Thank you.

Um, I'm Alex, and I do a bunch of things in this world, as you can see.

Somewhere serious, Some not so serious.

Among the serious things I do as I'm a volunteer from is a lot.

I'm a Muslim.

Representative Animas, LA Tech Speaker.

And I want to tell you all a story about the T shirt.

That's basically how I got involved in open source about nine years ago.

Uh, I was fresh out of college in Romania and those looking for a job now in Romania, there's only one kind of tax job, and that's outsourcing.

If you're lucky enough to not know what outsourcing is, it basically means you get rented out.

You get rented out by the hour by the day to other companies.

And when I started out, I was doing this.

So it was a trip.

I was working for a trip planning company, kind of like trip it.

And about three months into my job, my boss came to me and said, You know what?

We've got this project called Mazzella, and I need someone to fill a role.

So you're gonna do that?

I don't like change.

I really, really don't like change.

And on top of that, I had no idea what Mozilla was.

What open source was What?

The old man was fresh out of college.

Volunteering wasn't in my vocabulary.

How do you mean?

I work for free and I enjoy it.

So we made the deal with my manager.

He was like, Look, I need to fill this role for three weeks.

I'll find someone else to replace you in those three weeks, but you have to take it.

I was like, Okay, there were several problems with this.

The team was a tester team.

I wanted to be a developer when I grew up.

Testers weren't really my friends on top of that.

Um so I joined the team around Firefox for and they had this T shirt that said Firefox for Beata Tester and I joined a week after they got the T shirt.

So I don't have the t shirt.

I stood out.

I don't feel like I was Welcome.

Welcome that.

I don't feel part of that team.

And I hated my life.

Of course, when manager was an asshole and he didn't keep the bargain So a month later, I was still working for this project.

And every morning I read this thing called the Muscle a planet which is kind of like a block aggregator everything that happens in the Muslim world.

And I read it because it helped me with my job.

All the road maps were there.

The release note that says everything and something kind of popped up.

The Mossad documentation Network was holding a documentation sprint over the weekend for $40 and the kicker was, If you participated, you got the T shirt, and that's when I had my great idea.

I'm gonna go participate for, like, two hours get the T shirt and my master plan.

It's a developer T shirt.

They have testes, T shirts.

I'm gonna get the developers.

That t shirt's not only will I fit in that team, I'm gonna be better than everybody else.

So my plan also included because I was fresh out of college and I had money.

My plan also included to go get wasted with my friends over the weekend, and I joined Saturday morning.

Um and then something changed.

As soon as I joined, I joined, and I have C and everybody was welcome.

Everybody was nice.

Everybody tried to help me help them.

And compared to my normal day to day work that was mind blowing.

And instead of staying two hours with those people, I stayed for 48.

Because apparently you don't need that much sleep when you're fresh out of college.

Now, the sense of belonging that happened over the Internet on IRC was the thing that kept me going.

I felt like my job.

I hate my job ahead.

Everybody worked with.

But I love this people part of this project, this little you could call it this little tangent to my work.

And in those 48 hours, my my friends kept calling me and calling me Where are you were at the club.

What are you doing?

Why don't you want to come have fun with us?

Like you don't understand.

I'm having fun with strangers.

I met over the Internet.

Yeah, my friends call me trades United Names, but I stayed for 48 hours like contributed to MD.

And I think to this day some of the CSS examples I've put in tow mdn still exist.

And that makes me also proud.

I did this all for a T shirt.

The T shirt.

I don't have the T shirt anymore.

It's been nine years.

No T shirt lasts for nine years.

But what I got at the end of this experience, as I got the sense of belonging and a sense of community that I didn't get anyone else going back to my work.

I had so many ideas just because I knew the right people.

I knew who to connect with and who to talk to if I wanted to do something.

Outside of my work, had this network of people to help me out.

If I had 23 hours in my day and I want to get back to something, I had this opportunity to be involved with everything from teaching coats, from teaching kids to code, the writing documentation in my pajamas on a weekend.

It was all available, and I feel like I found Lee find the missing piece in my puzzle.

I finally found a way where I could fit them.

Now, nine years later, I still days I still contribute to the mazelike community and the reason behind that, as I strongly believe in his last mission.

If you don't know what his last mission has, please Google it.

It's beautiful.

And I think I'm running out of time and I don't have anything else to say, but thank you.