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					<title>063: The Distribution of Brilliance and Opportunity with Rehema Wachira</title>
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					<pubDate>Wed, 17 Jan 2018 05:00:46 +0000</pubDate>
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					<description><![CDATA[In this episode, Rehema Wachira joins us to talk about being a software developer in Nairobi, Kenya, creating a Culture of Saving, diversity of thought, and how technology empowers people.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[In this episode, Rehema Wachira joins us to talk about being a software developer in Nairobi, Kenya, creating a Culture of Saving, diversity of thought, and how technology empowers people.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a></p>
<p><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rehema Wachira: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/remy_stack"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@remy_stack</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://andela.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Andela</span></a></p>
<p><b>Join Our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">Support us via </b><a style="background-color: #ffffff; font-size: 1.8rem;" href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">!</b></p>
<p><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:22</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Rehema’s Superpower: Empathy</span></p>
<p><b>02:53 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Rehema’s “Untypical” Origin Story</span></p>
<p><b>07:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Enjoying Coding Because of the Complexity Behind It</span></p>
<p><b>11:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Creating a “Culture of Saving”</span></p>
<p><b>14:52 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Diversity of Thought” and Seeing the World Through Others’ Eyes</span></p>
<p><b>22:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Creators and Makers</span></p>
<p><a href="https://www.indiehackers.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Indie Hackers</span></a></p>
<p><b>30:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– How Technology Empowers People</span></p>
<p><b>38:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Distribution of Brilliance and Opportunity</span></p>
<p><b>47:01 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Freedom of Creative Expression</span></p>
<p><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Having to unlearn the need of being perfect.</span></p>
<p><b>Jessica:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> We want to speak to more guests on a global level! Please reach out!</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Fixed vs growth mindset.</span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Diversity is not just good for ethical reasons, it also makes your organization more competent. </span></p>
<p><b>Janelle:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Celebrating beautiful.</span></p>
<p><b>Rehema:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> A fundamental right to freedom.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID</b></span><span class="s2"><b>:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b></span><span class="s1">Hello everybody and welcome to Episode 63 of Greater Than Code. I’m Astrid Countee and I’m here with my friend, Rein Henrichs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning, or whatever time it is when you’re listening to this. I am here with my friend, the colorfully-haired Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning! And I am thrilled to be here today with Sam Livingston-Gray!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Woohoo! And I’m happy to introduce the prodigal Janelle Klein.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And we’re here today with Rehema Wachira. And she doesn’t fit the typical profile of a software developer. She is a self-taught coder from Nairobi, Kenya whose passionate about making a positive impact on people’s lives through technology. She’s a graduate of the University of Virginia. And she first started her career working in advertising. And then after learning about product development, becoming intrigued with the complexities of coding, she began teaching herself the basics of Python. So, with only two months of coding experience under her belt, she applied and was accepted to Andela’s development program where she now creates code that’s used by companies every day. Welcome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. Thank you so much. I’m really happy to be here. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We’re excited to have you here, too. So, the way we usually start this is by asking a question about your superhero powers. So, what would you say your superpower is and how did you acquire it? </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hey, that’s an interesting question. I think for me, it would have to be empathy. I think. My mom used to work for nonprofits for most of her career. The majority of her career, actually. And she has a big heart. She cares a lot. And I think she would bring that home and that’s something that I would witness and sort of absorb as well. And it was really important and it made me good at my job when I was working at nonprofits and when I worked in advertising and communications. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I wasn’t so sure how it would apply to being a developer but I actually more and more am realizing just how important it is to have that empathy to see people not just the way you see them but to be able to see people the way they see themselves. And to be able to understand things from their perspective, really putting yourself in their shoes. It’s important just for everyday life but also when we’re building things. To me, code is a tool but it’s also always an expression of who you are and the way that you think in the way that you write the code. And so, being able to put yourself in a potentially user’s perspective I think adds more to the thing that you create at the end of the day. So yeah, I like thinking about empathy not just as a personality trait but as an actually really useful took for navigating the world, especially as it becomes more complex. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Superheroes also usually have an origin story. Can we talk about origin stories in tech for a minute? I think that you said that you don’t have what you would consider to be a typical origin story for a developer. So, in my mind that’s the, for my generation it was you grew up with an Apple2e in your parents’ basement and you wrote BASIC when you were five or something. What was your origin story like? And how do you think that has given you maybe a different perspective than other people who are in the industry?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well to begin with, I’ve never had a basement. [Laughs] That’s not something that we have in Kenya. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well done. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But yeah. I always thought that I would do something with my life related to helping people and communities. Again, I think stemming from what my mom did. And I was one of those kids for whom school wasn’t that difficult. It was fun. I enjoyed learning things, especially the humanities and languages and all that good stuff. Good at the sciences as well but really terrible at math. And I just didn’t think that I was a logical thinker. This thing that we tell ourselves and we tell kids from a very early age of like, if you’re good with languages and humanities, then that’s how you think and that’s where you should stay. And then if you’re good at maths and science, then you’re logical and that’s a completely different thing. And we sort of put people into these different categories from very early on. So, I always thought I was going the humanities route. And even when I went to college, I studied political and social thought. My major literally was called Thought, something that my parents were not too happy about but they got over it. But essentially that was the way I was thinking about my life and my career, was in terms of how I help people and thinking about systems and the human systems that we build, really. Society, culture, all that good stuff. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But it wasn’t until I was working for a company, a telecommunications company in Kenya, the biggest one in East Africa, and they created a mobile money payment solution that is pretty revolutionary (and I can talk more about that because it’s really cool), way before you guys had Apple Pay and all that stuff. We’ve been sending and paying for things using our mobile phones for the last 10 years. So, I was just fascinated by the impact that that had, just seeing what it could do for communities for individuals and for financial inclusion. It just, it blew my mind. And I was like, “Okay. So, if you can create these things, if people can do this, then why can’t I also be one of the people that creates things.” I wanted to be more involved in actually shaping solutions and creating them. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So, I was interested in product, actually. I wanted to start building products. And I figure if I know a little bit of code, maybe that can help me be a better product manager. And when I started playing around in Codecademy and all that stuff, I realized, “Hey, wait. I actually really enjoy this. I’m writing stuff and things are happening.” [Chuckles] And that feeling really got me excited. And I just continued with that, trying to figure out how I could get better at it. And a short while later, found Andela and applied to join their program and yeah, and now here I am as a developer. And sometimes when I say even as introduction to other people like, “I’m a software developer,” it still sounds a bit funny to my own ears. But it’s cool. [Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You said something interesting just now which was that you thought that learning to code could help you be a better product manager. And it’s funny how many programmers I don’t hear say things like, “You know, I thought that learning more about the humanities would make me a better developer.” And I feel like we do, just societally, we do such a tremendous disservice to kids who are good at math by not making them study more of the humanities. Because there’s so much out there that we could benefit from.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. Because at the end of the day, everything that we build is within a particular context, right? Whether business context or social context, we’re putting things out there that other people have to interact with. And if we don’t understand the human systems that affect those, then I think the solutions that we build can never really be true solutions. And it’s so important because I have met people who are so focused on the code and they’re like, “Just give me the specs and I’ll build the thing,” and I’m like, “But there’s a whole world that you have to build for and that your product will live in.” And if we don’t have a sense of what that means and then importance of it, then I think we’re missing out in a big way as developers. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and that world is full of human systems which are even more complex. I found it interesting in your bio that you enjoy coding because of the complexity of it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. It struck me as a field where when I started to think about a possible career in terms of getting into this and really looking at it for the long haul, it struck me as a space where I would continuously be learning. And that was really important to me as well, because at some point in some of my previous careers I was looking up the ladder and looking up the chain and thinking, “I don’t feel like excited by what’s in the future.” Like if I try and imagine myself five years down the line as a marketing manager or something like that there were parts of it that really excited me, things that got me into the field in the first place, but I wasn’t super excited about it. But when I think about a possible career as a developer, and not just as a developer but what it could mean as a product manager, as a person who creates things, hopefully also as an entrepreneur, the skillset and the fact that it’s a field that’s changing so often is what I find really exciting about it. And the fact that you also have to do a lot of deep work, a lot of deep thinking to really solve problems, the problems in front of you, that kind of complexity also I think is just really fascinating. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, when you say complexity, I’d like to maybe explore that for a minute. Because I get the feeling that you may not mean algorithmic complexity or cyclometric, like ‘how many branches there are in you code’ complexity. What do you mean by complexity?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, so you’re absolutely correct. For me, the complexity is in, I always think about things in terms of what can this help solve in terms of a human need. So for me, complexity is in terms of ‘Are we able to build something? Are we able to build a product or a solution that can address things at various layers or various levels of understanding or reach or depth?’ essentially. So, if we’re looking at creating the mobile money solution for instance, in Kenya, if the problem is we need an easier way for people to be able to send money back and forth to each other because we don’t have the right banking systems that make banking accessible to the vast majority of the population, how do we make that happen? </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So, one way of thinking about it is, “Oh, let’s just have this service where I can send money to you, you can send money to me. Done.” But what has happened in Kenya is that it’s gone way beyond that. It’s not just about sending money. It’s also about savings. How do you create a savings culture? How can you use technology to remind people or to prompt people to start planning their finances and thinking through long-term how they’re using their money and where it’s going and how they can better track and monitor it? How are they able to seize opportunities to get loans for small businesses and enterprises? And are we linking that back to financial education? </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So, that’s why I mean by complexities. It’s more in terms of the human complexities that we live in and how we can use tech to address all of those different things. I think as I continue in my learning and in my career and as I continue to get deeper into trying to solve for those different problems, things like algorithms and things like how to optimize different kinds of systems, the nitty-gritty, I think that’ll start to become of more interest to me once I can relate it back to a bigger picture. Does that make sense? </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, the complexity for you comes from the computers, that system interacting with other systems, usually humans, right? </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly, exactly. Humans and the infrastructures that we create. So again, in the same thread of the financial systems, how do we integrate that back with banks and make sure that they are actually serving people in a way that’s meaningful to people but also useful for them as a business, right? So yeah, for me that’s the area of interest.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Software would be a lot easier if we didn’t have requirements.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or people. [Laughs] It would also be a lot less fun. [Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is true. So, you talked about creating a savings culture and I find that really interesting that you’re talking about using technology to affect the larger culture in that way. Is that something that you think is just something that you’re personally interested in? Or is that a major value of the culture that you’re in?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think a culture of saving is important, and especially so in a country where traditionally banking has not been accessible to the majority of people. So, companies that are in this space and that are trying to create and promote a culture of savings obviously have their own personal interest, which is the more money you put with them, the more money that they make. But I think it also goes much deeper and much larger than that because it does affect people’s ability to pull themselves out of poverty, right? So, in Kenya right now there’s big talk about a growing middle income. And you can definitely see it. Kenya’s a country that’s going through a lot of changes and we’re the biggest economic powerhouse of East Africa. So, there’s a lot of activity happening here. But how do you make sure that that’s a tide that’s raising all boats? So, the way that people have access to and are able to understand and interact with their money is super important, super big part pf that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So Rehema, it almost sounds like your major that you talked about, that social and political thought, is actually… </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The beginning of where you start thinking about these problems as opposed to the side-effect that you hope will happen in the end. And because of that, it looks like what you’re doing, well not just you obviously but other people who you’re working with, is that you’re creating a physical infrastructure by using technology instead of maybe augmenting or changing or even just adding to some other infrastructure that already exists. And that changes the way you ask questions. Do you think that some of what you’re doing can be translated to other systems that are not already set up to think about that stuff first? And how would you suggest somebody start changing the way that they solve these problems?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s huge, right? So recently, I learned about civic tech as an area that I guess a lot of people and interestingly enough a lot of cities are getting into, at least in the west. So, I met somebody who worked for New York’s, I can’t remember if it was part of… I think it was part of the city’s push to start using data science more effectively, essentially. And they were creating or they were using different maps and applying different algorithms to them to try and figure out as the city grows and as different types of infrastructures pop up in different parts of the city, how do you optimize for the populations that are there? So, if you notice that a whole bunch of high-rises are coming up in one part of the city, then you can figure out if you need more buses. Or do you need to add more libraries or more public amenities? Things like that. So, a very smart way, literally smart as in, you know what I mean [Laughs]. Like a smart city, essentially. