In the land of the JavaScripters | JS Conf 2019

Wow. We are in the land of the JavaScript-ers. You already knew that. So today I'm going to share some thoughts in a medium that you probably weren't expecting. I know I'm not the first person to bring poetry to a tech conference, and I sincerely hope I'm not the last. You see, JavaScript and the people who write JavaScript, that's you all, have been essential to my work in developer relations. I've watched the culture and the language evolve and grow up over the past decade.

This is the tweet that went out announcing my talk. I was so excited and so honored. I decided to embrace it even though I have never, ever thought of myself as a golden girl. And I had to wonder, what would you all be expecting from me? So I struggled for weeks. trying to find a way into my story. And then one random Wednesday morning in April, After several weeks of waking up in the middle of the night, in the dark, in a cold panic, I decided to get up and write. I began.

Why is my brain so unsharp? This might be my last conference talk ever. I kept going. As the light crawled into the garden and the birds started making noise, I wrote, the JS cons were punk rock. They cut the crap and went rollerblading. Then I stepped slowly away from the display. I grabbed a pad, a lined legal pad and a pen and started writing. 14 lines later, it was a sonnet, strict rhyme scheme, a metre called iambic pentameter that sounds like the beat of your heart.

I felt lighter than I had in weeks. Writing poetry had put me into a fine state of flow. This is the first one, the beginning. Here goes. When I consider JS Conf EU and wonder what it is I have to share. Heroic JavaScripters I once knew, or YUI, or Ajax, or would you even care? I've studied coders long, but not the code. I know constraint can free up self-expression. Rhyme, scheme, meter, platform, network, node. But is there room on stage for true confession?

You see, I'll speak of culture's evolution, but you are the artisans of JS give and taking, and I'm not here to explain your revolution. It's iterative and comes from daily making, creating more than apps and interactions, you terraform immersive new distractions.

You're gonna see this slide at the close of every sonnet. I'll read nine of them or eight more of them today. It's a visualisation of Lorenz's strange attractor. That's a set of equations that describe a simplified model of convection flow in the Earth's atmosphere.

The Lorenzo tractor is also associated for some obvious reasons with the butterfly effect, the unverified idea that small changes of state... like a butterfly flapping her wings, can influence larger, more significant differences later and elsewhere, like triggering a tornado thousands of miles away. We'll get back to that a little bit later in the talk. For now, it turns out the constraints of poetry are not totally different from the constraints of code.

in producing things of craft and artfulness. In a sonnet... as in code, you have to pack a lot of meaning and intent into tightly controlled syntax and word choice. And then there are elegant ways to go bonkers and bend or break the rules. Quick two-minute history of the sonnet form. It was created in Italy in the early 13th century. The poet Petrarch, you may have heard of, was its most famous practitioner. The form travelled across Europe and arrived in England in the early 16th century.

Just in time for the Elizabethan poets and Shakespeare most famously of all who wrote 154 sonnets. Through the centuries, poets everywhere wrote sonnets. in their own languages. In Russia in the early 1800s, Alexander Pushkin wrote a novel in verse called 389 stanzas of sonnet about the life and times of a young romantic, let's say. In 1922, in German... In a chilly castle in Switzerland, the Austrian poet Reiner Maria Rilke wrote a 55-sonnet cycle called Sonnets to Orpheus.

Inspired by Pushkin, Indian-born author Vikram Seth published The Golden Gate, a tale of yuppie romance set in San Francisco and written in stanzas. And he inspired me, and so it goes. The sonnet endures as a poetic form for storytelling, philosophizing, expressions of love. and celebrations of festive occasions.

The second sonnet, the origin story, was inspired by a talk from Jan Leinhardt called JSConf History, written in 2015. The times have changed with JavaScript's ascent since Voodoo Tiki God 10 years ago pitched us to sponsor a new event. gathering in Washington beyond the web 2.0 of suits and swag and paid product pitches. The first JSConf happened in the spring. and almost didn't due to funding glitches. But tickets sold, it was a homecoming for folks who didn't know that content plus fun

could raise up a community of like-minded coders where once was none. It was not long to find an opportunity to do another one. In Pulsing Berlin, Jan, Holger, Malta, Kristina made the JSConf and CSSConf pure win. In the sonnets ahead, I'll continue to poke at the relationship between the writer's craft and the coders. In Elizabethan England, poets would release their sonnets in private to an elite audience before sharing them more widely, kind of like I'm doing here today.

Please be kind to these little songs of mine. Like me, they're travellers from an older world into JavaScript world domination, of course. Trajectory is best viewed in retrospect. A JS singularity was never inevitable. But loose federation makes network effect. And the JS comps have been unforgettable. Client side, server side, dark side of the moon, Asia, Australia, Colombia, Budapest.

Node.js and Tito launched from this cocoon. Iceland, Scotland, CSS confs, and the rest. It's that magic dynamic that comes to your town. building camaraderie out of the fun. Maybe it is conferences all the way down. Artifacts of knowledge with access for everyone. And always, new ideas are put in play to globally influence a generation's way.

One of those good ideas that did not emerge immediately was the need for a code of conduct and a focused, committed effort to enforce it. Along with a commitment to foster a diverse and inclusive environment for all attendees and all speakers. We can and we must keep doing better at this. And maybe... I think this weekend has shown me some of what's possible. So, the code of conduct. At our events we do not tolerate.

harassment of participants in any form. A posted code of conduct works to mitigate. In 2011, this was far from the norm. Today, we raise each other up through schooling for unbiased language and communication, appropriate kindness and respect. and tooling to promote good behaviour and collaboration. We will not tolerate at our events stalking or following or unwelcome comments.

or unwelcome contact. This includes offensive verbal comments. You see, a code of conduct is a pact reminding each of us of our humanity and hoping tolerance can replace profanity.

