How my disabilities make me a better developer.

>> Thank you for letting me close out this conference with a bang. Certainly has been a cool conference. It's good to have everyone online, even though we're not in person. I'm going to talk about how my disabilities make me a better developer. It's going to be interesting. Let me just dive in. So, before I do, just really quick, I work at bounteous, and I have been here about three years. I love this company. You can see some of our clients like domino's pizza, Centura health. Everyone in the company is smart and works hard and everyone at my company supports my disability. It's a really great place to work. And I have a lot of great things to say.  Is if you're looking for a Drupal position, keep us in mind in the future. 

So what is this talk? Obviously I struggled a lot with figuring out what to present for this talk, what to talk about. You know, I went back and forth on this a million times. And adjusting the slides. I have been adjusting things today as I figure out whatever I want to say. But, you know, first and foremost, this talk is about my experience with a disability. It's about the things that I go through on a daily basis, and the different lessons that I've learned from living with a disability. 

This is not a call for pity. I don't need you to treat me any differently because of this. I don't need empathy or pity. If I need help, I will ask for help. Just something to keep in mind through this. There is a really great quote that came out in the '90s during the Americans With Disabilities Act. People with disabilities started fighting for civil rights, and they organized around this quote that is, "nothing about us without us." And you know, what this says is that when decisions are being made about people with disabilities or when things are being done that impact our lives, we need to be in the room to talk about the things that we need. So this talk is my way of putting myself in the room and making myself be known and making it be known the different things that I deal with and raising some awareness about the lives of people with disabilities. Many people don't usually have a lot of perspective into this type of thing, so it's an interesting thing to share. As I mentioned, this is a very emotional and personal talk. I struggled a lot with trying to figure out what to say. It is scary for me, because as a person with a disability, I understand that society may look at me differently. People in the future or people in general that are trying to find a job, if someone is trying to get information about me, they will see this talk. And you know, what I'm trying to say is that it's a difficult talk to give, and there are going to be consequences for me in the future for sharing this part of my life with you all. So I'm going to do my best to be honest and forthright about all of this. 

On a high level, this is just how I survive day to day life and the different lessons that I have learned from having a disability. 

So I am Matthew Ramir. I am a senior web developer at Bounteous. You can find me on Twitter. I am a computer science major. I went to University of Illinois Chicago. I minored in gender studies, something that people might not know about me. I have always been very social justice oriented, very active with human rights groups and disability rights groups and animal rights groups throughout my life. So disability equality is something that is very important to me. It's something that I have put a lot of thought into throughout my life. 

In the tech perspective, I started doing Drupal in 2012 during college. Some of the first sites I built were for the LGBTQ group and a couple of other groups that I was a part of. I enjoy performance optimizations and long running queries on the beach a lot. Any time you have a technical problem that involves complex things, performance problems, integrations, I'm definitely the guy to call. 

I'm also very athletic. I'm a golfer. I play in golf tournaments. I play golf every weekend. I play soccer and camping. I was in boy scouts. I was an outdoorsman. And I love just being a part of nature. I love being outside of my house. So it works out that I can get back outside after this coronavirus. I got the name crasX because of the number of times I crashed my bike as a kid. When I was in high school, I used to bike to school every day. And unfortunately, with my disability, balance and coordination are slightly affected. So that equals more bike crashes. I thought crash with an H wasn't cool enough. One of those things is true. It might be both. But you guys can decide after the talk. I'm also addition abled. 

This is an interesting thing that I struggle with a lot. Because I am, you know, a well respected senior developer in the company. I'm an asset. Does that mean that I'm not disabled if I can do more than what most people can? What even is disability? Right? So, from a medical perspective, disability is a physical or mental condition that limits a person's movements, senses, or activities. So you have this medical term, disability. There is also the societal view of disability. Which is this idea that, you know, like I do not have a disability that ‑‑ what disables me is the fact that society becomes inaccessible for me. So there's a lot of different views on what disability is. It affects everyone differently. And it's extremely complicated. I just wanted to share a couple of videos here of me. On the left here is me playing golf. I play golf about once a week. And I have been playing since I was a kid. When I was in high school, I tried out for my golf team, and I was one of a couple people that didn't make the team. And I found out about a week later that everyone on the golf team was calling me the crippled kid that didn't make the team. So I quit golfing. But I picked it up again a couple years ago. This is a video from about a month ago. Since picking up golfing again, I have just started working hard at getting better at overcoming some of the challenges that I have to face, which I will be talking about shortly. It's a good example of how how do we learn it? I'm physically disabled, but I can golf better than a lot of people out there. Here's a video of me bowling. This was also about a month ago. You know, I had my best friend record me, because I kept throwing gutter balls. And I wasn't really able to throw it down the lane. Of course I was like hey, can you record me? And I threw it perfectly, right? So this is a really good example of I have these physical limitations. And sometimes they are difficult to overcome. But there are cases like this where I just tend to work at the problem until I figure out how to overcome it. So part of myself, working with friends, talking to friends about what I might be doing wrong and how I can improve my skills is good. Just some of the work I have to put in on a daily basis. So, am I disabled? Well, medically, yes. 