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But thinking about how you build right from the get go instead of using information that may be outdated or anything like that, you essentially have this data constantly at your fingertips. And so, city planners are able to tap into that and look at all this information and be able to make smart goals and smart planning based off of data, which I thought was really interesting. So, there’s lots of different ways in which this is happening all over the world. And even in Kenya, open information type of movements and all of that where we’re keeping better track of what government is doing and what the public sector is doing to empower people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can I just mention that the phrase ‘diversity of thought’ has been sort of perverted to mean being able to be a bigot without consequence. But in my mind, this is what ‘diversity of thought’ really means. When someone like you approaches a problem, you may look at it from a way that no one else on your team looks at it. And that gives the whole team a better understanding of the problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA: </b> Yeah. I think that’s the biggest argument for diversity, because at the end of the day, like I said earlier, what we build is an expression of ourselves. So, if I’m building and I’m thinking about the end user, then essentially I’m just thinking about myself, right? Because that’s the frame of mind in which I understand and interact with the world and that&#8217;s what I know best. So, it’s so important to have people from all different walks of life, different experiences. I think the challenge that a lot of companies have is, because this goes right through to hiring, to how the company talks about itself, to the type of people that it attracts. So, its’ one thing to talk the talk and say, “Yes, diversity is important for us,” and I think quite challenging for a lot of companies to actually figure out how to put that into practice. And making sure that as you’re sitting there in an interview with somebody across the table that you can somehow control for people’s biases, right? Because people have them and it’s like, how do you navigate past that? That’s a tricky one. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. It’s very easy as a company to say “We value diversity,” but it’s a bigger commitment to actually value it with dollars or local currency of choice, right? </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The other problem is hiring for diversity and then making everyone think the same way. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I think that that’s also really fascinating, because you… I see this a lot in adverts or company profiles, especially in Silicon Valley where the descriptions all kind of tend to sound the same. “We’re super fun. We hang out all the time. We have lots of games and we all drink.” It always… they say they’re hiring for different people but you’re right. The culture always seems to be the same in every environment. So, the question is how do you create a world where within the company, a world where everybody can have their voice and be comfortable. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Something that I’ve been thinking about a lot that we discuss quite a bit here at Andela is extrovert versus introverts, and how the world is primed and built for extroverts. But how do we make sure that those of us whose energy comes from different places are also served just as well and feel comfortable in that environment? </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I’ve just been kicking back listening to you and taking all these notes. And there’s this theme that I hear emerging in the references you’re making of continuously taking the problem that you’re looking at and then zooming out and zooming out and zooming out and relating it to that bigger picture. And that bigger picture always comes back to culture. And when you started and talked about your superpower with empathy and you mentioned your mom, I have that in the back of my head. And then I’m thinking about where we went with this discussion to the meaning of diversity and diversity of thought specifically. And what I’ve come to really appreciate in different people is to learn how to see through their eyes and to listen to them and see ‘How is it that you see the world?’. And when you learn how to look at the world through another person’s eyes, that’s where you really get that diversity of thought coming together in synergy. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And so, the question on my mind that I wanted to ask you is you’ve got this rich culture that comes from your mom and from Kenya and this savings culture and everything that means. And that’s given you a current set of eyes. And so, when you look at the human system around you, what I’d like to ask you is just what are the major patterns that pop out to you? What do you see?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Would this be specific to Kenya or just in general?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think contrasting those things. If you think about that upbringing and you look at the things around you, I’m guessing what you see is a lot of dissonance with that culture. Like savings culture and what that means. Here we promote the complete opposite. It’s a spending culture, right? And that contrast alone is very distinctive. And it’s also in that meaning of diversity, right? It all comes together in that human system. And I bet given the things you’ve bene talking about, you see a lot of contrast in that. But it is contrast at the same time, like the smart city movement is very much happening. It’s very much alive here, right? But there’s a lot of contrast to that, too, of people stuck in the weeds in their thinking where you’re like, “Bigger picture. Bigger picture. Bigger picture.” Like an echo. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. So, when I’ve been fortunate enough to travel, I spent a bit of time in the US. And when I contrast these different places that I’ve been in and the different spaces I move through, I think one thing that always strikes me is how to some extent, people are fundamentally looking for the same things. It’s just how they go about actually getting them that tends to be very different, or even how they will talk about how they go about getting them. So, I don’t know. The interesting thing about comparing people in Nairobi specifically to people in for example New York City is there’s a very similar drive towards being active and active in terms of hustling. Like, I need to get to this next thing. I need to get this next gig. I need to push and push and push. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And I don’t know. It’s interesting how people will describe what they are doing, because here it’s very much like that’s the accepted thing. Whenever people from outside come to visit, they’re always fascinated by the fact that so many developers are doing other things completely unrelated sometimes to actually being developers. You have people who have farms. You have people who are like, raising livestock. You have people who are doing very different things. But here, it’s just part of the culture and the energy of the space. So, it gives the two cities very similar energies in terms of being very almost frenetic and high-speed. But at the end of the day what people are looking for is a sense of independence, a sense of control over their lives and their incomes in many ways. In Nairobi that’s very much geared towards ‘I need to do this because for me, but also because I need to support family’. In places like New York, it’s ‘I need to do this for me because I need to be at a certain level and have a certain level of accomplishment’. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So, people are sort of going after the same things in what seems to me to be increasingly similar ways, like the gig economy and all that stuff. But the way that they talk about it here, they’ll always try and frame it in terms of “I’m doing this because people need me to do this.” Or people often are the only breadwinners or have come from outside of Nairobi and therefore this is their one big break and if they don’t make it then the world falls apart. So, that’s been interesting to see. I don’t know if I’m really getting on, I’m really touching on what you’re asking in terms of the human systems. I don’t know. I might need to think about that a little bit more. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It sounds like what you’re saying Rehema is that they’re doing the same sort of things but in the context of the values of wherever they’re from and what’s going to be rewarded. Is that right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, yeah. I think so. I think so. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Earlier in the conversation you were talking about how people kind of get tracked into different routes, like you’re good at math and science, you’re more humanistic. And some of the things I’ve been thinking about lately are similar and to like, how do you stop making it about those specific traits and more about how people think? And you had also mentioned how the reason why you wanted to pick up more coding skills is because you wanted to be able to make things. And so, I wanted to ask you what you thought about creating and making as something that is more neutral in terms of you’re not really talking about how you’re doing it. And if people can start to think of themselves as wanting to be creators and if that can help them switch their mindset a little bit and give them more access to maybe something that they weren’t trained to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. That’s something that’s actually quite close to my heart [Laughs] as an area of discussion. So, like I mentioned, growing up school was fun for me. And I think I’m quite lucky for that, because I know for a number of people, it wasn’t. And I think for me it was fun because again I enjoyed learning. I enjoyed the process and act of learning. I did well in my studies and so I got a lot of positive feedback. “You’re smart. You’re clever. You’re intelligent. Good job.” That all fell apart once I got to college, actually. I started a bit late. I think I joined about a week after everybody else did. And I had put myself in this, I guess it was an accelerated intermediate Spanish class or something like that. I’d only done Spanish for three months before then, but I somehow tested into it. And I was excited. I loved learning languages, which probably also explains why I love being a developer. But I was excited and I joined the class and I realized that it was a week late but I figured, “Oh, I’ll just catch up.” And I never did. It was a four-credit class and I think I got a D by the end of it. So, this is first semester, first year, new country, university and all of that. And I was failing that class that had the most credits. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that was my first major experience with failure and I completely fell apart. I didn’t know what to do. My whole identity was built around this idea that I am clever, I am an intelligent person. Nothing should be too difficult for me. Failure shouldn’t happen. And I completely fell apart. And it took a while, probably the rest of my college career and a lot of time after that, to realize that essentially what they call the ‘growth mindset’ versus ‘fixed mindset’ of me believing that I was a certain way and it was therefore a fixed amount of intelligence that I had and I had surpassed it when I failed and realized that I had used up my quota of intelligence, so to speak. And that was that. But fortunately, over many sort of almost painful years of trying and failing and trying and failing, I got comfortable with the idea of failure. And reading about growth versus fixed mindsets and seeing people who are a lot more comfortable with experimenting and creating helped me realize that actually, I needed to change the way I think about things. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And it’s interesting because to me, being a creator, when you’re in the context of development it’s very specific. Like, yes there was nothing there and I built something and now there’s something there for somebody to interact with. But I think it applies to everything. Like, people who cook, people who make music, people who write, people who do haircuts. The idea of being a creator to me matters or integrates with the idea of a growth mindset because essentially what you’re saying is, “I’m going to take a blank page,” so to speak, “and I’m going to put something on it. And I’m going to see where that leads.” And it doesn’t have to be perfect from the get go. And even if it goes wrong, I can always fix it, change it, scrap it, start again, and create something else. So to me, that mindset of being comfortable, being a tinkerer, being comfortable with just playing almost with things and just to see where they lead, has been really important, like shift in my mindset. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When I started writing code, I was terrified of breaking anything. I always thought that to even begin writing the code I needed to know the exact right way to approach a particular problem. And I would spend hours trying to google and research and figure out, ‘What is the right way?’ before I would even begin. And it took me a lot of unlearning to get past that and to be comfortable making mistakes, essentially. Hopefully none that cost my company anything. [Chuckles] But being comfortable with that frame of mind. And I’m applying it to all different areas of my life. Learning how to play the ukulele, for instance. I’ve always loved music, always wanted to learn how to do something and how to play something. But I was always like, “If I’m not going to be perfect, then why begin?” which is a terrible way to go through life because essentially you never do anything. You never challenge yourself. So yeah, I’m all about thinking about myself and having other people think about themselves as creators.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think there’s a whole conversation we could have about the value of mistakes, per se. But I just wanted to mention this one neat trick that I learned from Virginia [Set] here, which is that whenever you catch yourself making a statement about who you are that comes from a fixed mindset, like ‘I don’t know how to write JavaScript’ what you do is you tack the word ‘yet’ at the end. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA: </b> Mm.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You say “I don’t know how to write JavaScript yet.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, yeah. I think that’s awesome. Actually, I’m going to start adding that to my mental lingo. [Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love that story, Rehema, because I feel like there are so many people who when they hear will be nodding and saying, “Oh my god, that’s me. Oh my god, that’s me.” And we don’t hear enough of it because there tends to be a lot of discussion about how amazing you are and how you got to be so amazing and how your amazing is so special that nobody can be amazing like you. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And there’s not a lot of discussion about “Yeah, this was hard and I failed. And then I tried and I failed again. And I tried and I failed again.” Even in the “tech failure stories” it’s always like “Yeah, they gave me a hundred million dollars and then that company crashed and burned, but it’s okay because I took a vacation and I thought about things. And then when I came back from climbing that mountain, I realized I could do this other thing.” And that’s really not helpful for most people to try to take that next step forward. So, thank you so much for sharing that. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, no problem. And one place that I really like to go to read stories about people who are still in the weeds and trying to figure that out, especially entrepreneurs, is Indie Hackers. I don’t know if you guys are familiar with that. They have a really good newsletter where people ask different questions but also a lot of people will just talk about their experiences trying to build something and the mistakes that they made. Which I think yeah, is important to hear that over and over again. And especially back now in my context of being in a developing country. We’re in a position where the majority of our leaders are a generation or two older than the majority of the population that they’re leading. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And I think the topic of empowerment is a difficult one. Because on one hand, you have a group of leaders who perhaps see things in a very different way and believe in a sort of “I’m going to tell you what to do so you should do it” type of mentality, the traditional teacher/student type of relationship where you don’t really have an opportunity to ask questions or at least in our context, you’re not really supposed to talk back to a teacher and question them or challenge them. And I see that a lot. We see that when we go and do mentoring or tutoring for kids in different schools. And you ask kids a question and everyone will be scared to respond, not because they don’t know the answer but because they haven’t been in an environment where they’re empowered to speak and to have their voices heard and that their thoughts are valid. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So, letting people know that it’s okay to make mistakes and it’s okay to try and to create and you have some agency in your world I think is such an important mindset to have, not just for us as we build things in our day-to-day lives, but in an entire population actually, of people who will become the next business owners and public leaders and all of that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE: </b> So, there’s no real right answer to this question. What I asked you was essentially ‘What do you see?’ because we were talking about this diversity of thought and perspective. And I wanted to be able to just see the things that stand out to you as a starting point. So, we got Nairobi versus New York City. Two cities, both very high-speed. And you’ve got this similar active drive and hustle, the similar culture in terms of push, push, push toward the next thing. And what you described as the importance of this is the sense of independence and control over your life, of your income, being able to choose your next goal, where you invest your energy, whether it be your money or your time. And at the core of this seems to be the essence of what it means to be a free human being. [Chuckles] And there’s constraints in terms of things that we shackle ourselves down with in terms of culture and shapes. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And we talked a little bit about identity and how we look at ourselves. And then you mentioned earlier about how technology has this role in shaping culture, in shaping that human system. And so, you’ve connected these things together. So, you’re always going big picture, big picture, big picture, right? And so, I’m wondering then, if these are the patterns you see at a societal level, how do you think technology has helped to shape those two systems similarly and differently?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think one thing that always stands out to me about a difference between the two societies that I’ve moved through, Kenya and the US, one of the things that always strikes me about the US and I think for any foreigner who visits especially if you’re coming from a developed country, is you can see the history of the place. America’s very good at, and has been very good at, telling a very unified story to the outside world, to the international community, about its origin story, going back to superheroes. Its origin story, its ethics, values, the people who made it great, the things that they’ve built. And you’ll see monuments to that and you’ll see all of this massive effort to preserve a particular narrative in the history, right? I know the US last year was having some trouble with that. [Chuckles] But from the outside it’s always seemed very unified. One thing that I struggle with as an African is where to find that at home in terms of where the monuments to the people who’ve made our countries and our continent great, where the monuments to the things that we have built that have stood the test of time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So, one thing that Andela’s director, country director of Nigeria, our Nigeria campus, his name is Seni Sulyman, he loves to say “Africa may have missed the industrial revolution but we’re not going to miss the technology one.” And I think that’s the thought that I think is really important for a particular generation of Africans in terms of “How do we build things that will last?” And how do we build things that can become part of that conversation and part of the monuments to what makes this continent important and incredible and amazing? And they don’t have to match what has made the west and what has made America important and amazing. We’re trying to create our own narrative and our own story. