Great.
Hello.
Good evening, everyone.
Thank you so much for joining me.
I'm Sumana Harihareswara,
and I'm very grateful to the conference
for inviting me to do some stand-up comedy
for you this evening.
Evening, it's midday here in New York City,
but I'm extremely glad to get to virtually visit Istanbul.
It has been a wonderful year to be in free and open source
software.
Actually, and this may sound surprising to you,
but I actually think there's never
been a better time than the past year or so
to be involved in free and open source software,
because there's never been a better time
to get distracted by pedantic arguments that don't matter.
It has been wonderful.
Every time that I argue with somebody about code style,
that's a moment I'm not looking at the news.
And that has been wonderful.
That's great.
I, myself, I feel like I finally understand
the appeal of reading news about celebrities, right?
Something where it catches your attention,
but on some level, it doesn't matter.
So that's been very helpful.
I'm really glad to be performing at a conference
and meeting you.
But I do miss in-person conferences, right?
I love that at an in-person conference, especially
one outside the United States, I get
to meet a lot of people from outside the US
and get to hear people speaking different languages, which
is really great.
When I hear people speaking a language that I don't understand,
if they speak a tiny bit of English,
they just have little dots of English throughout.
I try to construct a story about what they're talking about
based on that.
I heard some people once speaking a language
that I did not understand, but I heard one of them say OK.
All right, I understand.
And then one of them said design.
I thought, oh, OK, are these maybe artists?
And then one of them said blog.
I thought, oh, maybe these are programmers,
or maybe they're working on the next WordPress or Squarespace.
And then one of them said California State Bar Exam.
And I almost wanted to go up to them and say,
I'm sorry, I need to understand.
I rewind.
I miss in-person conferences.
And I haven't been to one in so long
that I worry that no conference I actually go to
will live up to the fantasy conference in my head, right?
Because what I actually want is really contradictory.
I want things happening all the time
that I really want to be at, that they're interesting to me.
But actually also, I only want one thing
I want to go to in every time slot
so that I don't miss out, right?
And I actually don't want things happening all the time.
I only want them after I get to the conference for the day.
And so I want it for the conference
to magically work with my sleep schedule.
I stayed up till 2 in the morning last night,
and I'm rolling into the venue at 1 PM.
That's when things start, they start on some of the time.
I want it to be that everybody I want to see is there,
a lot of my friends, a lot of my colleagues.
But also I want to have enough time to meet new people
that I haven't met yet and encourage them, right?
I want it to be walking distance from my apartment.
But I would also like for there to be no visa restrictions
stopping people from actually coming, which is not so easy
if it's based in the US.
And then I just want some additional stuff
that you don't always see at a conference.
In addition to the keynote address,
I'd also like something called the low note.
And that's where that guy, whoever
you're thinking of when I say that, that person,
we're on the same wavelength, that guy,
whatever he's been up to in the last year,
someone stands up and summarizes like, all right,
that's what happened with this guy this last year.
So you don't have to pay attention to the rest of the year.
You know, you'll catch up at the low note.
A lot of conferences have workshops, right?
Training sessions and things like that.
I would like, in addition to the usual ones
that you see about security and threat modeling,
I would love one where you just try to remember
a password you've forgotten.
Maybe they have a psychologist come by,
someone who knows how to do hypnotic memory recovery,
you know, and they just help, "did it start with an @?"
And maybe you could even work with them
to try and retrieve smells that would help you.
Like, if I could ask them to look up
and get me a little bottle of the shampoo
that they were using at that one conference hotel
in San Francisco in 2013, around June 13th or so,
you know, maybe then I could remember a password
that I created during that one hack week.
So that would be, that would be really helpful.
There's a lot of times you'll see a workshop
or a sprint or a talk at an open source conference
about how to get in to open source,
but not on how to get out.
[Audience: I knew it would be that.]
Usually that's just the hallway track.
And by hallway track,
I think people are exhaustedly leaning against walls.
[Audience: I'm sitting right now.]
And, you know, one thing, we try and teach people skills,
but there's a particular skill.
I'm not sure if I've seen nearly enough training on,
and that's how to file a bug.
How to file a bug report?
Honestly, I think this should be taught in school.
And I don't just mean in a computer science class
or in a literature class.
I mean in, in physical, it's like a self-defense thing.
Like in physical education or gym.
Honestly, just to be serious for a second,
I think filing a bug is one of the most amazing things
about free and open source.
