"YOU"
Speaker: Leon Gersing
Twitter: @Rubybuddha
Site: http://about.me/leongersing

I honestly had no idea what I was getting in to when I sat down in to this session. I basically saw the picture of the speaker and knew that it would be a good session. I was completely wrong; it was the BEST SESSION of CodeStock 2012.  In fact it was so good, I texted another coworker attending the conference to get over and listen to Leon. Leon took on the concept of growth in the software development community. He specifically referred David Hansson in his ability to stick to his beliefs when the development community thought that he was crazy for creating Ruby on Rails. If you do not know this story Ruby on Rails is one of the fastest growing web languages today. In addition, he also touched on the flip side of this argument in that we must be open to others ideas and not discard them so quickly because we all come from differing perspectives and can add value to a project/team/community.

This session left me with two very profound concepts/quotes:

“In order to learn you must do it badly in front of a crowed and fail.” - @Rubybuddha

I can look back on my career so far and say that he is correct; I think I have learned the most after failing, especially when I achieved this failure in front of other.

“Experts must be able to fail.” - @Rubybuddha

I think we can all learn from our own mistakes but we can also learn from others. When respected experts fail it is a great learning opportunity for the entire team as well as the person who failed. When expert admit mistakes and how they worked through them can be great learning tools for other developers so that they know how to avoid specific scenarios and if they do become stuck in the same issue they will know how to properly work their way out of them.