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So, in terms of how technology can bring that about for us, because technology is in many ways such a huge force for democratization (if I’m saying that correctly), it’s an opportunity to really build something that could change the narrative around the entire continent, if that makes sense. So, I guess in some way, it very much ties into why I wanted to be part of Andela and what Andela is all about. It’s essentially founded on the belief that brilliance is evenly distributed but opportunity isn’t. So, how do we create that opportunity? How do we make it accessible? So, we’re about creating an entire network of technologists that will be not only the leaders for Africa but for the world as a whole, to be global technology leaders and creating solutions in a world and a space that is really moving forward in a more inclusive and supportive way. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So, that’s an area where I’ve seen so far has been a huge difference between the African context and for example the North American one, where there’s a history there and a narrative that continues to empower young people in the US telling them that if you’re going to build something, it’ll impact the world. And that’s very true in Silicon Valley, I think. That’s the narrative in Silicon Valley. But in the US as a whole, you build products for the United States but they impact the world. That’s something that I think we feel very strongly about here now in the African continent, that it’s now our turn to do that. And we’re empowering people to do that. We’re building solutions that may begin locally but will impact the world, essentially. Does that connect? [Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I thought that was great. There are so many great things in that of what I ultimately heard you coming to with technology empowers people. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And lets us have an impact, lets us not be invisible. And our narrative that we push forward as ourselves, this is the foundation of our identity. This is our story. And if you think about who I am, what it comes back to is, what is my story? What is the narrative I’m telling? And whether we’re telling that narrative as an individual, as a team, as a company, as a nation, there’s this echo of the same kind of human system that we’re talking about at all these different levels of abstraction, that bigger picture, bigger picture, bigger picture. That echo. And so, that’s kind of what I hear from you when you jump to these different tangents, is there’s essentially isomorphisms between these different contexts that are associated with identity.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Very much so, with identity and the story we tell ourselves about what is possible. Because if our identity is built around the idea that we missed out in this revolution, we missed out on that revolution, we don’t hear or see or tell stories about the things that have made us as the African people uniquely powerful and uniquely fantastic. If we don’t hear enough of those stories, then our idea of what’s possible, what’s in the realm of possibility is therefore very small in comparison to the kinds of stories that in the US, that you are told and that you hear about yourselves as a people. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So for me, yeah exactly what you’re saying, identity is so important. Because if we continue to push the ideas of what is possible, if we change what the stereotypical developer is supposed to look like and I present myself as a developer and I’m saying “I’m from Kenya, born and bred. I’m female. I changed careers. I’d done all of these different things,” and there’s so many stories here of people who come from such different backgrounds who are creating and building such incredible things, I think that narrative is so important. And that’s why Andela is more than just a company. It’s really a movement, because we’re tapping into that and saying “This is possible. We are here. We are working out of our native countries. I don’t have to leave my home in order to have global impact.” And that’s so important to me. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s beautiful. Because it basically echoes as a statement of identity “We’re just going to be superheroes. We’re going to choose to be superheroes and let technology empower us to make the world a better place.” That’s the identity statement. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly. [Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This goes back to something we wanted to talk to you about, which was you told us that sometimes you feel insecure about not having the traditional developer story? </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love that ‘brilliance is evenly distributed but opportunity isn’t’ in relation to that. Because maybe it’s like we think of developers as having learned to program as children and been doing this their whole lives and they had computers as kids and this is how the grew up, and that’s the traditional getting into programming story. But maybe that’s not where brilliance is distributed. It’s where opportunity is distributed.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Precisely. Exactly. [Laughs] You’d be surprised the number of people who started learning how to code on phones here. They saw games or whatnot and they were just like, “Hey, let me just try and figure out how to make a game.” The number of my colleagues who first interacted with computers when they were in high school or once they were in college didn’t even have laptops of their own, borrowed from friends, because they were just, they saw something. They saw somebody write something or they saw a game or they saw a website and they were like, “Hey, I’m really curious about that. Let me figure out how to do this thing.” And now they’re here working for companies like Viacom. They’re working for companies like Facebook. And it’s amazing, right? And I think that every single day that I come to work and I’m working with people and I’m interacting with them, that always come to mind as why it’s so important that we do provide and we do give people access to different kinds of opportunities. Because it’s not always going to come from the most traditional or the most obvious of places. And there’s the whole narrative, I think especially in startups about yeah, they went to university and then they dropped out. And here it’s like, “Well, some people didn’t even have that opportunity to get to university.” but here they are still creating incredible things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When you think about the global tech community culture, it is extremely anglocentric. And one of the outcomes of that is that work done by people that aren’t in the USA, Europe, especially people in the global south, is erased. We don’t know that it exists unless you go look for it. And even if you do, it can be hard to find. So, I wonder how many of our listeners knew that there was a system for mobile payments in Africa before Apple Pay was a thing. I wonder how many of our listeners knew that Chile in the early 70s had a cybernetic software-based system that managed their global economy that is the basis for a lot of work in cybernetics. It’s led to things like [Kybernetes] today. We don’t know that. If you go search… </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN: </b><span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span>For that project, it’s called Project Cybersyn. If you search for it on Amazon, there are zero results and Amazon things you misspelled something else. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, this work around the world that’s getting done in various countries that don’t speak English, that aren’t primarily white, is erased. It’s hard to find. And That’s a tragedy as far as I’m concerned. And I’m wondering what we can do about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:</b><span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span>Very true. I mean, even when you think about it essentially, to be able to code means to have to learn English. [Chuckles] Essentially.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>At least the 50 or so keywords that are used in most programming languages, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] Exactly. But even… </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But the documentation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Just to read documentation. Exactly, yeah. I was working with a developer from Albania and he was saying to me how when he started off it would take him an incredible amount of time because he had to, when he was looking something up [Chuckles] for every other word that he read, he would have to google that word. So forget just trying to understand documentation, which can be difficult enough in and of itself. He had to understand the language as well. And I never really thought about that because Kenya is predominantly, English is one of our national languages. So, it’s not something that I’d had to think about. And even then, you’d assume that because I’m coming from a country where we do speak a lot of other languages, that that’s something that I would be sensitive to. But it wasn’t until I met someone who was from somewhere where English isn’t even on the menu, he was like, “Yeah, that was actually a really big challenge.” But he’s grateful fro now the ability to learn the language because it’s helping him in other ways in terms of his education and his business opportunities and all fo that. But again… </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks, colonialism.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] Exactly. Very anglocentric world that we’re living in. Yeah, I don’t know how we go about fixing that. I think part of it is telling these stories of people from different places and having their voices heard. The fact that you guys agreed to have me on here, I think that’s incredible because otherwise there isn’t much of an avenue for people from different parts of the world to tell their stories and have them heard on the global platforms. That’s quite tricky. But I do think that the tech world does it better than most though, even having said all of that. Because I think there is, okay with some caveats, I think if you’re working on things that are already deemed interesting by the Silicon Valley set, then yes, you’ll be able to maybe have your voice heard. If you’re working in spaces that are not directly related to the next Uber or the next e-commerce app, if you’re working on things that are more local to your context or even more focused on civic tech, then I think there is still more of a challenge there and we still need to highlight those projects because they’re just as important.</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. And that gets back to the empathy of, can you appreciate a solution to a problem that you don’t have?</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. [Laughs] Absolutely, yeah. I think that’s the biggest thing. I’m not entirely sure how that’s something that we can solve until we really appreciate what we were saying earlier about the importance of diversity and the importance of different people’s perspectives. Because at the end of the day, it might not be a problem that you have directly, but I think we should be able to appreciate and try to understand the difficulty that somebody else is having and how that solution then solves that. But yeah, that’s a tricky one. Because I think it means not just being able to imagine having a problem but to imagine how that problem then affects so many other aspects of somebody’s life, right? </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"> So, I read about, sorry I watched a documentary actually about a coding competition for young girls in different parts of the world. And I think there was a group of girls from an Eastern European country. I don’t remember which one, but if I find it I’ll share it with you guys. And they had a problem where in their town, clean drinking water is very difficult to find. So, what these girls did is they built an app that basically pointed people to all of the wells in the surrounding neighborhoods and would have indicators for the level of cleanliness of the water or like at different times of the day or at different times of the month. I can’t remember. But essentially, a way for people to easily check and see which wells were most appropriate to go get clean drinking water. So, that’s a solution that’s very much tied into that particular area. But you’d also have to understand why, for you to understand how important their solution is, you’d have to understand how lack of access to sanitary drinking water can affect so many other aspects of their lives. </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"> So, it’s not just about understanding a specific problem but understanding a whole context in which somebody lives. And that takes a lot of mental effort. [Chuckles] And I guess some people would find that to be too much work. But I think hopefully if we continue to tell the stories in a positive and inspiring way, more people would be interested, hopefully. And want to take part in those discussions. Because eventually, there will be some application or some learnings that they can take and bring back to their own context. </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I’m really encouraged by that particular example just because it tells me that the tools of programming and creation are accessible enough that they can be picked up and used by people who have such different contexts than somebody in my position does.</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Technology as a tool is incredible, I really think. And so is the internet, which allows us to go and find out all of these things. But not everyone has access to [Laughs] internet easily. Which is again, another challenge. So, seeing stories like that and hearing about people who’ve been able to create solutions in that way is really inspiring but it’s also I feel like another reminder of just how important it is to make sure that these tools are actually more greatly accessible. </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh yeah. I didn’t mean to imply that we don’t have a lot further to go. But yeah, definitely.</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We were talking earlier about access to opportunities being unequally distributed. I think in my mind there’s another thing that’s very important that’s also unequally distributed, which is freedom of creative expression. The ability to… </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is that the ability to make mistakes?</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It’s the ability to create on your own terms without being dictated by other people. </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can you give us an example?</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, so… and I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t name-drop a philosopher on one of these shows. </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Bring it. </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>John Locke, the inventor of classical liberalism, said that the basic human rights were life, liberty, and ownership of property. Wilhelm von Humboldt a hundred years later said that the basic human rights were freedom of inquiry and freedom of creative expression. And the example he gave is that if a craftsperson makes a piece of art of a sculpture or something like that on their own terms, we generally respect their creative expression. If they were told to make a thing by someone else, if they made it for their boss, we can appreciate the thing they made but not respect the way it was made. So, access to freedom of creative expression is necessary for art and I think it’s necessary for a lot of human growth. </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think this was the same thing I was seeing before in the contrast that I brought up freedom. And then Jessica made this funny face like, “What?”</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1">[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And I was sitting there thinking about well, how does this fit in? But it’s this theme that I see repeating with this idea of basic human rights and being able to see all this potential of what could be. And then being able to have the freedom to reach for your dreams and to express creatively. And in order to do that, to not have shackles that hold us from those things, we have to have knowledge distributed. We have to have the opportunity to be able to experience these things, to have the basis of knowledge so that we can participate in that. And once we’re empowered by technology which is awesome because it’s just, we’re empowered by the ability, the things that we learn, by things that are in our mind. They’re not things that we acquire. They’re not materialistic things. It’s the ability to create with our mind, the ability to do free, creative expression. Think about what you can do with software. It’s amazing. It’s like magic. We can create anything we can dream, right? </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"> And so, if you think about the freedom of creative expression as something that’s core and fundamental to be what it means to be human, and you bring back this contrast in culture of movement, movement, movement. We’re always pushing forward toward the next thing. And then when you look at that system and how technology influences the culture, then you’re like, well what if this was the thing that we all looked at? What if we saw our potential? What if we imagine that we could build anything that we can imagine and we started working together to make that happen? What if we looked at the human system and started with smart cities you brought up? So, that’s sort of the similar theme i’m hearing, is there’s all this potential that we’re wasting because of our culture, essentially. Like barriers in our culture. And what if things like, we could tell our stories and identities and we could accept people for who they were and the way that they saw the world and their unique perspectives that they brought to the table? And you described those things at a team level, an individual level, and then at a national level too, which I thought was really interesting. </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Because I think the world that you’re describing would be utopia, right? And I think that we can get closer to it, inching closer to it, in different ways and with different aspects. But you’re right. I think that’s such a profound way of looking at the whole idea of human potential, and through human potential achieving an incredible almost nationwide or continent-wide potential. I think for the context of the African continent, access to that kind of freedom is something that we have been sorely lacking. And what you’re seeing now is this huge resurgence in music and fashion and food and all of these different things that help to cement and celebrate different aspects of different cultures within these different countries. And it’s so fascinating to see that grow, because I think the more that we celebrate in the things that we are able to do, the more people’s minds open up. And the more they’re able to start thinking beyond what we currently have and think about the opportunities of the future and how they can make the best use of that. </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"> What’s been really fun for me personally is, so currently Andela is based out of three countries in Africa. We’re in Lagos, Nigeria, Nairobi, Kenya (where I’m based), and Kampala, Uganda. So, we have a lot of exchanges where we’ll meet and hang out with folks from the Lagos office or from the Uganda office and it’s just so fascinating to see and to experience and enjoy everybody’s differences and the cultures. Because they’re all very different. And we all get to interact and share so much. And I think that really adds to and builds to everybody’s sense of what we’re doing and what we’re building might look slightly different in each country but it’s all moving towards the same ideas and goals of opportunity and what can we do and what can we make of this opportunities that we have? What can we build for each other? What can we share with each other to help continue to grow and cement this movement? And I think that’s such a cool, cool way of thinking about it, what freedom can do for lighting a fire essentially, towards achieving such incredible things. That’s so exciting. I hadn’t really thought about it in that way. But that’s really cool.