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[piano music]

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[applause]
What Ano didn't want to say

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is that programming languages are my
substitute girlfriend. [laughter]

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It's easier to get a relationship with a 
programming language than a, you know

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But you have to take her kind of dating 
course.

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Alright! Since I'm going to maybe insult
some people, you know, maybe I step on

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some toes, I just want to say kind of, you
know, this is just my personal opinion

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Also, I want you to think about this and 
then make your own decisions.

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All I want to do is make you think,
and ultimately you decide for yourself.

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Alright! Of course, you expect a talk
where I'm going to go and scream and

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curse and talk about how HR and Scrum
are cancer that needs to be eliminated

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from this industry, right? That's what you
all signed up for, you all kind of have

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your beers, your snacks ready. Um,
I have to say this talk is not going to be

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like that. And what I want to do is I want
to take you back to a little bit of some

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recent history. And in 2013 I left
Microsoft. This was when Vollmer was

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kind of in charge; now he's doing some
basketball team.

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Think that's way better for him. 
[laughter]

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But, you know, I left Microsoft with the
goal to make the world asynchronous

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and reactive. So I founded this small
company, Applied Duality, that was trying

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to do that. And then, in June, one of the
first customers I had was Facebook where

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I worked with them on a language called
Hack. Hack is a version of PHP that looks

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like a version of PHP that looks like 
PHP but under the covers it's really OCaml

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Facebook is all written in Hack but really
it's written in OCaml with Hack syntax,

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with PHP syntax.

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So funtional programming-- if you're not doing functional programming yet, you're already behind.

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So who here is not doing functional programming? OK, you can go home now [laughter]

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and maybe do a startup course but in a few years it will be obsolete. [laughter]

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And then slightly later that year I started to work with Netflix on RxJava

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and I guess there is this thing has been a runaway success I think a lot of people are using it that has gone beyond my wildest dreams.

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Let's look at 2013-- eh 2014. At Microsoft I did programming languages as a hobby

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but it turned out with my startup that it became a way to make money.

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So in April 2014 I worked with Google on Dart

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and there I helped Dart to get also support for asynchronous programming ASynch 08

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And Dart already had support for streams and now we put our API in API for streams

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and now we put that in the language as well.

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So Dart is one of the few languages that has gone up complete support for synchronous, iterators, ASynch 08

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and streams all build in the language.

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If you haven't looked at Dart yet, I would really say: give it a try just like you should give Hack a try.

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And then in September 2014, I gave the Hackile Talk that you are all expecting to see, but that you don't get.

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But that talk was my interpretation of what I saw in Silicon Valley.

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I moved from the Pacific Northwest to Silicon Valley and
I worked with a lot of the internet companies there.

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And I was really impressed by the way they 
developed software.

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I was really impressed by the way that they look at software, and that's what I wrote down.

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And I will talk a lot more about this in the rest of the talk.

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And then in October last year, I did the FP101x mooc,

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where I tried to teach the world about functional programming.

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The mooc starts again October 15, the second edition.

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So don't despair if you put up your hand, not doing functional programming, because there's your chance

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to learn functional programming.

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Alright. And then disaster struck. On Christmas Eve 2014, my leg was swollen.

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My left leg was swollen, and when I put on my PJ's.
So I told my wife, I don't trust this, my leg is all swollen.

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So we went to the Stanford Emergency Room.
And of course, you know, it's Christmas Eve,

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so you wait for a few hours. And then, the doctors talked to me and said, 'okay, it's okay.

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Probably you ate curry or some salt food, you can go home.'
So I went home, and I went to bed.

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It was like around 4AM in the morning. 
And then at 6AM, I got a phone call.

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And I still have that phone call right here on my saved messages, in my voicemail box.

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And the doctor said, 'Sir, when we did your blood test,
the white blood cell counts were a little bit

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out of wack.' And then I asked him, you know, 'what does that mean?' And he was like, 'uh uh,

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well, sir, if you want to have Christmas with your family then it's okay, you can come in tomorrow.'

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So, I did a quick Google search: "high white blood cell counts." And that's not good, I can tell you.

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[laughter]
It's not good. Okay? So what I did, we took the car,

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went back to Stanford. And at 8AM, I was in the Oncology section, and I was diagnosed with

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this thing called CML - chronic myeloidic leukemia.
It sounds crazy, but actually if you want to have

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form of cancer, this is what you want to pick.
[laughter]

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This is really what you want to pick. So what happens - this is the CliffsNotes version - what happens is that

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all of our DNA constantly gets damaged, and your body tries to repair it. And sometimes that repair can go wrong.

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And in this case, two parts of a chromosome kind of switch. So they get glued back together in the wrong place.

