Keynote: Building Community & Supporting Others by Matt Mitchell

Uh let's put our hands together one more time for for Kojo, for Jessica, for Django Khan, for waking up early. Sorry for anyone's names, I forgot. I'm gonna talk about building, but not not building code like we normally do, right? Um and not building our skills. But building community. And in that effort, supporting each other, the people to your left and right and behind you. And if you're in the front row, I'm the one in front of you. Alright, uh, I'm Matt Mitchell. I have like a bio slide, but I had such a really nice bio. I don't even need this bio slide. Just like throw that out. All right. I'm a hacker and a security researcher. And when I interface with Python and Django, it's from

my application security. lens normally, but I'm not talking about that today, which I'm really excited about. And also today I'd like to announce my retirement from giving talks. So this is probably gonna be the last normal Matt Mitchell talk that I I ever give. We'll see what happens if I'll like fake retirement and come back, but uh do a Michael Jordan. But I think this might be the last one. Um when I w was reached by the DjangoCon organizers to speak and they talked about how they saw another one of my talks. I started looking into this conference and I was like, who are these people in San Diego? Why do they want me to talk? You know. Um I work with a group called Tactical Tech or the Tactical Technology Collective. It's a an NGO or non-governmental organization based in Berlin, Germany.

And uh we teach people about the dark side of technology, but also how to protect themselves from it and educate themselves in a really not doom and gloom. So it's like Black Mirror with a smiley face at the end. Yeah. Cool it landed. All right. Thank you, Caffian. All right. So when I looked into Django Con, I was amazed because I found out that this conference has everything that all the major conferences tell you it's too hard to do. And this conference is community run. This conference is volunteer run. And every year when you think they did everything that you could possibly think of to be welcoming and inclusive and exciting. Then they just like dunk on you and just throw another thing on there. And if you go to a larger conference, uh one that's like

got thousands, if not tens of thousands, of nerds and developers and geeks attending, please point them to this conference of a conference that's doing it right. The hater in me was like they gotta be doing something wrong, but I just found more and more golds. Okay. Okay. Um yeah. Only an untitled goose or duck actually can like ruin the other thing. My switch people out there. Okay. So um I just want you to put your hands together one more time for these people who are the recipients of the diversity sponsors, um the people who got the opportunity grants. The people who are parents and and took advantage of the child care grants, people who, you know, are reading this caption right here because they make us stronger. And if a conference is a civilization, it's weird when we don't see elders, and it's very strange when we don't see children.

And we should see representations of the entire world. And I see that here in DjangoCon. So Thank you for being here. Okay, it's early, so I I promise that's like the last of the clapping. Uh Django Con advertises itself as a conference with heart. And you know, they have a code of conduct, but I'm the person who reads the code of conduct. And I really loved the first thing, which was like be kind to others. And that really has a lot to do with building community, right? What is community and how do we build it? You know, we might know how we might tackle that next project that a project manager gives us, or that a client gives us, or if we're working on an open source project with people around the world with some problem that they're tackling.

But community, you know, there's no like hello world model for community. You know. I like to think of community as this. For whatever reason, you love Django, right? And normally when you're in the outside world, maybe you're ostracized for that love and you know maybe maybe people are like, oh I'm I'm into Python, but I never really got into Django. or whatever that case is. But here it's Django all the time, 24-7, right? But the community here is larger than that. We're not just here as individuals who love a language or a framework. So I'm gonna not ask you to clap, but you know, raise your hand if you're a parent. Right? If you look to your left and right, keep your hands up.

Keep them up. Keep them up. You'll see other parents. That's your community as well. Nobody knows why you've got that baby food stain on you or why that teenager is like texting you all the time. Like those people who have their hands up. You can lower them. I promise. Okay. Raise your hand if you love video games. I love video games. I'm a Switch maniac. That's my community of nerds out there, right? Who are traveling and Wrestling with their hotel TVs to get the HDMI to display their favorite console, right? You can lower your hands, right? And a lot of time the community that brings us together is invisible. It's an invisible community. And it's hard to see that outside community when we attend conferences. And that's why I liked what Kojo said about the Pac-Man shape. I want you to explore these days.

And find not only your Django community, or maybe the community of people who work with you in the same thing, but try to find that invisible community, right? And try to build on that, right? And uh it's really difficult to build a community. I have this blueprint here of like an engine, which is like a mystery to me. I have no idea what's going on. Um and One thing that helps us when it comes to building community is realizing that we are not alone. Not to sound like Michael Jackson, although I have the Janet Jackson earpiece. And when it comes to building community, I like to point towards some folks in tech who are doing amazing things when it comes to building community. And what are they getting right, right?