</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Speaking of really cool, it’s now time for reflections. Who wants to go first?</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can go. What I wanted to bring up was what you had said Rehema about you having to unlearn this need to wanting to be perfect or wanting to have the right solution first. Because I think it’s something that happens a lot. I know for me it’s something that still happens to me a lot except it’s more under the radar whereas before it was top of mind. But now it’s, “Why haven’t I done this yet? Oh, because I think I have to make it perfect.” Or I want it to be this way, instead of just starting. And I feel that it’s applicable to actually writing code. But I think it’s also applicable in other aspects of your life where it’s very uncomfortable to be uncomfortable so much and I think it makes you want to retreat back to what you know so that you can at least feel some sense of safety again. And you have to push yourself to take baby steps so that you’re not still in the same place month after month, year after year. So, I thought that was a really great thing to remind everybody about.</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA: </b> One thing that stood out to me was that Rehema, you said that people outside of the US don’t often get an opportunity like this podcast to speak to people globally. And I’m like, “Whoa, our podcast is global?”</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But, but, but I think you have a great point there and we should seek out guests from all around the world and do this disparate timezone thing some more. </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. There are so many stories out there that are just waiting for a mic. [Chuckles] It would be incredible just to hear from these different people, to hear so many different perspectives. Because it makes our worlds all that much richer for it. But also because there could be real sparks of inspiration from people’s stories and the things that they work with and the things that they’ve created. If you guys could create that kind of a platform, I think that would be incredible because I also think it would be very, very unique.</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Greater Than Code: The World Tour.</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do it. [Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like the sound of that, I really do. </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One thing that really stood out for me was Rehema, your story about failing in your first semester of Spanish and you were talking about the fixed versus growth mindset. And that really resonated for me because a lot of the frustration that I feel in life really does come from that place of feeling like I should be good at something from the get go. So, it was a really useful reminder to me and hopefully to our listeners as well that I need to be more gentle with myself, that I need to accept mistakes as being part of the learning process, and how you get good at something is by [chuckles] being bad at something first. And Rein, I’m going to take your reminder to heart to add the word ‘yet’ at the end of my sentences now. So, thank you all.</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I’m glad that we as a podcast are thinking about how we can add more diverse voices. I think we do better than most people or most podcasts in the game right now because our focus is on people and because we care about getting diverse viewpoints. But we’re still reaching into a really small pool. And there’s so much more that we could be doing. </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"> And my other reflection would be that diversity is not just good for ethical reasons. It’s also a way to make your organization more competent. Because you need at least as much variety to solve problems as the variety of problems you have. </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely.</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And the way that you get that variety as an organization is through diversity of experiences, of viewpoints, of all sort. </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And you have more problems than you think you do. </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1">[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And so, if you want as an organization to solve harder problems, to become more competent, that’s where you should be looking. </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, the thing that really struck me that I still got on my mind was right at the end you mentioned fashion. And so I’m thinking “Fashion? Where does fashion come into this?” But you brought up this idea of celebrating culture and celebrating our stories through fashion and how beautiful that was to be able to empower something like fashion. And when I started thinking about who I am and who we are and you start thinking about what matters to us, being able to express my soul, being able to express my art, that essence of creative freedom; and then I’m thinking about fashion and it’s the same kind of thing, right? We have all of our stories and all these things that we build which is the beauty that comes out of us. And that maybe if we just take a step back, that fundamental thing that we can do to influence the culture around us is just celebrating beautiful. And I think that’s ultimately the message I hear you echoing through all of the things that you’re saying when you’re admiring all these different cultures, when you’re admiring all these different people, is to celebrate beautiful. </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I think that’s probably yeah, my reflection as well, my takeaway from this. Because I’m all about opportunity and I believe in it so much but I hadn’t, even I hadn’t thought about it in terms of fundamental right to freedom, which I think is such an incredible way to think about it. Because technology as a tool, like we said, it democratizes. It has so many applications. Like you said, it’s like magic, right? You can create entire worlds with it, which I think is what so many of us love about this. But if we do go slightly more bigger picture and we pull back and we’re looking at people’s fundamental rights to have freedom of thought, freedom of expression, and the ability to create, and the kind of mindset that allows them to see the world around them and want to, and feel like they have the ability to effect change and positive change hopefully on it, then opportunity isn’t something that somebody else has to provide. It becomes something that people are able to take and make for themselves. And that’s the big thing that I’ve taken away from this conversation. Thank you guys for directing that and for bringing that up because I think that’s really cool.</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome. Rehema, thank you so much for coming on the show. </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>REHEMA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you guys for having me. This has been a blast. [Laughs] </span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As a reminder to our listeners, if you like the show and you want to hear more of it, Greater Than Code is a listener-sponsored show. We are looking for a few really special companies to sponsor episodes but we’re pretty much listener-supported. And you can participate in that. And if you contribute to our Patreon in any amount, even $1 once, you get an invitation to the exclusive Greater Than Code Slack channel, which is my favorite Slack channel because it’s not very high volume and everyone is super nice. And especially, you get access to the overheard channel where I put things that Rein has said without attributing them.</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wait, what?</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p3"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Go to GreaterThanCode.com to find out more!</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span></i></p>
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]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a></p>
<p><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rehema Wachira: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/remy_stack"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@remy_stack</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://andela.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Andela</span></a></p>
<p><b>Join Our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">Support us via </b><a style="background-color: #ffffff; font-size: 1.8rem;" href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">!</b></p>
<p><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:22</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Rehema’s Superpower: Empathy</span></p>
<p><b>02:53 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Rehema’s “Untypical” Origin Story</span></p>
<p><b>07:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Enjoying Coding Because of the Complexity Behind It</span></p>
<p><b>11:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Creating a “Culture of Saving”</span></p>
<p><b>14:52 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Diversity of Thought” and Seeing the World Through Others’ Eyes</span></p>
<p><b>22:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Creators and Makers</span></p>
<p><a href="https://www.indiehackers.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Indie Hackers</span></a></p>
<p><b>30:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– How Technology Empowers People</span></p>
<p><b>38:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Distribution of Brilliance and Opportunity</span></p>
<p><b>47:01 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Freedom of Creative Expression</span></p>
<p><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Having to unlearn the need of being perfect.</span></p>
<p><b>Jessica:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> We want to speak to more guests on a global level! Please reach out!</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Fixed vs growth mindset.</span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Diversity is not just good for ethical reasons, it also makes your organization more competent. </span></p>
<p><b>Janelle:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Celebrating beautiful.</span></p>
<p><b>Rehema:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> A fundamental right to freedom.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID</b></span><span class="s2"><b>:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b></span><span class="s1">Hello everybody and welcome to Episode 63 of Greater Than Code. I’m Astrid Countee and I’m here with my friend, Rein Henrichs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning, or whatever time it is when you’re listening to this. I am here with my friend, the colorfully-haired Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning! And I am thrilled to be here today with Sam Livingston-Gray!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a></p>
<p><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rehema Wachira: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/remy_stack"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@remy_stack</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://andela.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Andela</span></a></p>
<p><b>Join Our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">Support us via </b><a style="background-color: #ffffff; font-size: 1.8rem;" href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">!</b></p>
<p><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:22</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Rehema’s Superpower: Empathy</span></p>
<p><b>02:53 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Rehema’s “Untypical” Origin Story</span></p>
<p><b>07:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Enjoying Coding Because of the Complexity Behind It</span></p>
<p><b>11:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Creating a “Culture of Saving”</span></p>
<p><b>14:52 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Diversity of Thought” and Seeing the World Through Others’ Eyes</span></p>
<p><b>22:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Creators and Makers</span></p>
<p><a href="https://www.indiehackers.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Indie Hackers</span></a></p>
<p><b>30:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– How Technology Empowers People</span></p>
<p><b>38:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Distribution of Brilliance and Opportunity</span></p>
<p><b>47:01 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Freedom of Creative Expression</span></p>
<p><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Having to unlearn the need of being perfect.</span></p>
<p><b>Jessica:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> We want to speak to more guests on a global level! Please reach out!</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Fixed vs growth mindset.</span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Diversity is not just good for ethical reasons, it also makes your organization more competent. </span></p>
<p><b>Janelle:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Celebrating beautiful.</span></p>
<p><b>Rehema:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> A fundamental right to freedom.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID</b></span><span class="s2"><b>:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b></span><span class="s1">Hello everybody and welcome to Episode 63 of Greater Than Code. I’m Astrid Countee and I’m here with my friend, Rein Henrichs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning, or whatever time it is when you’re listening to this. I am here with my friend, the colorfully-haired Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning! And I am thrilled to be here today with Sam Livingston-Gray!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>]]></googleplay:description>
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					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
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					<itunes:duration>01:00:57</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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					<title>062: The Beauty of Art and Technology with Jamey Hampton</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/062-the-beauty-of-art-and-technology-with-jamey-hampton/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 10 Jan 2018 05:00:31 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=1100</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Panelist Jamey Hampton shares their thoughts on feeling like you have to know everything, ‘zines and being a ‘zine librarian, and why The Death Star led to some intense feelings on ethics in technology.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Panelist Jamey Hampton shares their thoughts on feeling like you have to know everything, ‘zines and being a ‘zine librarian, and why The Death Star led to some intense feelings on ethics in technology.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@jameybash</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="http://www.jameybash.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">jameybash.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.agrilyst.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Agrilyst</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><a href="http://www.buffalosugarcity.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sugar City Arts Collaborative</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Join Our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">Support us via </b><a style="background-color: #ffffff; font-size: 1.8rem;" href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:22</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Jamey’s Superpower: </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fharlanghn"><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The Fharlanghn Sense”</span></a></p>
<p><b>02:40 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Working in Agriculture</span></p>
<p><b>04:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Theories on Automation</span></p>
<p><b>05:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Pivoting Into Computer Science and Software Development</span></p>
<p><b>10:35 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Feeling Like You Need to Know </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Everything </span></i></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7kFkt5WxLeDTml5cTFsWXFCb1U/view"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Stella Report from the SNAFUcatchers Workshop on Coping With Complexity</span></a></p>
<p><b>15:47 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– ‘Zines and Being a ‘Zine Librarian</span></p>
<p><b>27:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Beauty of Art and Technology and Forming Emotional Connections to Things</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHJOz_y9rZE"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Floppy Music DUO &#8211; Imperial March</span></a></p>
<p><b>35:26 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Death Star =&gt; Ethics in Technology and Taking Responsibility/Being Accountable for your Code</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Malcolm Gladwell: The strange tale of the Norden bombsite</span></a></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">“I think the more powerful a tool is, the more respect you have to have for it.” ~ <a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@jameybash</a> on Greater Than Code</p>
<p>— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode/status/950415458385186816?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 8, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>49:42 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Brilliance and Learning From Others Without Consent</span></p>
