Paul Hudson's closing keynote had the entire audience silent. When I looked around the room, I saw not one person looking at a personal device.

His talk was not technical. It was a call to action.

Here were my takeaways:

Work on what matters.

Build Accessibility into your apps. No excuses. Think of the hearing-impaired and vision-impaired.

Call out inequality and make room for everyone of different backgrounds.

We build apps to make hearts sing.

Drop the "perfect architecture" arguments and champion solutions that serve users.

Mentor. Even if you've only been at this for 1 day. You could inspire someone else to take the leap. If you have any knowledge in this subject, you are ready to mentor. Start. Today!

Paul's talk doubled-down on important messages from other speakers at Deep Dish.

Marc Aupont spoke of the high financial barrier to getting into iOS development. $1000 iPhone + $2000 MacBook. He started with a Hackintosh. Swift Playgrounds can run on just an iPad ($329). It even lets you submit apps to the App Store.

Via dedicated her talk to her mentor, Matt, who floated her a MacBook and jumpstarted her journey into iOS. She named all of the wonderful mentors she met along the way as she grew in her career. Then she urged all of us to become mentors.

Peter shared how he struggled in the void after the sale of his company. I empathized immensely with his feelings of sadness and lack of joy despite such an enthusiastic and successful career start.

Malin & Kai shared how they were struggling to make conversions into paid users despite all of the App Store features Apple was giving them. They went completely all-in into building and nurturing Orbit for over a year. When their bank account was about to run dry, they turned to freelance work. It was then that things started to turn around in Orbit.

The last 2 talks I mentioned just affirmed to me that we need to ask people how they are really doing and not assume they're over the moon because they just hit a jackpot.

Hey! I care about you and want to know. How are you really doing?

I came for the Indie Talks, but I was moved by these devs who opened themselves up and shared their struggles.

It is these stories that propel us to do better for ourselves and each other.

PS. My memories swirl like cake and icing mixed into a Portillo's milk shake, so I welcome your feedback and as well as corrections.

Edit 14:34: Fixed typo in Portillo's. Thank you Alex!