And we can take it for granted sometimes,
but isn't that actually really wild and unusual
that in our world, if you are unhappy about something,
if something in our world is not to your liking,
if you want to complain about it,
you can file a bug report.
If you can figure out who to file it against.
I, sometimes that's a problem.
Myself, I would like to file a bug report against 2020.
If I can figure out who,
I mean the text of it would mostly just be,
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!
Unfortunately, I think maybe someone did file
that bug, but it got marked as WONTFIX.
Or even worse, WORKS FOR ME.
It can be really,
if you actually want to live this life though,
it can be pretty tiring.
There's a friend of mine who says,
she actually likes using proprietary software
because if she runs into a bug,
she feels no responsibility to file a bug
or to try to fix it.
Because empowerment can be exhausting.
If you can fix anything,
you can feel pressured to fix everything.
But complaining has its appeals,
so there are gonna be people who file bugs.
This seems to be a law of nature.
Some of them seem to be filing a bug
from an alternate universe
that somehow has HTTP and SMTP
working the same way as in our universe.
You run into that.
Okay, so one time,
well it's not always in a bug tracker,
right, that they file a bug.
Sometimes it's more of just an email to you.
That's the bug report.
I was doing some work with the local Linux users group
and we were having some policy questions
about a legal matter.
And I said something I thought fairly non-controversial
on the mailing list
and got a reply that started: "deja vu all over again.
I finally understand why mankind has been plagued by war
throughout its entire history.
Even when one generation learns something,
the next one has to learn it all over again.
It amazes me we ever expanded
out of a hunter-gatherer culture."
I wish at this point to apologize
to the organizers of this conference
because I did not mention to you in my proposal
that I am the cause of all the world's wars.
Which may be against the code of conduct.
[Audience: Definitely.]
And so if you need to discipline me,
of course I will accept whatever disciplinary action
you choose.
But yeah, sometimes working in public means,
people file bugs.
People say stuff about you and about your work.
Sometimes in a bug tracker, sometimes in an email,
sometimes in a blog post, right?
And then sometimes someone files a bug
and then someone else closes it.
You didn't even know it happened, right?
A few years ago, I ran across a blog post
where someone criticized some work that I had been doing
and then someone else, someone I'd never met,
some stranger replied in the comments and said,
"I think that you're mischaracterizing Harihareswara's work
as you would know if you'd been following her career."
I did not realize that I was famous. "Following her career."
Am I a painter?
Is someone gonna make an NFT of my stuff?
Am I gonna see one of my blog posts on the blockchain?
Having, when you work in public, evidently over time,
you accrete a reputation.
Only find out about it afterwards
and you only find out about it when people react to it,
right?
It's invisible to you,
but that is something that you're building.
But whatever story I have about,
oh wow, people are reacting to me in a certain way.
My mom has something wild
or my mom has lived a really amazing life.
Last year, I was learning,
because my mom's been writing her memoirs,
I found out that when my mom was a teacher
as a young woman in India,
she was unfairly fired from her job at a school.
And not only did the students go on strike to support her,
they set fire to the thatch roof of the school room.
[Audience: Ooh. Whoa.]
To support my mother and she was rehired.
And I said, "Mom, wow, no one's ever done something like that
to support me."
And she said, "well, in America,
mostly your roofs are concrete.
Not thatch."
That definitely is a blocker.
That is a blocker.
I'm just a project manager.
I don't think a lot of people
are going to be setting some fires literally,
in any case, to try and support me.
I do know how to file a bug report though.
That is, that is something I am reasonably good --
I think filing a bug report is a really key skill
for any project manager.
And I think my secret weapon is,
I know how to file a bug report that is so detailed
and so thorough and so reasonable
that they feel a little bad if they don't fix it.
I think that's my secret.
If I have one other secret,
it's that no matter what the meeting is,
even if I've forgotten what the meeting is about,
there are three things I can ask
that always make me sound good.
And I'll just teach them to you right now.
One of them is, "so what's the timeline on that?"
And the second is, "who's driving that piece?"
And the third one is, "has anyone even thought
for a second about internationalization or accessibility?"
Because they never have, so you sound like a genius.
I could teach some of this in one of those workshops, right,
at this conference, like I just imagined
a whole room of people just repeat after me,
"what's the timeline on that?"
Y'all come out project managers,
you get more salary, it works out.
I think another workshop at this fantasy conference
would be a workshop on Git recovery.
