Keynote: One Hacker Way - Erik Meijer

[piano music]

[applause]
What Ano didn't want to say

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

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

But you have to take her kind of dating
course.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

with PHP syntax.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

So in April 2014 I worked with Google on Dart

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

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

and now we put that in the language as well.

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

and streams all build in the language.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

where I tried to teach the world about functional programming.

The mooc starts again October 15, the second edition.

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

to learn functional programming.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[laughter]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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