Okay, in Sonnet 5, I look back in time. Emma Lazarus was a writer and an activist in New York City, well-educated and well-to-do. In 1883, she wrote the sonnet that eventually found a place on a plaque on the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty in New York City harbor. Those are the words of welcome for immigrants and refugees to the United States. A digital immigrant that's me reflects on Emma Lazarus. The sonnet is a poem of 14 line. Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses.

Octave, sestet, pentameter, define the sonnets of Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Emma Lazarus' new Colossus. that made the statue of liberty evermore a mother of exiles. For every refugee, her lifted lamp beside the golden door gives worldwide welcome to the land of the free. 20 years to go from print to monument, written in 1883, engraved on a plaque in 1903, a poem for the immigrant. by an author and an activist, a world-class harbour hack. Emma, like me, a New York City girl with Jewish roots.

wielding words to change minds, our work is in cahoots. Ta-da. This next poem was inspired by a TED talk from Carol Cadwallader, an investigative journalist for the Guardian whose work uncovered the role and tactics of Cambridge Analytica in disrupting. the Brexit vote on Facebook. I'll also quote from an article by Jeffrey Zeldman on a list apart titled, Nothing Fails Like Success, about...

the dangers of surveillance as a business model. The immigrant who puts down roots but never learns the language. That's JavaScript and me. Sometimes code is poetry that changes lives forever, though nothing fails like success to keep us free. gathering wise words from Twitter, I could read, I could weave sonnets of bravery in 140 characters. gleaned from conferences, recorded to retrieve later to remember the passion of others.

Courage in the form of a TED talk to the tech gods of Silicon Valley. Sheer terror didn't stop her speaking truth to power. Her urgency to save democracy. Will we play with our phones as this darkness falls?

Fascism rises when democracy palls. Okay. I would not be here today if it weren't for my employer, Mozilla. I'm not really sure that the web as we know it would be here were it not for Mozilla. So, this is a sonnet for Mozilla. You may know Mozilla as the dinosaur that birthed a browser open source out of Netscape's ashes. Long may Firefox endure as a user-centric client with a mission worth your love. To protect the net as a global...

public resource. Mozilla makes browsers, apps, code and tools open and accessible, safe and free. A force for opportunity with level... playing field rules. Keeping tabs on browser culture and internet health explicit in our aspirations. and stated in our manifesto in support of civil discourse, collaboration and a wealth of user commitments. Ten principles plus addendum show a clever red panda that faints like a fox. Protecting web standards so the open web still rocks.

I met Angus Kroll at a... at the JS conference in Porto Alegre, Brazil in 2013. His book, If Hemingway Wrote JavaScript, was in the works and he spoke then about the connections between language... literature, and JavaScript. And I don't think this talk would ever have happened without that book. I also quote directly from some of Angus' online writing about... poetry and code. When I do this, I'm trying to indicate that I'm quoting somebody else's words verbatim.

Doctrine and dogma, these are the enemy of good JavaScript, writes Angus Krull, a programmer who codes English expressively. If Hemingway wrote JavaScript, for whom would it toll? Kroll's book praises pushing language boundaries. For earnest, code works tersely and direct. His simplicity conceals the quandaries of eloquent reduction. Jane Austen's code is circumspect. If code is function and poetry is grace, if poetry connotes and code commands,

The choice of paths reveals a human face. An algorithmic style is still in human hands. goes beyond the charm of ploy and led me to write sonnets which I hope will spark some joy.

So, thank you for indulging my book reviews and literary references that may be a little unfamiliar. They've given me a way to share some reflections on culture and code. You may have noticed also that in writing, as in JavaScript, we are always borrowing and building upon the writing and the work of others, especially the text. or the libraries that have shaped us and taught us and tickle our fancy.

So, there are several slides of reference links and one more book review sonnet called big data, big picture in the appendix. conf EU sonnets page which is live now online if you really want to keep going. I'm going to close with an homage to two programs that are very dear to my heart. One is Mozilla Tech Speakers, a program that I co-founded and led for a few years.

And that may be also poised for world domination like JavaScript. And Global Diversity CFP Day, a young program that came about directly through the influence of JSConf. And that's been very present here this weekend. Mozilla Tech Speakers is a program designed like Global Diversity CFP Day. to make diverse speakers easier to find and share skills, tools and contacts along the way.

CFP Day workshops are grassroots and self-sustaining, built by Jiggy Pete to fill a lineup with new faces. Mozilla's program offers... support and training for web advocates and speakers from a host of places. These are living proof of working ecosystem. Stand-alone programs launched and thriving. Feeding global JavaScript momentum. Nomadic tribes of advocates arriving. Is it... the butterfly effect or strange attractor? The influence of JSConf could well be a factor.

Okay, today I've been speaking about the subtle and intelligent things that are exchanged when people come together with good intentions and a certain spirit. I've pushed past my own sheer terror to share what I believe most deeply, that if you can be true to yourself, there are many amazing and outrageously cool things you can do from there. Like organise a tech event in 60 cities on the same day from an island in the far north.

Write 10 sonnets about JavaScript in 21 days under pressure for a tech conference. Thank you so much to everyone who has encouraged me on this journey. Thank you all today so very, very much for your attention. I'll be putting the slide deck up and like I said, there's... Lots of resource slides and links and one more sonnet in there. So, have fun. And, yeah, if you're into John McCarthy and AI and stuff, you should read that one. All right. Thank you all so much. Really.