<p><b>54:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Advice for Channeling Your Own Inner Fharlanghn Sense</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM</b></span><span class="s2"><b>:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b></span><span class="s1">Hello and welcome to Episode 62 of Greater Than Code. I am Sam Livingston-Gray and I am here to introduce my good friend, Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning. Thank you, Sam. I am excited about this episode of Greater Than Code because this is our first episode wherein we don’t have an extra guest and we get to grill one of our fellow panelists. So, thank you very much to Jamey Hampton for being the first panel target. I mean, guest.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Jamey is a non-binary adventurer from Buffalo, New York, who wishes they were immortal so they can have time to visit every coffee shop in the world! They’re an artist who turned into a programmer after one too many animation classes that was a Computer Science class in disguise. Currently, they’re working as a professional plant-liker and software engineer for Agrilyst, a data analysis platform for indoor agriculture. They’re also the zine librarian at Sugar City Arts Collaborative and, bet you wouldn’t have guessed this, a permanent panelist on the podcast, Greater Than Code!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM: </b> Woohoo!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Jamey spends most of their free time camping and thinking about Star Wars, sometimes simultaneously. Jamey. So, the other day you came to St. Louis and visited me and it was fun and I learned about your superpower, which is to magically find the best place to go on a given night in a city you’ve never been in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. I call it my Fharlanghn sense where Fharlanghn is the god of travel and roads from Dungeons and Dragons.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It’s a good superpower to have. It makes me very fun to travel with. So, if anyone ever wants to go on vacation with me, just hit me up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, if you’re adventurous, I guess. If you don’t like surprises, don’t go with Jamey.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s true.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I’ve thought about it. I’m like, I wish I could offer my superpower as a service…</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>To other people, like have an app.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s like me giving people advice on what to do. But I’m worried that if I tried to exploit it in that way, maybe it wouldn’t work the way I want, because it’s kind of fickle.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It sounds like you would have to be there. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don’t think I could automate it. I think I would have to have a personal consultation with someone. I could do that. I’m quitting my day job. Hard pivot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Just kidding. I love working at Agrilyst. I like plants. And I like working with plants. And I like working with farmers and growers because they’re very interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I’m curious. So, I used to work at an agriculture-related company, too. And one thing I observed about the growers in that particular very corn-dominated agriculture segment is they’re all white males. Is that true in your customer base?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s a little bit true. Agrilyst is actually, the founder of our company, her name is Allison. She’s the CEO, Allison Kopf, and she’s awesome. And she used to be a grower. She was an agronomist for an indoor farm and she actually did very similar to what I was just saying about my superpower where she was like, wow, not every farm can afford a me to have a personal agronomist to do this for them. So, what if I created myself as a service? And [chuckles] that’s kind of how Agrilyst happened. And so, she had this whole idea for how you could do the kind of management that she did with software. And I think that’s really cool. But also, the reason I brought it up is because she is a minority, for sure, in the agriculture industry. So, it’s an honor to work with her. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sweet. So, she is also in the process of automating herself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. It’s going well. [Laughs] Now every farm can have an Allison. It must be nice to be so important. I like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Ah, that’s an interesting point. But the part about whether we’re important, that’s our decision, right? Is my work worth automating and spreading?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You have to have the ability to do so as well, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think…</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, not everything works.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Some things need the personal touch, I think. Automation. There’s a lot of discussion about automation and what’s going to get automated. And we’re not going to have people doing jobs. I remember the first time I ever thought about that question. I used to work… when I was in high school I worked at a TV studio and I was really, really into it. And we got to tour a local news TV station one time. And I was so excited. And so, we show up there and we met the newscasters and it was super cool. And we watched as they were doing one of the news broadcasts and they had these really cool cameras that were on these robotic tripods and they moved around the studio on their own and focused on different things. And we were like, “These are so cool! These are amazing. We wish we had these in our studio.” And my boss was like, “I’m not saying that they’re not cool. But think about this. Because this is doing your job to the point where they don’t need you to do your job anymore.” And I was like, “Oh.” And that was the moment I first thought about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We think of… your job was to move the camera, but there’s so much of your job is deciding how and where to move the camera.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s true.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And somebody still does need to at least punch a button to tell it which move to make. But yeah, maybe you go from three camera operators to one. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or three and you just do more camera movement.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s true. It freaked me out at the time because I was planning on going into TV production for my career at that point. And I was like, “Oh, it’s going to be so hard to find a job in TV production,” which was true. And it’s not what I do now. So… [Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, so tell us about how you made that switch.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I went to school for digital art, which was the closest that I had to film and TV production at the school that I went to. And because it wasn’t an actual film and TV production major, I took a lot of other miscellaneous art classes. They were basically like, “Take animation.” I’m like, “I don’t want to take animation. I don’t want to be an animator.” And they’re like, “Well just take one. One is required. And then if you hate it, you don’t have to take any more, ever.” So, I took some graphic design classes and I took some animation classes and some game design classes. And I found that specifically in animation and game design, there was a lot of actual strict writing code involved. [Chuckles] I learned ActionScript at that point. And everyone else in all of my classes was like, “This sucks. Why do I have to do this? This isn’t art. This is math. It’s stupid.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] Wait, there’s a difference?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] Some people think so. But so, I was like, “This is great. I love writing ActionScript.” And everyone else seems to hate it, which makes me special for liking it, I guess. At least, in my digital art classes. So, I started studying computer science. And I got a minor in computer science. And then I decided that’s what I actually wanted to do instead of trying to move to the big city and make my big break or whatever I would have had to do to go into film production.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, I really want to ask you about that. But first, I have to mention that we have a surprise bonus panelist. Astrid Countee has just joined us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yay.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Welcome, Astrid.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you for coming.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We’re glad you’re here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I had to hear all about you, Jamey.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s a lot of fresh [inaudible]. Sorry. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So yeah, I had it on my list to ask you how you got into tech. And so, it sounds like you sort of discovered a love for it during college. What happened after you graduated? How’d you get your first tech job?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I found my first tech job on Craigslist. That’s a true story. And it was this tiny startup, like locally to me, that did QR code generation and text message marketing using it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh yeah, I’ve seen one of those. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was the only developer. I learned Ruby on Rails while I was working there. So, they hired me. They were paying me $10 an hour to basically teach myself Ruby on Rails to the point where I was capable of running this software by myself. And I worked there as the only developer until essentially they ran out of money to pay me and they started cutting my hours. And I found another job at that point. But it was really, really interesting being the only developer at my first tech job because I did a little bit of mentorship because one of the owners is a very talented developer. He just wasn’t writing code for this project. So, he was there to answer some of my questions sometimes, although this was kind of his side-gig. But I learned a lot from him because he was really brilliant. But I worked for about a year on a codebase that I was the only person who touched, which was really interesting. Because I knew how everything worked and that is the last time I’ve ever worked on a project… </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Where I knew how every single piece worked.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was the one who built everything. That’s not true, because it did work before I joined. But I touched everything in that year and I updated everything in that year. But also, then if something breaks, I didn’t learn that, “Oh, who broke this?” It was always me. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If something was great, I could pat myself on the back. And if something was broken, I could blame myself because there was nobody else. [Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I once went to a talk with somebody who was in a similar position where they are the only developer. It was a Rails app. And they had done it for, I think at that point, three or four years.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And the talk was titled “Galapagos Rails” and they were talking about like… </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When you’re the only one and it’s only you and everything that breaks is your fault and you have to just figure stuff out. And how it made him into a better developer but that it also made him had way less patience for people who don’t fix their own problems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] Yeah, because I guess in one year you could potentially make a bunch of problems and then leave and then let somebody else deal with them, or at least some of the bigger problems that you made, you could leave to somebody else. But in three years, you’re really going to have your face rubbed in it, huh?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] Yeah, yeah. He talked about that, about the really lonely nights where it’s all broken and you just can’t do it anymore. And you have to come back the next day because the whole company is depending on you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, do you think it changed anything about your attitude about being a developer, Jamey? Like, having to do it by yourself?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I do. I think the hardest thing about going from being the only person to working with other people, and in fairness I’ve never worked at a big company. I’ve never worked on anything with more than a handful of developers, really. My next company after that, at our peak, there were about 10 of us. And at Agrilyst right now there’s, at our peak, there were probably five or six people touching the codebase. But even just from that jump from one to a few, the hardest thing was that I feel guilt about not understanding how something works. And if someone’s like, “Hey, do you know how our application does this?” and I have to be like, “No, I didn’t write that and I’ve never looked at it,” I feel guilt about saying that. I feel like I should know everything. And so, that’s kind of hard. And I still feel that way a little bit. I recognize that it’s kind of silly and that it’s reasonable not to know everything. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It’s more than reasonable. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It is literally impossible to know everything. And if you try to know everything, you won’t get anything done. These systems scale bigger than our heads. Actually, there’s a paper on this in the [inaudible] report. It talks about our software systems are sufficiently complex that every model is always incomplete and out of date.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The best we can do is collectively have enough accuracy over enough of the system to be able to keep it running and change it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would agree with that. And I think the other thing that I got from being the only person is that a sense of, “Well, but I’ll figure it out,” because I was in a position where I had to figure it out. There was no other option. And so, that was kind of empowering. Because I remember, and that was my first job and I was very new. And there were a lot of times where I was like, “This is impossible. I don’t know how to do this. I can’t pawn it off on anyone else. [Chuckles] I just got to do it.” And every time I started a new big feature I’d be like, “This is impossible. I’m never going to be able to get this to work.” And somehow, I always did get it to work eventually. I’d have to learn new stuff. And I’d have to figure it out. But I did it. And so, after this cycle happened a few times, I started to be like, “Okay. I’m feeling that feeling where it feels like it’s impossible. But the last six or eight times I said that, it was possible. So maybe, that feeling is wrong.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, one of those things that you learned at that first job where there wasn’t really anybody else was that you could figure it out?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Definitely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And it is. [Sighs] I still feel that every day. I have this urge to understand the whole system. And I just have to let it go because if I try to keep up, it’s changing so fast and there are six other devs working on it. It changes so fast that if I tried to just keep up with what’s going on, I don’t have time to do anything. So, I’ve had to force myself to narrow my focus, not know how most of the backend works, and just move forward on relative frontend stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY</b>:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span>That makes sense to me. I think the two things are related. Because if you have confidence that you can figure it out if and when you need to, then you can let it go for now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s a good point, yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, my strategy for that is to try to leave the code in a legible enough state that when I come back to it, some way down the road, that I’m confident that I can pick it back up again. Or whoever else touches it can pick it back up. And that’s why refactoring is important, kids.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Code politeness.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Lately I find that the limiting resource is based in my head. So, I’ve become really stingy with what I keep in my head and started writing more stuff down and letting go of it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I write everything down. And I write it all down on paper. Everything has to go on paper. It’s like I don’t even know something until I write it down on paper. Because I can type without thinking about what I’m writing or reading what I type. [Chuckles] But I can’t do that with paper.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. Well, the trade-off is you can search typed stuff easier. But writing it down with your hands on paper helps cement it more firmly in your brain.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. A lot of times I don’t even go back and read the stuff I wrote. But just having written it down is so helpful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I’m totally like that. It’s like by writing it, now it’s in my brain so I don’t need it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. It’s almost like that. That puts it in a more built-in form of memory instead of some active memory that I feel like I’m expending RAM to remember this, until I write it down.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Like deeper storage or something.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I didn’t know you were a droid. But now I know.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, actually I think possibly a better metaphor would be registers in the CPU for working memory. Because I think most people have seven plus or minus two slots for holding onto things in their head.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Today I feel like I have three.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s my usual. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So Jamey, you’re a librarian. Can you tell us about that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am. I get a little nervous about using the word librarian sometimes because there are actual librarians that had to study and learn a lot of things to be a professional and that is not what I do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, was is it you do that they’re not doing, or that you’re not doing that they are doing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don’t know what they’re doing. I feel like they’re doing magic and I’m doing, I don’t know, volunteer work. But I work at a local collaborative art space called Sugar City and we have the zine library that people can donate zines to. And I take care of them and I keep them nice on the wall and I put them in the database. And I meet people who want to donate to us and I get zines from them. I take in donations from the mail and I keep track of all of it. And I love all the zines in our library and I take care of them lovingly. So, if people read them and they get ripped, I fix them. