know about those things, cool. If not, I’ll tell you offline or in person if you care to know. Both are software projects focused on data ownership.

    Also, I’m starting an open source organization with a few others called:

    Open Source Offsets. Its purpose will be to raise money to hire people to work on open source projects full-time. I’m excited. More about that soon.

    Twenty eleven has been a kind of crazy year.

    Twenty twelve is going to be totally amazeballs.

    Get wild.

    There are so many super smart and incredibly talented people at EY. I wish you all the best, as a company and as individuals. As friends are made and lost I always look back smiling never moved by struggle fate or cost.

    I’m forever reachable at:
    (801) 898-9481
    veganstraightedge@gmail.com
    https://veganstraightedge.com
    @veganstraightedge

    Don’t be a stranger.

    XOXO SB

    Talk Proposal for Quit Your Job. Srsly.

    Posted by Shane Becker on

    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.

    New Speaker Bio

    Posted by Shane Becker on

    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.

    LA Ruby Conf 2012

    Quit Your Job. Srsly.

    Posted by Shane Becker on

    Yesterday, I spoke at LA Ruby Conf 2012. My talk was titled “Quit Your Job. Srsly.”. The title was not a metaphor.

    It was a very non-technical talk. It was very much an emotional breakdown in front of 200 people kind of talk. It was very …cathartic? …taxing? I’m pretty happy with how it turned out both in the slides and how I delivered it. The feedback from the attendees seems to indicate that it was well received.

    For the first time, I wrote a script first for a talk then extracted slides from that. I’ve included the script below.

    When I get audio and/or video, I’ll update this post.

    I plan to refine this talk a bit and give it at more confs. If you’re interested in having me give this talk at your conf, email me: veganstraightedge@gmail.com.

    View the slides for “Quit Your Job. Srsly.” here.