Like, don't mean you have a screwed up repository,
I mean, your own psychological recovery from using Git.
More of a grief counseling session, really.
I mean, Git, we've gotten used to it, some of us,
and some of us have not.
It is a multiplayer role-playing game
that is safe to play at work, but only if you win.
I'm not on Facebook, but my Git repository status
is it's complicated.
And then, you know, you have Git,
and then you have this shell of GitHub around it,
which has its own quirks, right,
that a lot of us end up happy to get used to,
the idea that people have this thing called a pull request,
but honestly, sometimes it's kind of pushy.
Let's be real, let's be real.
A friend of mine aliased "git reset --hard"
to "git regret --hard".
That's my friend Fureigh did that,
and I think that's just a good user experience
because something should be named the thing that it does.
There is another, you know, there's a lot, a lot of stuff.
There's a lot of tools.
There are so many different ways
that you can accidentally stab yourself in the foot with Git.
And one of the, you know, there's some politicians
in your country and mine who are interested
in rewriting history.
Hope they never find out about Git rebase.
I think that we should consider, you know,
the squash commands where you're changing a big old list
of work in progress commits to make it look like a series
of logical steps that you took.
I think maybe we should change that: instead of Git squash,
we should call it "git I meant to do that".
Or "git rebase --hide-my-shame".
But I feel bad for new folks who are trying to learn all this stuff.
I mean, we tell people, "come on in to open source,
we're so inclusive, come get started."
Then the moment they get in trouble,
they have to learn about something
called the directed acyclic graph.
By the way, I previously, I rehearsed this act
in front of some friends, and one friend of mine said,
"DAG jokes are just so old.
I've heard those a million times.
I think you should get rid of that one.
It's so played out."
And I think that is amazing to me
that you have heard jokes about the directed acyclic graph
so many times that you're thinking, "oh, this is just old
and played out."
This makes it sound like this is something
that even mainstream comics are doing.
Like you go watch a standup comedy special via YouTube
or Netflix and you see Jerry Seinfeld saying,
"have you guys heard about this git tool?
First off, I will control my versions.
Thank you very much.
But you add this and you cherry pick that
and then you find out you're in a detached head state.
That's just a little worrying.
I think the government ought to do something about that.
And then what's this?
You have a pull request.
It's one of a tug of war with somebody.
And then there's a directed acyclic graph.
How can it be directed if my head is detached?"
And then this routine is so popular, right?
It goes viral and Jerry Seinfeld gets
a deal for a new sitcom based on this material, or a git-com.
Git is very weird.
It's very difficult for newcomers to learn.
I feel that I got into this stuff in 1998.
And I didn't have to learn get at that time.
And so I feel bad that you have to do that as a new person
coming in.
I also think there's so much that
must be difficult for people coming in to free and open
software right now.
Like the names, having to learn the names of all this stuff.
Do you pronounce it nome or G-nome?
Christopher Neugebauer suggested splitting the difference
and calling it Jénomé.
And then even just learning what the names are
and why they're called that is ridiculous.
You're trying to figure out, "OK, what framework or tool
or library should I use?
Well, why is it called --"
"Oh, well, this is called that because it's
named after an extinct species of penguin
because Linux is about penguins."
"Oh, this over here?
This is named after an organ that only Python snakes have."
Or, "oh, here's a gem that is often
confused for a ruby or something like that."
Everything is named based on idioms
that you also don't know yet, right?
And oh, so I do most of my work in the Python programming
language, I once had to explain to somebody
who was completely new to Free and Open Source software.
This was their first PyCon.
Why a particular package format in Python is called a wheel.
I said, well, it's called a wheel the way
that cheese, which is like paneer,
is often packaged in wheels, which
is sort of like they're hard on the outside but gooey
on the inside.
And that's because, all right....
So something like 60, 70 years ago,
there was a white group of European comedians named
Monty Python.
And they had a skit called "The Cheeseshop" about a store that
says that they sell cheese, but they don't have any.
It's funny if you watch it.
And then the Python programming language
is named after Monty Python.
And the people who started the programming language
were also mostly white men.
They thought that that was funny.
And so when they started the first Python package repository
of the Python Package Index, or it was called at the time,
"The Cheeseshop," because it was named after this,
because there weren't any packages in it yet.
And so there's all these cheese jokes and puns
in Python packaging.
I think maybe white people have a lower rate of lactose
intolerance than --
But the, and so a wheel of cheese,
it's a binary format because you could transport it,
but then ones are like the gooey cheese......