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And again, this is CliffsNotes, I'm not a medical person. So if there's somebody here with medical background,

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they will probably laugh, but you know, just trying to explain this in computer science terms. [laughter]

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So what happens, it's like fuzzing. Fuzzing of your DNA.
And what happens, you know DNA makes proteins,

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and now that this program is wrong - so they've just switched two statements around - it creates a protein that your body

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doesn't recognize. And that kind of fucks everything up.
Well, the nice thing about science is that they came up with

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a medication that binds to this particular protein. It's like an exception handler, it catches the exception and that's it.

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[laughter]

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So everyday, I take this pill. If I would have to pay it without insurance, I would be broke.

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So my life- I can now count how expensive my life is. It's like a few hundred dollars a day for this pill.

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But I'm happy that it exists.
So as I said, that was that.

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But if that was the only story, life would be good, right?
It's just, 'okay, you know, my DNA got messed up,

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I pop a pill every day, life goes on.' But of course,
being Erik Meijer, things are never simple in my life.

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And instead, a couple of things went wrong. So this was me around New Year's Eve. I was close to dying.

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Because what happened is that I got some internal bleedings, 
and one of the effects of leukemia is that your spleen-

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this is the thing when you're running, you know, you feel pain in your left side? That's your spleen.

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Your spleen gets enlarged. And when your spleen gets enlarged, it takes up all the space in your abdominal section,

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and so I got some bleedings, for whatever reason. And since there was less space, the blood could not go anywhere,

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so my kidneys were kind of pushed out- I don't know, like 50 centimeters from where they were supposed to be.

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So I got a- I don't know what the doctors called it- 
acute kidney injury. And then they have to open me up.

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If you're curious, I can show you. I have like a big, you know, kind of... wound here. Everything that's soft in the belly,

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they opened up to go in there. I spent five days in intensive care, I was nearly dead. If I had wanted, I could have just

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floated away, and you know, just given up. But I was fighting because my journey wasn't over. I had to still, you know

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eliminate SCRUM and AGILE from this world, so how...
[laughter, applause]

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How could I die? Alright? But anyway, it was pretty horrible, and I can tell you, one of the things that people-

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that happens to people when they are in intensive care, is they literally go crazy. There's a medical term for that,

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and I can understand that. It's a bizarre experience. I don't know if anybody here has ever been in intensive care.

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They probably know what I'm talking about. Alright, so that was the end of 2014. And not the kind of Christmas vacation

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I was expecting. But hey, you know, I'm still here.
So early January, I was released from the hospital.

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Because of the kidney moving around, all the nerves that kind of traveled to my leg were displaced. And kind of a little bit,

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you know, out of wack. So I couldn't walk anymore, my whole right leg was, you know, I couldn't move it. So I had to

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learn to walk again because I had the breathing tube in for a couple of days. I lost my voice, I couldn't even speak,

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I was like [gasping]. So they went in with a syringe and injected straight through my throat some stuff to make it work.

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So all kind of fun things, you know. The body is kind of a remarkable machine. So that was fun.

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And then, of course, when something like that happens you start to think about, 'what is the meaning of life?'

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'What am I doing on this planet?' Blah blah blah.
[laughter]

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And it took me literally 6 months to get back to normal. And it was quite a big journey. But as I said, when something

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like this happens to you, you really start to think, 'what do I want to do with my life?'

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And then in July, Mark Zuckerberg asked me about Rx, and how that could help solve giving people that are on 2G

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a better experience- a better Facebook experience. Now, you may have seen the article by Mark Zuckerberg and Bono

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about giving everybody access to the internet. Well, that kind of appealed to me because what I wanted to do is, you know

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like after this whole event, can I make my technology do something for real people? Okay? So it's great to kind of

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talk about Rx and programming languages for other geeks, but what I wanted to do was really use what I do

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for normal people. For the world, to do good for the world. That's what I came up with after I reflected about life.

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And when Mark Zuckerberg asked me that, I said, 'Well, that sounds really good. That sounds like a nice combination

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of my technical stuff and a real opportunity to help people in the real world.' You have seen what happened now with

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the refugees here in Europe. They use Facebook to find their way. It's kind of amazing how this really effects

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normal people and improves their lives. And this is something I think fits right in with the new Erik.

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So, just a few weeks ago, I joined Facebook.
And that's what I'm going to do now.

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So my startup adventure was short but sweet, but thanks
to this big life-changing event, I think I can spend my

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few years that I might have on this planet to really help
the big population of this earth.

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By the way, if there's questions at the end, I have
a whole bunch of t-shirts here for people that ask questions.

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They will get a nice Facebook t-shirt. You see here? 
Isn't that beautiful? [laughter]