But let me talk about something else. Okay, I talked about how we can support people around us. Supporting people around us means understanding that everyone has something to contribute and everyone has a strength. And when you're finding your hidden community, also look for Your hidden weakness and others' hidden strengths. No matter who you are in this room, you've got something to contribute not just to Django as an open source community, but also to this community here in San Diego and throughout the world. I travel around the world because of my work in security. I specialize in working with marginalized groups everywhere in the world. And uh just two weeks ago I was in Agra, India. I had like two days vacation after like an assignment, and I was like, hey, let me check out the Taj Mahal.

And I was blown away by its beauty. And I was thinking like how do you build something like this, even like if you could go to Home Depot tomorrow and try to build it, let alone when this thing was built. And what it took were several Fingers and hands working in unison. I heard a story that um the beauty of the Taj Taj Mahal was meant to be never replicated. So the artisans who carved into all these rocks and stones and gems had their thumbs cut off. So they can never do that again. And thankfully we're not gonna do that to you today, right? But also while I was in Agra, after leaving the Taj Mahal, there's uh a community around it, obviously, because a lot of tourists come from around the world

there. Much like GitHub. And there's this place called She Rose. She Rose Hangout, it was called. And I was like, oh, She Rose Hangout, that sounds cool, right? And the comic book nerd in me was excited for a minute. And then I read more about She Rose. And Shiro 's has a tragic past. There are women in India, especially in rural areas or in areas where there's a lot of misogyny , sexism. And they are attacked by their community b uh with acid, right? And there's now like a a ban on acid, so you shouldn't be able to buy acid that you could use to clear a drain or something. But um a lot of women were victims of acid attacks. And Shiros

is a community of survivors. And when you go to Shiros, there's photographs everywhere of women's faces And one thing that you're struck by, because everyone who works there is a survivor, whether they work in the kitchen or they're your the waiter or they're the people like running the video projector. Is how much resilience they have and how much strength they have. Because they have community. And they look at each other and they see inner beauty. And that's why these photos on the wall. Are photos of strength, and they see faces like theirs, and they're like, these are the proudest, strongest faces. And they raise their chins and their faces high.

And there's signs all around the cafe that say things like, you can do it. Don't give up. Every day a miracle is possible. And it's not just words. It's something that you see like in the energy of the room around you from the strength of these women. They have built a community and in these four walls, they are the most beautiful people on the planet. And they like resonate that when they step out of it. And it's something that really shook me to my core, and I thought, wow, I have to talk about this when I go to DjangoCon, right? So I I took this slide from a Django book, because some people were like, What's that

do with Django, right? And I thought, how can I figure out what is this power? Where does it come from? Right? Where does this strength and how do you build community? Where do you tap into that? You know, the nerd in me, I want to see the source code. The nerd in me wants to learn this framework. How do I do that? And I thought maybe it's like MTV, right? Maybe it's like that model template view. Speak a language we understand here, okay. All right. So I was thinking, please excuse the ugliness of my slide, I am not an artist. The model in this seems to be some kind of data, right? Who you are and where you are.

Maybe you're someone who self-identifies as a woman, and maybe you're in India, in Agra, or maybe you're in a village in the outskirts, right? But then there's something about you that's different from other people. There's a drive inside of you. There's these norms, this code of conduct that you've built within yourself. And that's like your template, right? And then there's this outlook on this world where we all experience everything together. But in this world, you bring it all together, and that's how you have real community, right? Boom. I'm gonna talk about examples of other people in tech who shine with that same energy.

Who puzzle me by how they can dig so deep and find this inner strength. And I hope that, you know, on these next few days, as you challenge yourself in these conference rooms, And you dis you know deliberate with yourself whether you're gonna sign up for a lightning talk. The answer is yes, you will, right? Um you dig deep and you find that inner strength in yourself, okay? The knowledge house is in the Bronx, New York, which is in upper Manhattan. And it's even further up than Harlem, where I do my Crypto Harlem project, right? And the knowledge house is completely committed to sharing the excitement of technology with people who cannot maybe even afford their laptop or maybe are dealing with a lot of issues in their community. It's a an area that is bright and strong and powerful, but also one that's dealing with economic disadvantages, issues with crime, etc.