I have what's called cerebral palsy, CP for short. And CP refers to a broad group of medical disabilities that typically affect a person's ability to move and maintain balance. And a whole variety of things. This list here is how CP specially affects me. So there are different medical names for the different symptoms that I have. I don't know if you call them symptoms, but different difficulties that I have. So spastic hemoplegia. Mostly the right side is affected. I have super toned muscles. It means I don't have to work out at all and I get really Jacked. Sorry. Super toned muscles means that my muscles are in a constant state of contraction. So I found a good example of this today when I was looking through this. So when you put your arms down by your sides and clench your hands really hard, you can feel your muscles tense up a little bit, right? When I get nervous or there are certain conditions that trigger this, my muscles will tense up like that, and I won't be able to relax them. So that also falls into there's times when I have involuntary muscle contractions. If I hold my right hand here, and I rest it on the table, my fingers start twitching. That's not me doing that. That's just involuntary movement. So again, mostly the right side of the body. And also, I do squeaking and swallowing. I didn't discover that until a few months ago and then I was like oh. That explains why I randomly choke on things. There are a lot of different ways, some ways I don't even know of yet. I'm always finding new things that are difficult or give me limitations or kind of make me have to think through problems slightly differently. I also have ataxia, which affect my balance and coordination. So again biking probably wasn't the best. I biked to school every day anyway. It went about as well as you could imagine. Good times. For example, if I pick up a bottle cap here, I will be talking about this shortly as well. It's difficult for me to grab on to that bottle cap in a way that doesn't hurt my hands. So, for all intents and purposes, yes, I am disabled. Sometimes I'm disabled; sometimes I'm not disabled. Sometimes I'm able to do things in a way where I don't have to have specific accommodations. Sometimes I need to ask people for help. It's usually people around me that cause me to be disabled. It's a very, very complicated thing, and it's a very situational thing. But I want to talk through just a couple of examples of how my disability affects my day‑to‑day life, and some of the ways that I figure out how to work through it. This is me and my dad on my porch, sitting on a swing that we built together. My dad was a pipe fitter when I was a kid. He is now in a different line of work. I grew up with him, and he had a tool. I grew up around working with my hands. He would show me how to fix things like toilets and electrical switches and outlets. Anything in the house that would break, he would show me how to fix it and teach me how to use the different tools that he used in different situations. So a good example of this is, you know, whenever I want to hang a picture, grabbing on to that nail is extremely difficult for me. I'm not able to grab the nail between my pointer and thumb. The most comfortable way I can grab this nail is how it is shown in the picture here. A big problem with that, obviously, is my finger is in the way. Trying to hold something that small in my hand, I'm going to hit my fingers. And I really like my fingers, so I try to avoid that when I can. So yeah, I can go. I can ask my dad for help. I can ask a friend for help. There's people that I can go and ask for help with this, but I'm not always going to have someone around to help me, especially when it's something as simple as hanging a picture on a wall. I'm not going to make my friend drive across the city to hang a single photo, right? So I have to think about how to nail something to a wall without having to ask for help. And again, as a kid, I realized that I have a perfect tool for this. So this is just a pair of needle‑nosed pliers. I'm able to grab on to a nail with just the tip. And the way the pliers are shaped, I'm able to grab on to the handle without worrying about my spasticity, without worrying about my hands cramping and the constriction that happens with my body when I try to do the fine motor controls. 