If a new open source contributor comes
from anywhere in the world outside
a very limited geographic area, whatever they thought
they were going to do in open source,
their first job is actually localization.
So that's something to get used to.
You also have to get used to working in public, right?
You have to get used to making mistakes in public
and being corrected in public.
And correcting other people in public,
including people who are your elders, right?
Who are your seniors who have been doing this a lot longer
than you, but they might mess up.
And if they mess up, you're supposed to tell them they're
wrong.
You're supposed to file that bug in public.
And sometimes if you tell somebody in open source
that they're wrong, and then they're
able to fix it, they might thank you.
That's, that is weird.
But don't worry, that thanking, it probably won't happen too
often, so it won't make you feel uncomfortable.
Because we have a world of a lot of abundance
in open source software.
You can copy code freely.
You can publish stuff without having
to ask a lot of people for permission.
But I'll tell you, the two things that are really scarce
is attention and gratitude-- and money, and money.
I shouldn't forget money.
But I'm thinking about the gratitude.
I'm thinking about there's this amazing ease of sharing.
But when you share, you don't necessarily
get any gratitude back, right?
In my cultures, if you ask someone, just -- you're at dinner
and you say, "could you please pass the salt?"
And then they do.
You say, "thank you."
But in open source, you might be grabbing an operating system.
Could you please pass the OS?
And then nobody ends up saying thank you.
It is easier in free software to reuse something
that somebody spent 10 years of work on than it
is to thank them in a way that they will actually hear.
The infrastructure of free and open source software
is frictionless.
And that's part of what makes it thankless.
And that abundance, that ease of sharing,
where anybody can allow their possibilities to flower,
that means that everyone has a lot more stuff
that they might need to try to pay attention to.
That's that other thing I mentioned
was really scarce, attention.
The limits of human imagination are possibly endless.
The limits of this one human's perception are not.
And that leads to, at least if you're not careful,
and I wasn't, the worst case of fear of missing out,
it is possible to have.
The fear of missing out is something
I have to deal with every single day.
I can't keep up on everything.
There is a limitless, wondrous splendor
of the universe, of all the stuff
that we are making and sharing.
But sometimes I need to actually be making,
and not just learning about what everyone else has made.
The limit is not human imagination and human achievement.
The limit is this one brain that has to sleep sometimes.
I don't know Rust yet, OK?
I'm working on it.
I started a Rust tutorial.
I have not finished it.
It is in one of my many open tabs.
I will get to it.
But I have a lot of curiosity, right?
That's part of what got me into this.
My curiosity that doesn't have an off switch, right?
The thing that drives me to learn and achieve
and to learn from all of you, that what if it doesn't have
an off switch?
And if I ever try to say to myself, "It's OK.
You can stop.
You don't have to read that article.
You can close it without reading it.
You could unsubscribe from that one mailing list."
There is a voice inside that says, "What are you?
Complacent.
Do you want to end up being so ignorant, so out of it,
that people laugh at you with insults
that you don't even understand, all because you
wanted work-life balance?"
And I know what people might tell me who meditate
or have psychological health or something they would say,
"Consider having gratitude, right?
You could be grateful that there's all this wonder.
All these people are making so much stuff, so many tools.
There's so many advances in science and engineering
every day.
Isn't that a wonder?
Can't you just be carried along like it's a river
and you could just dip into it?"
But a thing that they might not understand
is my fundamental insecurity.
Because who am I?
And what good am I to anyone?
What use am I if I am not a constantly updated dashboard?
Of all the projects that I care about,
what if someone asks me for advice and I'm wrong?
What if someone asked me for advice and my advice is obsolete?
If my cache is out of date, doesn't that make me invalid?
And no one can tell me, "Oh, that's enough," right?
and help quiet that voice.
No one can credibly say to me, "OK,
you have now read enough today.
You follow enough people on social media.
Your email is now at a point where you should not
be subscribing to any more things."
It's not like anyone else can say to me,
"now you can rest" in a way that makes them authoritative, right?
We talk a lot about licensing in free and open source software.
I would like a license, like a driver's license,
that says "you're good enough."
It would just be like a stamp of legitimacy
that says "you are a good enough open source technologist."
And that means that I could unsubscribe from so many things,
especially if maybe they could be like a guild that would also
do continuing education courses, right?
So I just take five of these classes every year.