But it's also got a vibrant community that so far has been like resilient and strong fighting against gentrification. And in the center of the Bronx, there's a warehouse that is just a brick wall on like almost a dead-end street, not far from a major highway. But when you go inside, it's like every nerd's favorite place. It's got consoles in the sofa, it's got giant screens, and there are people there learning Python and learning Django who have come from completely untraditional backgrounds. I met someone who worked at uh as a chef at Trader Joe's uh or whole and Whole Foods and things like that. And he was like, you know what, I I'm picking up a check right now, but uh and I'm a big fan of the NBA But I just want more. I'm really into my mobile phone. I got a Samsung phone, and I want to learn not just how to consume apps on this thing, but how to make them.

I want to learn What goes on when it comes to data? And he went to the knowledge house and he became a data scientist and he was like building apps that like would predict who would win what game based on all this data. And it was amazing to watch this happen. It was just a normal person from our community, not someone who maybe has gone through the paths that you might hear about But uh who in a in a kind of boot camp type program came out as someone who loves data science. There was someone at the knowledge house. Oh wait, hold on, let me make sure I get this. Right. Boom. Uh named Asher. And uh they built this thing called uh Py Ghost and they had never coded anything before. Uh Knowledge House uh is focused on people who when they see the hello world screen Shining back at them, that sense of accomplishment.

I don't know if you could ever remember that day if you go that far back in your memory, right? They share that with the people around them and then we they find the things that they love and inspire them to push forward with it. And Asher loved hip-hop. Asher was like, I love hip-hop, and uh I love trying to find out what my favorite rapper is saying. But I'm concerned sometimes with the amount of profanity. So they built a tool to help them. And it will read the apps, uh sorry, read the lyrics of their favorite song, and it'll make a clean version. Of it. So Asher knows what slangs mean and knows which ones are a little bit too much on this side versus that. And just like, you know, this is an appropriate recoding of that. And uh you know, had something that did basic natural language processing and made a clean version of the entire hip-hop universe. It was pretty amazing.

All with like really early and rudimentary Python skills, but just had a mission and and made it happen. And it really was exciting to me. Yeah. The people who take classes at the knowledge house are able to take those classes because this boot camp is heavily subsidized by volunteers, donors. um and the city of New York itself. If you're on unemployment insurance, you can say, you know what, um instead of getting trained on how to type or use Microsoft Office, Could I learn Django or Python? And a lot of times your municipality will be like, you know, we think so. It should be fine, you know? And that's how Knowledge House was able to do this. They have diverse trainers, people who come from all walks of life. Some people are in Manhattan

working um on their kind of silicon alley jobs. And then they took a train uptown and they help out at the knowledge house. Other people are people who live in the community. But the cool thing is that the knowledge house is based in the community. So people who are parents or people who have like, you know, odd job schedules are able to still take their classes. And while some students aren't able to attend every class, that's quickly forgiven because people understand the needs of the community. And one thing I really loved about it is um the attendees are given uh training on how to pass a job interview. One of my favorite things when I'm sitting there at the knowledge house, I get to watch their kind of like final project presentations, which each one of those, I tell you, if you get a chance to watch, it'll just like

really inspire you. Is I asked them, who here has ever stood up in a stand-up before? And they were like, oh, no hands go up, right? Who here has worked on a sprint or knows about agile really well? Oh no. Don't really know that, right? And then I'm like, well, okay, well, like how would you approach uh this particular thing? And they're like, well, I've used to working on these problems on myself and just like Just I just like dig deep and I just keep trying by myself in a corner. And these are all things that will ruin you in a job interview, but are normal for someone who's going through a boot camp experience. And until you give them a really simulation of that interview interrogation, you can't expect them to get that job, right? And Knowledge House spends a lot of time on that. They spend a lot of time saying, look, this is what a resume looks like when you're trying to get a job at Trader Joe's or at Home Depot or something.

And that's what your resume looks like. But this is a tech resume, and it looks different. And yours will stand out in a way that'll destin it for the shredder, right? And we have to make sure that you get in front of that person because once they score the interview and people get to see them and see their projects and look at their code, then everything is understood. But it's so hard to just get in that place. And Knowledge House spends just as much time teaching code as teaching how to get that first job, you know? And that's something I really was uh really happy with and inspired by. Okay, let's go through. Okay, so one of the many things I do is I'm on the advisory council for a group called the Open Technology Fund. or OTF. And the Open Technology Fund is an amazing entity in tech that most people have never heard of.

They will fund any open source project to you know $300,000 a year, year over year, etc. Right? If you have an idea, they even have a new project that'll fund just an idea. They'll give you uh 12 weeks and $6,000 to just make your idea real. And if you're a UX designer or you're a product person, you don't even need to make that idea. They have their own implementers who can make the idea for you, right? A lot of open source tools and projects that people use, especially in security, like Mailvelope. or Tor Browser or even Signal, the encrypted messaging app, receive their first funding and continue to receive funding from OTF.