So this is a good example of how things can feel impossible sometimes. I look at using a screwdriver to pull out an electrical switch or something. It becomes difficult for me, and it can take me four or five times longer to do something as simple as removing something from a wall. If I tried to do this without the pliers, I would probably drop the nail four or five times. I would probably hit my fingers as well. One of the things I would do as a kid is I would push the nail into the wall a little bit so it wouldn't fall, and then continue to hammer that way. There are other projects or tasks on projects that feel impossible. It might not feel like there's a solution for it. It might take you four or five times the amount of time you estimated. But once you have the right tools and you understand the problem, it's not too difficult to find a way to work through it and work past that. So it's a good example of this. Another one is tying shoes. So this is a super basic task. Only it requires a lot of perseverance from me. I recorded this a couple of days ago. It's 40 seconds long. So when I was trying to figure out what to talk about through this, I looked up how long should it take you to tie your shoes. I would be interested to see how long it takes people to tie their shoes, because when I searched this, most of the videos are either how to tie your shoes in under two seconds or ‑‑ videos designed specifically for kids on how to tie your shoes. I even had a good laugh because one of the videos was of a kid explaining how to tie his own shoes, and he was able to tie his shoes faster than I was able to. 

So a good example is as a child, I was at Six Flags and my shoe kept coming untied. It's a busy amusement park. People are running around and I'm trying to stay up with my group. I believe I tried to tie my shoes about three times, and they would come untied constantly. So I would have to stop, tie my shoes, and catch up with my group. Eventually, I asked my friend for help. I said hey man, like I need you to tie my shoes. And he was like yeah. No problem. He helped me without question. Me standing in the middle of Six Flags with my best friend tying my shoes. And it's a difficult thing to deal with, because you feel like you're the center of attention. You feel like everyone is watching you. Even though that's not really the reality of it. It makes you very self‑conscious to ask for help. At the same time, if I were to try to tie my shoe myself in the middle of Six Flags, I get nervous because I feel like people are watching me. And then I get nervous and my body tenses up. And then it will take me five times longer to do it. But if I ask for help, all I have to do is suck it up for a minute, understand that sometimes I just need a little bit more help. And my friends help me with no problem. So even though it requires the perseverance, with the right help, I'm able to keep up. I don't have to worry about falling behind, because people help me. 

A final example of some of the things I go through, so I just moved out to Denver. I live on my own. As a person with a disability, which is something that is relatively rare for people with physical disabilities to live alone. A lot of times people need extra care with different types of help for basic things around the house. I just moved to Denver and I'm far away from family and my support system. I need to make sure that I can survive alone, making sure I can take care of basic tasks. So a good example of this was I got my first flat tire. This was about a month ago. You know, it wasn't the most ideal situation. I was on one of the highways, 294, the west loop. I had a friend with me, and he was, you know, he knew how to change tires. He was able to talk me through and point out some things that adidn't exactly know. I'm glad he was there and able to give me some help with this. But I also wanted to do this on my own so that I could prove that when I get to Denver, I don't need to worry about this type of thing because I know I can take care of myself. While this is happening, a man came up to us and offered to help us. The assumption was that this man was homeless or had some psychological issues or a combination of both. We tried to explain to him that, hey, I want to do this on my own. Like I need to learn how to do this. I appreciate your offer for help, but we're okay. There are two of this that are taking this on. He did the opposite of help. So instead of saying okay and moving on, he decided to get upset with us and call us racist for not allowing him to help us. And then he sat down next to us while we were ‑‑ while I was changing the tire and proceeded to heckle me throughout the entire process. So he would say thing like hey, hey buddy, you're looking weird. Are you sure you're okay? You're looking tired. You need someone to help you? That kind of thing. Just kind of mentioning how weird I looked, about how I probably needed help. It was extremely difficult. But my options were either confront this guy, start a fight. I don't even know what he has been through in his life. Or I can just accept it and just do what I need to do. So, that's what I did. You know? I don't want to start a fight with anyone. I doubt I can handle that myself. I just kept moving. And I changed my tire. I got it done myself. I had a friend help me out Jacking up the car. But we were able to fix the tire. And I did it while somebody was heckling me the whole time. That just helped prove that I'm going to be okay. I'm able to live independently. And the world is going to throw really annoying things at me, but I'm still going to be able to work through them, and it's going to be okay. 