And the rest of the time, I could do more of the typey typey
and less of the read-y-read-y, because I want to learn,
and part of that isn't just about a drive for curiosity.
I think at the heart of open source
is the kind of humility, right?
The humility of the open bug tracker or the open mailing
list, that every one of you who's watching this, who's
listening, if you've ever participated in a bug tracker
in a mailing list, if you've ever shared a space with people
where you were open to someone coming in and filing
that bug report or having another idea,
you're a part of this, right?
Because we all try to work to make a culture
and to make projects where someone else, someone who
doesn't look like you, someone who doesn't think like you,
someone who doesn't talk like you,
could come in and blow your mind, right?
They could have a better idea.
They could have an idea about how you could fix something,
an idea about how we could do something great together.
And that kind of possibility, radical possibility
of openness to the stranger, it's at the heart of what
makes open source amazing for me.
But in order for me to actually be open to that mind-blowing thing
and the reason our stuff is great,
in order for me to live out that philosophical commitment,
I have to read my damn email. The diversity and splendor
of 8 billion genius minds versus my inbox.
And it's worse of a problem for me
than it is for a lot of people, because I am just enough
of a leader in free and open source software.
I am just enough of a person whose words have a little bit
more influence than if I don't reply,
if I don't say, "that's a good idea."
If I don't say, "maybe you could try it this way."
If I don't say, "oh, you know who else is working on this?
Maybe you could work together."
If I don't do that, that might make a difference
between the thing happening and the thing not happening,
or worse, between someone feeling included
and someone feeling like open source has no place for them.
Spider-Man is known for saying that with great power
comes great responsibility.
But Spider-Man never mentioned the follow-up,
which is that with a single atom of power
comes a completely unsustainable load of responsibility.
Oh, by the way, I have power.
I know I'm not supposed to say so, but I do.
In open source, we don't really say, ever, right?,
"I have power."
Like, it's not any of the OSI-approved licenses,
but it sure does seem to be a rule that we have.
But you do not say, "I have power."
You can say, "I have a role."
You can say, "I am a maintainer of such and such project."
But power in open source, it's as invisible as a gas.
And you only find out that you've
been taking up too much space in a room
when someone else decides you need deflating.
To say, "I have power."
When was the last time you heard someone
say that who wasn't a villain in a movie?
Who followed it up with, waaa-hahahaha.
But.
Some of us do, right?
Some of us, we have gained authority over time.
And our words carry weight.
People listen.
And I'm not going to go too far into it.
But if there's a thing about you that's true,
and then you aren't allowed to say it,
isn't that going to cause problems?
If we have power, and then etiquette
doesn't allow us to talk about it, about how we use it,
how can we talk about how to use it well?
Imagine that you're talking to somebody,
and they say that they're about to have a child,
or that they have a child.
And you say, "wow, becoming a parent
is such a huge responsibility."
And then they say, "Oh, I'm not really a parent.
That's such a formal word.
I figure we're all growing together."
I think perhaps you would roll your eyes,
and you would say to them that they need to work on their
dependency management.
So yeah, if we don't talk about having power,
the only time that we end up talking about power
is when it goes wrong.
And that's pretty unsustainable.
I mean, I've been thinking about sustainability
and open source a lot.
There's the money side of it, which
I mentioned very briefly earlier.
That's what I've actually been spending a lot of my time
recently working on.
You know, I write grant proposals,
and I help projects think about, all right,
how do we, what is our roadmap that we can actually sustain?
But I think there's just so much we haven't tried.
Like we haven't tried product placement mostly.
Like imagine if instead of git commit, it was git Pepsi.
And we got paid for that.
There's a couple of licenses that could change things.
And so I'll end tonight by just sharing with you a few thoughts --
maybe we could talk about them at the social event --
for three licenses that could possibly
help with the sustainability of open source software.
There is the coffee shop Wi-Fi license.
And that's if you use the stuff for too long
without giving back, someone will start
resentfully mopping next to you.
There is the military conscription license,
which is that you can use the software for free.
But one weekend a month and two weeks a year,
you need to come help do code review.
And finally, to tie together a thing or two that I mentioned
earlier, there is the wedding gift license.
We give this software to you freely.
It is a gift, and we hope you enjoy it.
But would it kill you to send a thank you note?
Thank you very much.
I hope you've had a good time.
And I hope you have a great time at the social event.
Thank you.
[Audience: Woo!]
[Audience: Woo! and applause]
Thank you.
[Audience: Thank you.]