And as an advisory council member, I'm tasked with looking at these amazing proposals from all around the world, all open source, and deciding who's allowed to get a small amount of seed funding. To maybe turn this into a full-time gig for them and their contributors. But one thing that I never really looked at twice was the OTF website, so smooth, so slick, right? Who built it and how do they build it? And uh one day I was at one of the international OTF meetings, the summits, and there they were taking feedback from people. Just please write down how we can make this thing better on a card. And it was Torchbox. Let me go back here. Okay, boom. So um

I talked to Tom of Torchbox. Cosa works on Wagtail, which is a CMS that's even better than WordPress, no offense, automatic, right? Running on Django Strong, okay, right And I was like, you know, this is amazing. How did you build this thing? We I use this on the back end. There's so many complicated parts to it. It's so slippery, buttery, smooth. And what is Torchbox? What is your magic? What is that MTV that makes you work? And when dissecting this whole thing. And Tom's here, so if you didn't go to tutorial yesterday, no shame. You could find him. Maybe you could do a lightning talk on what you learned about Wagtail.

And I was looking into Torchbox more and I found that uh this crazy headline. Torchbox transfers not 1%, not 2%, 100% of their business to employee ownership trust. And that was just this summer. That means that the people who work at Torchbox, who are 70 lucky individuals right now, which is crazy, it's an insane amount, right? Um are the owners of the company themselves. Now, I don't know if you've looked at your employee agreement that you signed, but you don't even own the source code you dream up when you're not in the building, let alone own that company. Right? But at Torchbox, it's all yours because the thing you have in common with people who work in companies out there is with the people who you work with, it's just that you all pass the same job interview and you go to the same office

and you work on this code and that's all you really started in common with. with right you all got the same job you answered the same call and it you're at the same building together and you're gonna see these people like it or not more than you'll see your friends your families your enemies your video game console any of that stuff right But at Torchbox, you're doing it not just for the paycheck and not just for the love of a challenge and not just for the feeling of accomplishment when you finish a project, but you're doing it because this is your company too. And the decisions made at Torchbox are not uh, you know, like those. I come from an activist background and I remember those flat organizations I was in where everything was decided by committee. Like who washes the dishes at this anarchist punk squad? And it's like, oh no, you know, and like nothing got done. We spent one percent of the time like making change happen and 99

% of the time trying to figure out like, you know, who was throwing cigarette butts outside the house, you know. So But Torchbox still is run like a real legit company and they're a model of how you can do it. And it's not easy, but I wish them the biggest of success. We live in a time when things like Tech Worker Collective is real. And companies that inspired me for their uh dedication to one thing or another have later uh disappointed me, right? Like I look at uh B Corps, right? Which are like we have a public benefit. We have a uh outside agenda that's to support people, companies like um Kickstarter, right? Who are now challenged with the issues of employees trying to organize, right?

Which is like a new thing. We see like Google walkout every day. But in Torchbox, you're walking out of your own home. That's that to you. It's employee-owned. So I I asked Tom about this some more. And uh here's some points that he'd brought up. All right. He said that we set out to do digital work for people, making the world a better place. And I thought, wow, that's a really inspirational goal. What's the user story for that one, right? So as a user, I can make this world better, right? And um That 90% of their work is for nonprofits. And that's a model that they've not like purposely stuck to, but that's the work that really inspires the people who work there. They're like, look, I'm working on a project for a company that

you know, is a nonprofit and it has a a an agenda and a and a reason for existing that's greater than itself. And um he talked about Releasing Wagtail in 2014 and their commitment to Wagtail, which is not necessarily a profitable uh commitment, but it's a commitment to proving that this thing can happen. There can be a CMS like it. And because of that It's attracted a lot of new developers who are so excited by it. It's attracted groups like the Open Tech Fund, NPR stations, which also use Wagtail to support their stuff. And um even the um National Health Services of the UK are wow, we're looking at the Wagtail. And it's cool that you can kind of have this uh

Maybe if you are working on a traditional project in a larger company, maybe you can open source a kind of skunk work project. And use that as a way for retention and keep people excited. And use that as a way to attract new talent and have like people who are writing job posts and hiring managers promoting that project. Okay, let's go back to cool. I reached out to another person. Who seems to be able to build community, who seems to be able to support people around them. And I was like, what is like your magic? How do you do this? What's your MTV, right? And uh

this is Laura Teach. And um Laura is from Nairobi, Kenya, and loves security, lives in Africa. And I I just talked to Laura just like I talked to Tom quite recently. And Laura has a project called SheHacks, which is a conference that's growing and a project that's like huge and bigger than just Nairobi. She hacks is focused on getting anyone into security, especially women into security. Just like anywhere, cybersecurity is a huge field. And cybersecurity has more jobs than people. I know that my partner always tells me, like, stop with the cybersecurity evangelism, but I I can't stop it. Um and with cybersecurity being a huge thing.