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What kind of zines are they?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We have any/every kind of zine you can imagine, because we take any kind of donations that anyone wants to give. So, we’ll often get someone donating their entire library because they’re like, “I’m moving,” and, “I don’t collect these anymore,” whatever. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, we’ll get a whole box of art zines or queer zines from the 90’s, which is cool. We have a ton of anarchist political zines because we’ll get full collections of those. So, it’s really cool. And then we put them on the wall. There’s no order or anything. So, you just have to browse. We do have a list of what we own and people can come in and read zines. And it’s very exciting and cool. And I run zine fairs where people can sell zines.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Define zine.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A zine, well it’s short for a magazine. This is like a 90’s thing that’s… I feel like it was very popular then and then it got less popular and now it’s research, which I’m really excited about. I feel like zines are very popular again. But it’s basically self-published magazines. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, I’m guessing something like something that a person would type up or draw and then take down to Kinko’s and make 20 copies of?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A lot of them are like that. There as some that are a little bit more well-put-together than that. But that’s what I like so much about zines, is that anyone can do it. If you want to go big and do this whole production and do bookbinding and stuff, I know people who do that and it’s really cool. But if you don’t want to do that or you don’t know how to do that, or you don’t have the time or the skill, you can still do zines. There’s really no minimum skill required. If you have an idea that you want to put on paper, you can put it on paper and make it. And I love all zines. Some of my favorite zines are just these crappy Kinko’s copies that you can barely read. But the content of them is so important that I’m like, “Yes! I’m so glad that I have this on paper.” And it’s so different from the internet in some ways. Because the internet also has that extremely low barrier of entry. You don’t have to have any measurable skill in anything to go on the internet and post something. So in that way, it’s similar. But in every other conceivable way, it’s different.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it’s funny. You were talking about how they were really popular in the 90’s and then less so and then they experienced a resurgence. And being the sort of nerd that I am, I want to correlate that with a technical story about how in the 90’s publishing to the web kind of sucked. And then we got sites like LiveJournal and then later Tumblr and somewhere along the way WordPress. But that doesn’t really account for their recent resurgence. And maybe I’m totally off-base. What do you think? Why did they come back? Why did they go away?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that they went away because people were like, “Oh, we can use the internet for this, but better.” I would agree with that. I’m not sure why they came back. I was doing zines in 2010-ish and people were making fun of me. And now, half the artists I know locally do zines. And so somewhere in between there it’s become a thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is the answer hipsters? </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don’t think the answer is hipsters. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think if anything, the answer is like the punk scene. And I think the punk scene has, not that like… I’m not accusing punk of being dead at any point. But I think the punk scene has been more culturally relevant lately because of the political climate. I think that’s part of it. I think there’s been a nostalgia factor. Not just to, “Oh, remember when we had zines?” specifically, because I think some of these people are doing zines for the first time now. But like, the idea of holding something in your hand is very attractive to me and very different from the internet. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of my favorite things about zines is that they travel organically and they can’t be censored or searched. So, they can’t be censored is kind of obvious. You make them yourself and you hand them out to people and nobody can stop you from doing that, which is cool. But I also think that you get very personal stories in zines that you wouldn’t get on the internet, because you have a lot more control in some ways about who gets that story. You can control who you pass these zines to. You can make 20 and then never make them again. And now it’s out there and maybe it was cathartic for you to do. And maybe you shared it with someone who really needed to be shared with, but nobody can go on Google and be like, ‘Jamey Hampton this, this, and this’, and get these personal stories that I’ve written in zines. Because they’re just not on the Internet in that way. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, you’re sharing your story and you have some control over who sees it but not full control. You don’t know where all those zines will end up but you have some idea how many. And it’s more localized?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like sending zines through the mail. Someone recently asked me if I would put my zines on Etsy and I was like, “No.” And they’re like, “Well, can I buy one?” And I was like, “Yes.” PayPal me money and I’ll mail it to you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But I’m not going to put it on Etsy. And I think that the reason that I’m against… I’m not against Etsy in theory for other people, but zines used to be like you would find an address on the back of another zine and you would mail them a dollar through the postal service. And they would mail you something hopefully, or they would steal your dollar. I don’t know. Hopefully they’ll mail you something. I don’t steal people’s dollars. I do mail them out. People are like, “Well, that’s kind of sketchy.” I’m like, “Well, you know what? It is a little sketchy but that’s how we’re doing it. So…” [Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Your two dollars are not PayPal-insured.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, so back in the 90’s I actually had a physical copy of a book that think was called ‘Weird Stuff by Mail’. And if I remember correctly, it was actually written by the same person who did the whole ‘Church of the SubGenius’ thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was a printed book. So, by the time I got it, some of the stuff was already obsolete. But it was a list of just places that you could mail a couple of bucks and get back random, weird shit.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love that. I want to get that book and mail to people and see if any of them still exists.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] Right. Well, good luck finding the book. I’m sure it’s out of print. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Even the book doesn’t exist. It’s an enigma. Out of print is also another thing I think about with zines. Because a lot of them are really low printing numbers and I have zines. I got a zine when I was in France and it was four out of 15 on the back. And I was like, “15 copies of this exist.” And in France. And somehow I had one in Buffalo. Just the sheer randomness of the universe that put this zines into my possession. I love that. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I also think, it seems to have something to do with art. The whole it started and then it moved to the internet and then now it’s coming back again because… I was just at the art museum this past week over the holiday break which was awesome, because I forgot how much I love going to art museums, because I’m always at science museums because I love science. But when you go to the art museums and you realize some things you just can’t experience the same unless you are holding, touching it, looking at it in person. It’s just different. Especially because part of the purpose of things that are creative and made to be artfully done are that you want to experience something. You can’t just always experience it online in the same way. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And I kind of feel like things that first moved to the internet like blogging, when that first moved there, it was a small community. It was like you could actually talk to people. And then it got to a place where everybody was online so, it’s like you’re shouting in a crowded room. It’s not the same intimate personal feeling, which is part of the reason why I think there’s starting to be a resurgence of the more tactile experience of things. And then there’s people like me. I love to buy Kindle books because I have a Kindle. It’s so easy to read that way. But then books that I really want or things I want to read again, I want the real book, because I want to touch it and smell the pages. And I think that’s happening with a lot of things. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I’m a little bit materialist, too. I used to be very self-conscious about it. I wanted to be like, “I’m not materialistic.” </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay. [Inaudible]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But I kind of am. And it’s because I feel safe when I physically surround myself with things that I really love. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mmhmm.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And so, the idea of I really love this book and I want to put it on my bookshelf so it’s there is comforting to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. It’s like when you see sci-fi movies that are supposed to be set in the near future. And everything is very sterile and there’s no personal or clutter-y because everything is just perfect, it feels so lonely. It doesn’t feel like a life you want to have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. There’s a quantity of information here, too, just like with our programming systems. You can’t read all the blogs but you can read all of the zines that are in your hand.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>At first I got a little overwhelmed by the fact that things were so limited edition. I was like, “There are so many that I’m never going to see.” And I’m like, “I mean, true. But there’s also so many that I am going to see that other people aren’t going to see. And I can share them, the ones I like.” I also collect cassette tapes from local bands and stuff, because I just really like things that other people made that I can hold and read and listen to and be like, “Somebody spent time doing this.” And they made creative decisions about how this is going to be. I listened to a cassette tape recently that was literally just static-y noise with beeps. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And I loved it so much, because I imagined the person who made it sitting there and changing the frequency of the beeps and being like, “No, this is wrong,” and then changing them and be like, “Yes. This is it. This is what’s going on the tape.” </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And I thought about, what feeling were they having that they were trying to evoke in me? It’s probably not the same feeling I’m actually feeling. But this idea of putting something together and being like, “Yes. This is it. This is the feeling and now I’m going to give it to someone else and see what happens.” That’s what art is to me. And it just makes me really happy. I feel like I have a connection with whoever this was that put the beeps on the tape. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that’s beautiful. And we are physical beings, so we do have a connection to physical objects that the interwebs can’t satisfy. You talked about the beauty of this art that’s created by someone and passed down. Do you find any beauty like that in your work?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think about code and art a lot. And I think the beauty of a lot of code is what it does. We talk about beautiful code and beautiful code is nice. I enjoy it. Aesthetically, it’s good to work with. But in essence, when you’re writing code, you’re not creating code to give to someone. You’re creating a program to give to someone. But I’ve thought some about playing with it. I had this idea. This is an art exhibit idea that I’ve had for a while and I haven’t done yet. But I’m like, what if I wrote some little applets in JavaScript and I wrote them normal and tested them, made sure they worked. And then I typed them out on a typewriter and framed them. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because [chuckles] I think it’s really funny to present things that are useful in a context where they are useless. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. You can get code embroidered, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mmhmm.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I cross-stitched a QR code, once.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, cool. Wow!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I actually saw something like that on Twitter yesterday.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I saw something like that recently, too. But I used to do urban exploration. It was my big thing. And I ran a blog about urban exploration. And I had a backpack that I took with me. And so, I cross-stitched a QR code to my blog and put it on my backpack. [Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] Nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, you just said you used to do urban exploration. And you didn’t tell us about that when we asked where your superpower came from?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It does seem like… </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It does seem related.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Doing urban exploration would enhance your, what did you call it? Far-fig-newgan? No.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My Fharlanghn sense. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, Jamey when you were just talking about the beauty in code, it sort of made me think about something, this book I had to read when I was doing anthropology graduate study. And it was this book about why we buy. And there was this anthropologist who would watch people in the supermarket and see what they purchased. And some of the people, he would go home and see how they distributed their food items. And there was this interesting that he noticed where some people would purchase something, especially parents, and let’s say like a box of goldfish crackers. And they would go home and they would take it out of the box and they would put it into other little baggies or something for their kids. And he talked about how functionally, that doesn’t really do anything. But that it gave this impression that these are not the brand crackers. Like, these are mom and dad’s crackers for you. It created a connection to it that was beyond what it was purchased. It was about this function of somebody putting the time to put this into a small enough package for you to have so now it’s specialized for you. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And that might be a big leap, but it just made me think about how you were saying it’s not about… you’re not making code for someone. You’re making this program, but that’s what programs do. They have some sort of thing that they are supposed to complete or finish or do. And it’s almost like it’s a similar concept where it’s not about the thing. It’s about how well that thing was made, who it could have been made for, and how that affects someone, and what that could mean. It’s more abstract but when something is well-built and you’re using it, you feel that as a user. You feel like someone thought about what I was going to do. Someone thought about this choice. Someone gave me an option that I’ll always have. And it means something. And it reminded me of that same scenario where he noticed that it’s not really… it’s a strange thing to do functionally, to take something out of a box and put it in another box basically, but it’s being done to create a connection. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that how we feel about things emotionally changes the meaning of them really profoundly, too, in the way that we form emotional connections to things. When I was talking about how I feel like I’m kind of materialistic, I’ve forgiven myself for it, I guess, because I form these really intense connections to things I own. But it’s not because like, “Oh, I have this valuable thing.” It’s like, “Somebody gave me this. And now it has meaning beyond what it just is, because it makes me think of this person or this thing that happened or this place I was.” It’s almost like you can take emotions about people or memories about the past and trap them in these things that you own.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, because even though it’s a thing, itself doesn’t contain the memory. The thing in combination with your brain has the memory. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, because our brains are highly associative.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It’s like cryptography, almost. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Like your brain has this key… </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That makes these random letters into words. And your brain also has this key that makes these objects into like…</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It’s like we’re living in augmented reality.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But it’s only augmented for you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter] </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Now if only we realized that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It’s personalized. It’s like the crackers. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So then, if the beauty of the code is in what it does, and I completely agree with you there, then your work satisfaction is going to be less about what language you’re writing or how well-factored it is than what the software accomplishes?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>To me, the moment that makes me writing code is the moment when something that didn’t work before suddenly works. And I’m sure that other people feel this way. Like, they must, because it’s so satisfying.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mmhmm.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There is definitely a magic in that moment. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I remember the first time I ever really… I don’t work with a lot of hardware. But I was doing consulting and I was doing a project where I was working with printers. And it was a huge pain. It was just the worst. And there were all these restrictions. And so, I ended up sending information to printers via… I opened a bytestream from an Android phone and sent it directly to the printer via Bluetooth. It was such a pain. And it didn’t work for a long time and I was just days of, “Oh, I sent it and it didn’t work. It printed gibberish. Oh, I sent it and nothing happened.” And the first time that a piece of paper came out of that printer with real words on it I was like, “Oh my god.