I am louder than a bomb. So, louder than a bomb is a music festival in Chicago. It is over 5 weeks. A lot of underrepresented communities. Everyone from all over Chicago comes and shares their poetry. And when I was ‑‑ when I decided to join this, the coach for the team talked to me and she talked to all of us and she asked us, what's the thing that you hate the most about your body? And I remember telling her, like, I just hate how I smile. Like sometimes when I smile, that spasticity kicks in and I look really weird or I look strained. I don't like my smile. And she looked at me and she was like what about your disability? You have this whole physical disability. What about that? And I realized that I had never even really thought about that. My disability is something that I accept and live with. It's not ‑‑ it's something that I work past. But, I decided to write about my disability. And I performed this poem in front of thousands of people. Just like this, it was people that had never really been introduced to disability or hadn't really thought about how disabilities affects people so I am going to perform a poem for you right now. It's slightly different than the one I originally did for a lot of you. But this is a photo of me when I was on stage. I apologize if it makes you uncomfortable. Feel free to leave or tune out. 

Ruptured uterus. The worst thing a doctor can tell an expecting mother. Disabled. The worst thing the doctor could have called her child. Crippled. A word that has tortured me ever since. A word that tells me I exist somewhere between normal and trash. This idea sent me into spirals, roller coasters of depression and time bombs. I buried it in liquor bottles and silent nights hoping I don't have to explain my existence. Hoping I don't have to be reminded of what could have been. I put my heart on my sleeve and my guts on the stage. Words I have feared for all of my life in hopes that you would hear me. And I realized that the people that mattered had never stopped listening. I was just bottled too tight to understand or be understood. I was buried by things like the word cripple. Every social expectation, another meal, another coffin. I am supposed to be strong. I am supposed to be invincible. I am stuck in limbo, a place I put myself through years of torture trying to conform, trying to be worth something. I have marks on my wrist of the days I have been alive, the days I have been stuck in a broken body that holds my mind captive. I am a cripple, a deformed, defective, debilitated cripple. I called myself these things before anyone else had a chance to. And I am reminded daily of how true they are when innocent children and guilty adults point fingers. When all I can do is laugh along when my body spasms as I am startled. When anonymous people ask me daily how drunk I am. They tell me I should get checked out. When ushers at nightclubs turn me away or tell me to drink water because I look too intoxicated. When I am forced into the shame of asking for a seat on the train because my body gets too tired to stand. At least I can stand. I am not sitting at home hiding behind daydreams of perfection out of the public's eye. I am not a burden to the state. I refuse to be institutionalized or sterilized. I refuse to be restricted or restrained. I will not let an inaccessible world tell me what I am capable of. I am a cripple. I am intelligent. I am a human being. I deserve to be treated with respect. But I don't know how to be disabled. The universe forgot to give me a manual. It just decided I was special. Sometimes even beautiful, and somehow it became my struggle to just exist. So, that last point, there is no man page on disability. I think this is a big part where struggles come from. Is that how do I know what I'm allowed to ask for help for? How do I know what I can and can't do? Is my experience valid? If I'm able to be a physical asset and play golf, am I allowed to ask for a seat on a train? It's a very complicated issue. But throughout my life, I have proved that I can do anything. I can overcome any obstacle. But this is where things get dangerous, because I can't do everything. I like to think I can. I like to, you know, push myself to keep up with people. I have been, you know, I have had ‑‑ I have been lucky to have friends that can help me when I start to fall behind. But the truth is I can't always keep up. 

So I personally fight depression every day. A lot of it comes from being disabled. Being disabled really, really sucks. And I remember I got into a fight with someone about someone who was making fun of me. And I told him that I hope you never get a disability. Because even though you are giving me so much crap for this, I wouldn't wish it on you. 

Another memory is this quote I had from childhood. It must have been like fourth grade. Some art studio that I did. When people make fun of me, I can't concentrate. That's a very old feeling. I would have to fight with friends about my disability and depression. The world is cruel and unfair. And you know, the things I deal with affect me as a human. And make it difficult for me to work. And difficult for me to concentrate on things. Especially when, you know, I'm directly confronted with a struggle related to my disability. 

Sometimes I need to escape my reality. I'm stuck in this body. And there are times where depression is more debilitating than my cerebral palsy is, which I think is an interesting thought that I can overcome anything related to my physical disability, but when it comes to depression, it's not just something I can work hard on and overcome. It's something you have to treat very differently. 

So September 2018, I had one of my favorite aunts commit suicide. And it's such a simple act, but what it changed was my whole world. It changed the whole world in my family. You know, it's something that I think about a lot. I think about what would happen to others if I were gone. And this is the depression talking, right? This is the kind of thing that I have to deal with, with depression and work through. And I think the alarming thing about the whole process is I felt jealous of her. I felt jealous that she didn't have to live through the pain of life any more. That was a difficult thing for me to even say to myself. 