There are more and more women in Africa who are excited about it and go from learning uh JavaScript and Python and Django into security. But what they found is there's not a lot of support for them. And Laura decided to change that. She hacks is focused on community. Focused on getting people excited about not just this journey they're on and not just these challenges, but doing it together with the person to their left and right. And something that really inspires me. And I asked her, I was like, hey, uh tell me some more about like the magic behind SheHacks, which hopefully is right here. And she said, yes. Um They use Python for security scripting and they're really excited about Django, right?

Uh as a way to kind of create a lens on these scripts and create like web accessible tools, right? And when I asked her like what are something that you can if you could speak to these amazing people in San Diego, if I could fly you here and teleport you, if I bring you into this room, she said I would tell them To find something that you're passionate about. Find something that's missing from your community, whatever community you self-identify in. Because Uh when you focus on that, it'll inspire you. It'll inspire you to get up on a rainy day. It'll inspire you to get up when you have a cold. And um, we all have those other communities we're part of. She wanted me to tell you to stay focused no matter what. She's like, I know it's hard out there, you're developers like we're developers, and not every day is easy, and there's a lot of distractions, things that come up, but stay focused on why you started this

She said when you stay focused on it, that passion will become like your mission statement and it'll solve the problems for you. It'll get you through it. Please hang on, she's only to tell you guys. She said, Whatever dream you have, um, whatever that made you do this in the first place, don't forget that. Don't forget your first excitement when you were able to like, you know, run a build and It was it passed all your tests the first run, right? Or when you're even able to just create like a very simple interface that worked with an API you were challenged by. Hold on to those small accomplishments because that's who you are. She said, the more people I help, the more people want to help me. And that's something that she wanted you to do. She said, if you help another person.

Hey, you don't understand how this works? I was challenged by that. Oh, I noticed that you have this bug on your uh GitHub repo. You know what? I got two hours. I'm just gonna tackle that from home, right? It's gonna give back to you. She says she started her group on WhatsApp with some women in 2016 on August 4th because uh They were asking questions in different security forums in Nairobi, and people were like, Boo, get out of here, noob, you don't know what you're doing, right? And uh that lack of support They were like, wow, we feel really ostracized and down, but we we don't want to give up. And so a WhatsApp group started with just like two or three people, right? It was just Laura and some friends. And then they were like, oh I know someone who also wants to do this stuff. Oh I know someone who also didn't feel comfortable And that group got so big, it was just an unwieldy WhatsApp group, and that's how SheHack

started. Now it's uh it went from 30 women who are used doing the SheHacks thing every day to 270. And they're in 12 universities throughout the country. All in three years. I can't see my own. Oh wow, I'm really. Sorry, I'm fueled by Dayquill, so I'm like, the caffeine has got me talking really fast. I think I'm gonna finish early. So what is community? Community is someone who loses things all the time, because I know you do, because you're a nerd, right? Community is someone who spills things all the time, because I do that too, right? Community are those invisible things that bring us together that make us closer than family.

Community is Trying to solve something for three hours and then reading something on Stack Overflow that's like, oh, I got you. One minute. Thank you. Right. Who is that mysterious solution, that green check mark, right? Who saved the day for you? How many times have we quietly Just to use that assistance, right? So here's your chance to give back and be your human stack overflow to the person to your left and right, right? Community is that as well. I I feel like I'm ending super early now, but uh this is all I got. Um but I could talk all day about this stuff. It's important why we build code. If I said why do you build code, what would you answer?

Can I put you on the spot, Kojo? Why do you build code? Solve problems. To solve problems. Who builds code to solve problems? That's a huge community code, Joe. Congratulations, right? You're alone when you're behind a keyboard, but in a community of millions of people, once you decided, hey, you know what, I'm working on my code today. And this is one of the rare opportunities to see more than what's in your room or what's in your office and see the beauty of your community. Please be kind to each other. Don't be kind to your technical problems though.

Blow through those, right? And support each other. That's all we got. Viva Django, that's all I gotta say. Thank you