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>“I am the master. I control. The technology. I have so much power. I felt so powerful.” And I was like, “Ah, this why people like working with hardware.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA: </b> Right, right. It’s that changing the physical world thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh my god, I made an LED blink. I’m so great.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I’m a powerful technomancer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can make the LED blink whenever I want.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And of course, at this point I absolutely have to share one of my favorite YouTube videos.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Which is of somebody who programmed two floppy disk drives to play The Imperial March from Star Wars.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh my god.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And I will drop a link to that into the show notes. Because, oh my god, it is awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> I have a tattoo of the Death Star. Fun fact. Fun to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Really, Jamey. Is that ethical?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It’s not at all. And that’s literally why I have it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Chuckles] Yeah, because did you pay a copyright fee for that tattoo?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s not why.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>George Lucas doesn’t need any more of my money. I promise.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>He has so much of it. [Laughs] No. I think about the Death Star all the time. I think about the Death Star whenever I think about my career, to be honest. It sounds like a joke, but it’s actually kind of true. Because when I started thinking critically about the Death Star for the first time, which happened the first day that Rogue One came out, when I went to see Rogue One. I went to see this movie and I’m like, “Yeah, Star Wars. I love it. I’m going to go. I’m going to see this movie.” And I went with my fiancé and we were just like, “Yes, a Star Wars movie. We’re so excited.” And we got out and he was like, “What did you think of it?” And I imagine that I went super pale and I was like, “I’m worried about my career.” And he was like…</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter] </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is what you want to talk about? Don’t you want to talk about Star Wars? I’m like, “I am talking about Star Wars. I don’t know.” </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because it really freaked me out to watch that movie and see the backstories of the engineers that worked on the Death Star. Because everyone wants to go to the movies and be like, “I’m the good guy. I’m a hero. I’m an action hero.” And I was like, “Oh, I’m like an old white man in a white coat that works for the Empire.” Like, that’s who I relate to in Rogue One, because they didn’t know that they were building a super-weapon. They were just engineers who want to build something cool. And they did. And then it was the Death Star. And they all got killed. Spoilers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like that’s so relevant to our current life and times in technology.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, yes. I think about it a lot and it’s like, if you don’t think about ethics when you’re building something, that’s dangerous. Because I was like, “I wouldn’t work on the Death Star. No way.” But you can’t prevent yourself from working on something like that unless you stop to consider what it actually is. I’m lucky because I’ve worked on projects pretty much my whole career that I actually do feel really strongly like, “This is a good thing.” But there’s a lot of stuff that seems just not immoral but amoral. Like, unrelated to morality. And I think if you are too quick to be like, “Well, my work is amoral. It has nothing to do with morality,” you put yourself in a situation where you could be doing something that’s really immoral actually and you don’t really realize it. And I think that’s what happened in Rogue One.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or it could be used in a way after the fact.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is not the way it was intended when it was being built.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Definitely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or have effects that it wasn’t designed for.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mmhmm.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What if you get really good at growing indoor plants and then the plants take over and eat you?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Little Shop of Horrors.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I’m not as worried about that as other things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But I’m glad we’re talking about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like a lot of us look at the Volkswagen thing where they were deliberately spoofing emissions tests. We look at that and we think, “Well, I wouldn’t ever write something like that.” But a surprising number of us might write something like that if it’s where money was coming from, if that’s how we’re feeding our family. And [sighs] there are a lot of other cases in our industry that are a lot less clear-cut even than that is. And that I think a lot of people just don’t really think about, because they don’t really want to think about them. Because you don’t really want to face the possibility that you might be even to some small degree a monster.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> I’m working on a talk about this right now actually. And I was researching the other day people who regret their inventions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mmhmm.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because I was talking about… like a well-known example is Einstein’s contributions that ended up being related to the atomic bomb, even though he wasn’t personally the person who did that. He was very regretful of his involvement. And I was looking up other examples. And the person who developed pepper spray didn’t do so to make it a biological… it was supposed to be a weapon. It wasn’t something that wasn’t going to be a weapon. But now, the way people are using it, the way that police use it and stuff, he’s like, “This is just so… I’ve never seen such irresponsible uses of chemicals.” So, he has regrets about that. The person who invented the AK-47, there’s a really interesting quote that I found where he was debating, “Am I responsible for people who died with this gun or not? Sometimes I think I am. Sometimes I feel like I didn’t force anyone to do this.” But, on his deathbed or something, he had this quote where it was like, “I wish I just could have used that energy doing something else. I wish instead of inventing the AK-47 I could have invented something that could help people do their jobs, like farmers or something.” And I read that and I was like, “That’s what I do.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter] </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But another example I used is the person who invented the cubicle, because he was like, “Yeah, the cubicle is great. It’s going to be flexible. It’s going to let people have a better work environment than offices,” and then people used it to just pack people in because it was cost-efficient. And he was like, “No, that’s not what I meant.” But it’s too late.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because he already invented it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But it was in many ways better than what came before, which was a giant, open, floorplan with a bunch of people at desks just making noise.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You mean like now?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, but now it looks different.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Now it’s IKEA furniture, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. So, there’s this talk that Malcolm Gladwell does in a similar topic and it’s about the Norden bombsight. Have you seen that, Jamey?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No. Tell me about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, so you’ll probably like this for the research you’re doing. It’s about a person who was, he makes this device to make bombing more accurate. Because what he’s thinking is that if we can make the bombing more accurate then we can have less death and then war can be over faster. Because he assumed, “I’m not going to stop war. But maybe if I can make war more efficient, then we won’t lose as many people.” And he tells a very interesting tale about how it works. But at the end of the day, it ended up being used to drop the atomic bombs. So, even though his intention was to try to make the loss of life as small as possible, it ended up being used completely outside of its intention of being accurate, because you don’t have to be accurate so much if you’re dropping an atomic bomb, to hurt and kill so many people. </span></p>
<p class="p4"><span class="s1">And that’s like what we’re talking about where sometimes you’re building something because you think it’s going to do something that could be good. But then it could be used in a completely different capacity in a way that you never expected or intended. And unfortunately, especially with science and technology, oftentimes the money that you get to build things, when they will fund you to build all kinds of things and let you learn all kinds of science, it’s usually to be used in some way that’s going to exert power from one people over another people. And it’s like, how do you deal with that Faustian bargain of we’re going to advance science but it’s going to be at this cost that we may not be able to quantify? And it seems like it always happens that way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It’s hard because once you’ve put something out there, you kind of lose control over it and how it’s used. And I think that’s what a lot of the stories that we just told are about. And I also think that as programmers, we’re at a particular risk of that, because code doesn’t know what it’s doing. So, repurposing code is very easy in many ways. The example I like to use of this is AR technology, which is really interesting, and like facial recognition. So, people are like, “Yeah, AR video games.” It’s a big thing. And it’s cool and it’s interesting and it’s new and it’s futuristic or whatever. But if you write facial recognition software, the software doesn’t know whose faces it’s recognizing or why. And then if they repurpose that code to say, try to find protesters to arrest them; that would be easy to do with that code. And if you wrote it, there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t stop them from doing that once they’re doing it. </span></p>
<p class="p4"><span class="s1">[Sigh] So, I think it’s just really hard because there’s no way that we can anticipate all of the ways that our code could be repurposed. But I do think we have to take some sort of responsibility for what else could be done with it that isn’t what we originally meant. And I’m not sure where the line is between, “I’m afraid that my stuff’s going to get repurposed so now I just can’t write anything, ever,” which is also not realistic.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. The world is a complex system and when we create something or learn something, we change that system. And we can’t know how that’s going to affect things. But we can influence the system in various ways to hold people in power accountable for their pepper spray actions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know Jessica, sometimes I wonder if maybe we could just start thinking about… like, I try to think about code like a tool. In anthropology, especially when you’re learning about hominids, what you learn is that the tools that we make are extensions of us. So, an axe is an extension of our ability to use our arm with force. And cars are an extension of us to be able to run. Something like that. So in that case, then code is like an extension of what we could use our brain to do, or use a connection of brains to do, in one instance. And so, it’s like you wouldn’t give young kids sharp objects and then leave the room. Because you would expect that something bad could happen. So maybe it might be possible for us to think more about, “Okay, this type of code could be utilized in a bad way or in a destructive way by those who are uneducated about what to do with it or not capable of understanding how to use it.” We should know that. And maybe there are things we can do around that to help it be used properly. </span></p>
<p class="p4"><span class="s1">Because I think it’s not so much that you can make things without any type of morality. But, tools are tools. They’re just there until somebody picks them up. And you can use hammers to build a house for somebody or you can use them to destroy something. So, it’s really not, should you not make a hammer? It’s like, how do you teach people to use hammers and why would you have hammers? And who should be around if somebody doesn’t know how to use a hammer so that they can teach them the right way. And maybe we should be thinking around those questions and less so about, should we make this or not?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like there are some tools that are a little bit more single-purpose than others. Like it’s hard to imagine a use for a gun that isn’t destroying something. Which is not to say that we shouldn’t make guns, but it’s maybe a little bit less balanced of an example than a hammer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was just reading a book about somebody who was doing research in the rainforest and having a shotgun was really important because there was anacondas and there were jaguars. And you needed it. That’s totally different than if you take that same gun and point it towards a person in the rainforest.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because you don’t need to shoot a person unless they are seriously [inaudible]. So, it’s really about understanding… you know a gun is a powerful tool. So, you should understand when you’re using it, what the implications of what you’re doing with it could be.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY</b></span><span class="s3"><b>:</b></span><span class="s1"><b><span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think the more powerful a tool is, the more respect you have to have for it. And I think the tough thing here is I can control how much respect I have. And I can try to encourage and teach other people to have respect. But I can’t force other people to respect something the way I respect it, or think it should be respected. You know what I mean?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like what you’re saying though. And I think that with software, what you’re describing, we already do a lot in a… not a moral way, but in a mundane way. When we build something as engineers, we say like, “Okay. How are users going to break this? How are they going to screw this up and do it wrong? And what safeguards can I put in so that they don’t do it wrong?” </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mmhmm.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that’s a huge part of our jobs. But I think you’re right. I think extending that to be about morality and not just usability is important. I just have to figure out how to do it. It’s not just my job to figure it out. We can all think about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I think it helps to just ask the question.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I agree.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think getting people thinking about it is a huge thing. Because I had never thought about this, really, before I saw Rogue One, like I said. And it was scary, because I’m like, “I’m a good person. I wouldn’t purposely do something that I think is wrong.” But until you’ve asked the question and thought about it, you never know what you’re going to do, I guess. And at that moment, I felt like I didn’t know what I would do in that situation. And now that I’ve asked the question and talked to people about it and thought about it, I feel like I do know what I would do. And so, I feel much less anxiety about it now. And I feel like the more I talk about it, maybe other people will think about it, too. Hopefully.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had two things I wanted to follow up on. Your first job. You said one of the owners was a developer and even though he didn’t have a lot of time, you said I learned a lot from him because he was really brilliant. Does brilliance cause someone to be able to learn from you? Or is there some intermediate step? Or something different?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think brilliance does allow someone to learn from you. I think being a good teacher definitely, obviously, helps someone to learn from you, even if you’re not a genius, which this person was. But I think if you really want to learn from someone who’s a genius, you can learn from them without their consent. [Chuckles] Like if you just observe things that they do that are really brilliant and think about why are they doing these things and how can I emulate these things? There’s stuff to be learned there. Obviously if someone is also a good teacher, that’s a great combo. And he did teach me some stuff. It wasn’t that he was a bad teacher. It was just that he didn’t have the time to devote to me all the time that I would like. But I think picking out people who you look up to in that regard and just watching them very intently and observantly, you can learn things from them, even if they’re not trying. If you’re trying. At least one person has to be trying.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you agree with that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. At the time you were inexperienced. So, there was an infinite amount of stuff to learn. And you had the energy to devote to that careful learning. I wonder if there are some people that we think are brilliant that if we put the effort into learning from what they do, we’d find out they aren’t.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I agree. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think we slap that label on people because they’re doing something that feels like we don’t know how to do that. And then we miss the people who are doing what they’re doing so amazingly that it’s so seamless we can’t even see it, unless you’re really looking.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, the real genius makes it look simple.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But then if you look closely, you will learn.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, of course. But I think part of it is just, I feel like sometimes our culture has this idea about genius, like some people have it and some people don’t. And genius are these people that do things that nobody can do. And I think sometimes it’s like, when you see them, it’s the combination of a lot of things they’ve gotten really good at and that’s why they seem so otherworldly. And then we kind of confuse that with people who are just loud about what they do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mm.