So in June 2019, a lot of this was still happening. I was still processing this. I was working very hard at work. There are a few things in my personal life that were piled on. And I just decided that, you know, I couldn't handle it any more, and I needed help. So I went and said hey, I need to find some therapy. I need to find someone else to talk to, because I'm having a really difficult time dealing with this. And their response was to commit me to a psychiatric unit. I was in there for a week. It was one of the worst times of my life. And I really felt like I was captive. I think it's interesting to juxtapose this photo. It was taken about a week before this happened. I'm happy, right? I'm living my life. I'm overcoming a disability. I'm doing well at work it's not always the case on the inside. Getting committed to a psychiatric unit was a wake‑up call. It told me I need to take care of myself better and I need to start working on my mental health as much as my physical health and be aware of my gression as a disability just as I am aware of my cerebral palsy as a disability. Overall, I'm really glad it happened. It was a difficult experience. But I'm glad it happened, because it really was a wake‑up call. It taught me that I need to take this seriously. So now I'm moving forward. I work hard every day to understand what I'm doing. Just like I work hard every day to think about how I can work with my disability. And being aware of my mental health as well as my physical health. Sorry. 

So, I work hard every day to understand what I am feeling. I try to be very aware of my emotional health. I try to be very aware of my physical health. It's just something that I have to continue to work at day after day. Just like there is no man page on the disability, there is no man page on depression. It affects everyone differently. Just like my disability affects everyone differently. Again, you have to think, is my experience valid? Am I allowed to help? There's a few lessons that I will take. Growing up with a disability, I think there are helpful lessons to share. If you're not struggling on a day‑to‑day basis, if you're not facing these things, I'm facing things that people probably never think about. The first thing is that it doesn't get easier. I think about it. There's a lot of discussions, especially in the mental health community as a kid, it will get easier as you mature. The things I do don't get easier. I just find ways to manage them. And I think having that perspective things might be difficult, and that's okay. I will find ways to get through them. It has been helpful for me. I can't be perfect. I think I was trying to be perfect. I was trying to act like my disability didn't exist. I was trying to be a normal person that didn't need help, that wasn't a burden on society. But that's not reality. The reality is that I'm not perfect. And you know, I just have to be okay with that. And this really applies to everyone, I think. Every obstacle is a chance to learn. That's a really big one for me. Every single time I'm faced with a challenge I need to overcome, every time I'm in physical pain because of the way my body is moving, it's a chance for me to learn and grow. I learn something new about myself. 

The most important lesson you will learn is how to ask for help. In this discussion, in the last, you know, few months of trying to be more aware of my struggles, trying to be more aware of everything, it's very important to ask for help. Doing these things alone is extremely difficult. 

And it's important to seek balance. I think especially getting wrapped up in work, we are trying to make sure that the client is happy. Working 20‑hour days to make sure the project is on time. Are you living your life in an unbalanced way? Are you stressing yourself out? Sometimes it's good to take a step back and evaluate the way that you're feeling about something. Work on finding a more centered and balanced condition for it. 

So, I want to talk about support systems. Like I mentioned, I just moved to Denver from Chicago. I just got my stuff a few days ago, so I'm still unpacking and you can imagine the chaos that my life is in during all of this. But I'm still trying to be honest with how I'm feeling about all of this. There are things that are still difficult. Even though I came out here to try and find a little bit of peace and to be closer to nature, you know, life is still going to be difficult. So what do I do when I'm not at home and I don't necessarily have the same support systems? The first thing is establishing a therapist out here. So I'm becoming more and more aware of how my emotions effect me. You can always find a therapist. Unfortunately, some of us are in better situations than others in being able to afford a therapist. It continues to help the people. It continues to help me understand both the physical and psychological problems that I face. I still have friends and family out in the world. We're still people. I the talk with them and connect to them. Even at times like this where I'm confined to my house. I had friends and family I can talk to and reach out to. And this Drupal camp is a good example of this where we have this whole community of friends that genuinely care about each other and you're hear and hearing my story. I just know that we're all going to grow from this. 

You know, there's doctors and medicine. Sometimes your depression gets to the point where it's just unmanageable. And sometimes ‑‑ medicine is a good option for you. There's a lot of different routes you can take and a lot of people you can talk to that will sympathize with you. And it's a complicated topic, and it's not something that you just have to solve on your own. And then, you know, myself. Being a friend to myself. Making sure that I don't beat myself up when I'm not able to accomplish something or something takes me five times longer than it should have. A big place to start with is emotional happiness is to work on the internal part of yourself, not beating yourself up. I think that's a big thing with imposter syndrome in our field. We feel like we don't belong, like we're all just faking it somehow. I think it blinds us to the reality of what we're all doing is we're creating amazing things. There are ‑‑ creating amazing things on our computers. Sometimes you have got to congratulate yourself to help yourself feel better. 

