Back in March of this year I had the honor and delight to give the opening keynote at CodeMania, a new conference in New Zealand.

This conference was something special. I mean, just look at their beautiful lucha libre inspired site design.

codemania

Although inexplicably, they switched to a pirate theme when it came to my profile image. Even so, it’s fun and the Twitter integration is a nice touch. It’s time for me to tweet something very inappropriate.

phil-at-codemania

On a personal level, this was a particularly special conference for me as it was the first time I’ve been asked to deliver a keynote. The topic I chose was about the love of coding and some of the barriers that can dampen that love.

I touched upon some themes that I’ve written about here such as why we should care lack of women in our industry as well as the benefits of a work environment where employees feel trusted and fulfilled. I also riffed a bit about the GitHub work environment based on my brief experience there as well as the blog posts by Zach Holman on How GitHub Works. It was a privilege and a lot of fun to give a talk that’s very different from the ones I usually give.

Not only that, but apparently the talk touched a nerve for at least one person who tweeted that this talk made him leave his job in search of a better one!

You can watch the talk on Youtube. Note that the title of my talk includes a swear word (I explain why). I know some of you are sensitive to that so I thought I’d warn you in case you’re watching this out loud with children around and would rather they not hear such language.

You can view my “slides” here on GitHub. The slides is actually a web page using Impress.js. You’ll probably need to use Safari or Chrome to view them. As I mentioned before, I’ve been posting my recent talks on Github. The GitHub project page for my talks are here if you want to clone them locally.

I should also reiterate that this talk was delivered to a New Zealand audience. Hence the crack at the expense of Aussies. I have nothing against Australians. Some of my close friends are Aussies. But when you’re in the land of Kiwis, you do what you need to in order to get the message across. Apparently the relationship between Kiwis and Aussies is not unlike that of Canadians and Americans. No real hate back and forth, but a lot of mutual ribbing.