So, running low on time. I'm going to wrap this up. How do my disabilities make me a better developer? One thing I would argue is that cerebral palsy and depression force me to problem‑solve on a daily basis. I think, too, I have an assignment I do with a group after people. It's a way for you to practice software architecture. And for me, I am forced to solve problems on a daily basis that relate to my health. And if I don't solve them, I am in physical pain. I think that doing those things on a daily basis and trying to look at the problem that I solve as problems that have solutions. Help me strengthen my development skills. Having these disabilities has taught me a lot of compassion and patience. Not everyone in the software world is a rock star that can fix complicated issues in five minutes. Some things take people longer, and that's okay. It's important to help people through their problems and give them the support that they need. But do it in a way where they can learn and grow from it. So I think it's really helped me on a certain level as a developer just to learn how to better interact with people and give them that compassion that the work we do is hard and life is hard. And my disabilities afford me a different perspective on life. You know, life is hard. I have different solutions for things. I am ‑‑ have faced different experiences that some people wouldn't know about. It's a crazy life. But it also gives me a lot of different perspectives that people don't normally have. It's important for us to show those perspectives. And I think it is the case for everyone. We all have difficulties that we go through. We all have problems that we go through. But it's important for us as humans to grow from those problems. It is good to contribute that knowledge back to our society. I mean, yeah. It's a very interesting, complicated topic that I have been thinking about this stuff my entire life. I don't obviously have all the answers. I don't know if I'm doing any of this correctly. This is just my opinion about how I have lived my life. And I just wanted to share, you know, some insight. Thank you all for listening to me ramble for a while. Obviously with the COVID stuff and moving across the country, I wasn't able to put as much work into it as I wanted to. But I'm grateful for you hanging out and listen to me. You can send me some feedback. I appreciate the feedback on this, because this is a talk I would like to give more often. I would like to share it, share my story with the community. And I would like to share something that people want to hear.  So if you have any thoughts or perspectives, don't hesitate to share them with me. You can send me messages on slack or anonymously. That would be helpful. So that's my talk. If you have, I will take questions and answer all the things. And Brian, if you guys want to help with moderation. That would be cool. 

>> Sure yeah. Thanks, Matt. That was amazing. Thank you so much for sharing. Yeah. I don't see any questions quite yet in chat, although definitely some positive feedback and some snaps for the poetry. If anybody has questions, we do have a little bit of time. If not, as Matt mentioned ‑‑ ope, I might have a question. 

>> This is Amy. Hi, Matthew, I'm disappointed that I didn't get to hang out and drink beer with you. With all of you, sorry. But I just wanted to say that a couple of the points you made really hit home, especially about taking care of myself. Because I'm a nurse by trade, and then I'm a community developer, so I'm building relationships and that kind of thing. And I really think, like, when you said, you know, take care of yourself, I think it hits people, it's that really good reminder. So I want to thank you for iterating that a few times during your talk. 

>> Yeah. I mean something that I have learned about that is that you're not always going to be able to do that perfectly. It's also important not to beat yourself up if you can't do that. Sometimes you're going to have to work 20‑hour days to meet a deadline. And that's okay. Because you will move on and you just need to make sure that your happiness is in a place where you can keep being productive and keep working and reach out if you need help. 

>> Awesome. Definitely positive feedback in the zoom. As Matt mentioned, there's a feedback form on the session note. So that would be great if folks could fill that out. Any other questions or comments? 

>> Just wanted to say, feel free to message me on Slack. I know it's a difficult and complicated topic and not always something that people want to talk about in public. So feel free to message me on slack. And I'm happy to have a discussion with whomever. 

>> Feel free to unmute and give a real clap if you want or use the zoom clap reaction. It's almost like we're really in the same place.

[ Applause ]

Thanks so much, Matt. And for everybody else, the next thing is in the hallway track. I'll post the zoom link again. And we have confirmation that Matt's a good golfer. We got that on the record before I stopped recording. 

>> I'm glad that's known. It's so important to me. 

>> Awesome. Thanks, Matt, and thanks everybody. 

>> Thank you.