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, like, “I’m awesome. You have to love me.” And then we’re like, “You must be a genius.” And then they’re really not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think if you want… I agree with you. But I think that if you want to be critical about that, that’s a pretty easy thing to be critical about. I think that kind of genius façade that you’re describing is a façade that kind of crumbles pretty quickly once you look closer at what someone is doing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I agree. I just don’t know how much time we spend to look for those little things anymore.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s true.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is the limitation, the time we have to process the information. There’s so much more that we… more zines than we can possibly read. [Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yup.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And yeah, and more blogs and more people that we could possibly learn from than we can possibly learn from.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There’s one other thing you said early, Jamey, that I thought was important. You were in your animation classes and there was a lot of code. And you said you loved it and everyone else seemed to hate it. So, you recognized that that made you special and ran with it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that’s not a reaction that a lot of people would have. They would think, “What’s wrong with me? Maybe I shouldn’t love this.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. If you can see that thing that is different that makes you different from other people, then that’s where you can find your special job that’s actually fulfilling.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think there are some kinds of people that are afraid of being different from other people. And then there are some kinds of people that are afraid of being the same as other people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s so true. That’s like welcoming of difference is easier for some people than others.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But I even think, originally I was going to say some people are afraid of being different and some people like being different. But I decided to… I think it’s even more than that. I think that some people who like being different are actually afraid of being similar. And I feel that in myself, sometimes, I think.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like there’s a Portlandia sketch about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There’s a Portlandia sketch, I feel about everything, every episode we talk about. We could just… in fact, you could just watch Portlandia instead of listening to Greater Than Code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You could, but please don’t.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, no. Our podcast is good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I’m just kidding. Don’t do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, I wanted to bring it back to your superpower. And how can you share your superpower which does not transfer to an app. What is one piece of advice that you would give people who find themselves in a new city with options about where to go that evening?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay. I’m going to give away part of the secret.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Ooh, goody.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And it’s great because it’s related to what we were talking about. But the way that the Fharlanghn sense works is being very observant. I’ve had people say to me something like, “You’re cheating. You’re not really using the superpower. You heard about this place from someone else who went to Montreal four years ago and that’s how you know about it.” And I’m like, “Yeah. And the fact that I remember what somebody else said about a place in Montreal four years ago and remembered it enough to look it up and go to it, that is what the superpower is.” [Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. To somebody like me with memory problems, that is a freaking superpower. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But like I catalog information about places that I’ve heard people say are cool or read about or a stranger told me about. I catalog that information and I’m observant about what sounds like it would be fun. And then I remember it. And I think that what Astrid was saying about, are we observant about things in our lives? Do we have time or whatever? You don’t have the time and energy and mental RAM to be observant and catalog information about everything that you ever hear from anybody. You have to prioritize what’s important to you. And to me, this is what’s important to me. And so, I categorize it. And then it coagulated into the superpower.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, to turn the question to our readers, what do you want to be a genius about?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And what kind of information do you have to catalog to get there?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We can’t all hold it all so we each get to be special with the piece we…</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA: </b> Focus on. What do you love that other people don’t love quite as much?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And thank you listeners. We’ll end it there. We will be back at you soon with a new episode. Meanwhile, if you like the sort of things that we do, the conversations that we have here, please support us on Patreon. We all as panelists do this show for free because we love it. But the production costs are not insignificant. It takes money to pay Mandy to do the wonderful editing that she does so that you get the interesting bits without all the uhm’s and ah’s. And it takes a bit of money to pay for transcriptionists so that our show is searchable and accessible. So, if you’d like to help us with those costs, go to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode and help us out. And any donation will get you into our Slack community as well where we have a couple of hundred people being really, really nice to each other. Anyway, thanks very much. We’ll be back at you soon.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span></i></p>
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<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@jameybash</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="http://www.jameybash.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">jameybash.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.agrilyst.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Agrilyst</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><a href="http://www.buffalosugarcity.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sugar City Arts Collaborative</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Join Our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">Support us via </b><a style="background-color: #ffffff; font-size: 1.8rem;" href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:22</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Jamey’s Superpower: </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fharlanghn"><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The Fharlanghn Sense”</span></a></p>
<p><b>02:40 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Working in Agriculture</span></p>
<p><b>04:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Theories on Automation</span></p>
<p><b>05:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Pivoting Into Computer Science and Software Development</span></p>
<p><b>10:35 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Feeling Like You Need to Know </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Everything </span></i></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7kFkt5WxLeDTml5cTFsWXFCb1U/view"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Stella Report from the SNAFUcatchers Workshop on Coping With Complexity</span></a></p>
<p><b>15:47 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– ‘Zines and Being a ‘Zine Librarian</span></p>
<p><b>27:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Beauty of Art and Technology and Forming Emotional Connections to Things</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHJOz_y9rZE"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Floppy Music DUO &#8211; Imperial March</span></a></p>
<p><b>35:26 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Death Star =&gt; Ethics in Technology and Taking Responsibility/Being Accountable for your Code</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Malcolm Gladwell: The strange tale of the Norden bombsite</span></a></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">“I think the more powerful a tool is, the more respect you have to have for it.” ~ <a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@jameybash</a> on Greater Than Code</p>
<p>— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode/status/950415458385186816?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 8, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>49:42 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Brilliance and Learning From Others Without Consent</span></p>
<p><b>54:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Adv]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@jameybash</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="http://www.jameybash.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">jameybash.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.agrilyst.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Agrilyst</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><a href="http://www.buffalosugarcity.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sugar City Arts Collaborative</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Join Our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">Support us via </b><a style="background-color: #ffffff; font-size: 1.8rem;" href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:22</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Jamey’s Superpower: </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fharlanghn"><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The Fharlanghn Sense”</span></a></p>
<p><b>02:40 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Working in Agriculture</span></p>
<p><b>04:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Theories on Automation</span></p>
<p><b>05:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Pivoting Into Computer Science and Software Development</span></p>
<p><b>10:35 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Feeling Like You Need to Know </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Everything </span></i></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B7kFkt5WxLeDTml5cTFsWXFCb1U/view"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Stella Report from the SNAFUcatchers Workshop on Coping With Complexity</span></a></p>
<p><b>15:47 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– ‘Zines and Being a ‘Zine Librarian</span></p>
<p><b>27:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Beauty of Art and Technology and Forming Emotional Connections to Things</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHJOz_y9rZE"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Floppy Music DUO &#8211; Imperial March</span></a></p>
<p><b>35:26 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Death Star =&gt; Ethics in Technology and Taking Responsibility/Being Accountable for your Code</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/malcolm_gladwell"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Malcolm Gladwell: The strange tale of the Norden bombsite</span></a></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">“I think the more powerful a tool is, the more respect you have to have for it.” ~ <a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@jameybash</a> on Greater Than Code</p>
<p>— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode/status/950415458385186816?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">January 8, 2018</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>49:42 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Brilliance and Learning From Others Without Consent</span></p>
<p><b>54:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Adv]]></googleplay:description>
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					<itunes:duration>58:44</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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					<title>061: Destruction-Focused Development with Safia Abdalla</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/061-destruction-focused-development-with-safia-abdalla/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 03 Jan 2018 05:00:07 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=1083</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[In this episode, Safia Abdalla joins us to talk about the Silicon Valley monoculture, tokenism, and being content vs happy. She also introduces the idea of Destruction-Focused Development.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[In this episode, Safia Abdalla joins us to talk about the Silicon Valley monoculture, tokenism, and being content vs happy. She also introduces the idea of Destruction-Focused Development.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/paladique"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jasmine Greenaway</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Safia Abdalla: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/captainsafia"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@captainsafia</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://safia.rocks/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">safia.rocks</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://zarf.co/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Zarf</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/tanmulabs"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tanmu Labs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Join Our Slack Channel!<br />
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<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:53</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Safia’s Superpower: Sight</span></p>
<p><b>03:04 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Learning Languages &#8212; Both Human and Programming</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.blutner.de/color/Sapir-Whorf.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Sapir Whorf Hypothesis</span></a></p>
<p><b>07:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Empathetic in an International Perspective and Building Universal and Approachable Tech</span></p>
<p><b>11:19 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What does success look like for minorities in the Silicon Valley monoculture?; Being Tokenized</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Admiral Grace Hopper</span></a></p>
<p><b>21:59 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Accepting Speaking Engagements Because of Who You Are (i.e. as a woman, minority, etc.)</span></p>
<p><b>24:07 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Writing Things Down to Balance Prioritizing Decisions</span></p>
<p><b>30:46 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Defining “Happy” and Always Feeling the Need to Do More</span></p>
<p><b>37:02 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Destruction-Focused Development</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Destruction-Focused Development:<br />
write it, delete it, repeat.<br />
&#8220;I don&#8217;t become obsessed with the code.<br />
I think it&#8217;s more important to be obsessed with the problem.&#8221; <a href="https://twitter.com/captainsafia?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@captainsafia</a><br />
on <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/943551570591002624?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 20, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>43:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Safia’s Early Coding “Shenanigans”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Being thoughtful about planning finite energy and labor. Also being content vs being happy.</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">&#8220;I often feel like I don&#8217;t do enough<br />
and I haven&#8217;t defined what &#8216;enough&#8217; is.&#8221;<a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@CoralineAda</a> on <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/943551732671500289?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 20, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>Jasmine:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Exploring feelings about being represented at events.</span></p>
<p><b>Jessica:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Broadening perspectives that most of us were born into.</span></p>
<p><b>Safia:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Talking about the Silicon Valley monoculture, being content vs happy, and tokenism. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi and welcome to Greater Than Code Episode 61. My name is Jasmine. And with us on the panel today we have Jessica.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning. I’m Jessitron and I am thrilled to be here today with Coraline Ada Ehmke.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, everybody. And I’m happy to introduce our guest, Safia Abdalla. Safia started building HTML websites when she was 11 and writing Python and JavaScript since she was 13. For a little under a decade, she’s been a curious young technologist using computers to make cool things and share them. Now, she can be found speaking at conferences, blogging, contributing to open source, and working on her startup. Safia, so happy to have you here. Welcome. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you so much for having me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Our standard question that we start every podcast with is, what is your superpower and when and how did you discover it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would say my superpower is sight. One of the things that I pride myself in is being the kind of person who can just sit back and observe a room and look at people&#8217;s interactions and see how they’re talking with each other and what they’re sharing, and use that to inform my interactions or solve problems or work with them. So, I would say just having this empathy and this ability to feel and observe things and watch people would be my superpower. It’s not as cool as being invisible or being able to fly, but it works.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cool. And were you always able to read a room like that and understand where people were coming from, or is that something you developed over time?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, I think it kind of relates really strongly to my background as an immigrant. My family moved to the United States when I was seven years old. And when I moved here I didn’t really know any English. I had a lot of trouble interacting with people and making friends. And so, one of the ways that I would figure out what was going on in a place was just to sit back in the corner and watch what people were doing and see if I can gather some sort of understanding of what was going on around me. I think it started from there, from trying to just understand this new setting I was in and learn what was going on and evolved to me just reading a space and figuring out what I can do to make myself useful to the people in it, or figuring out how to interact with those people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s so cool. That kind of reminds me, about 10 years ago I went with my grandmother to Germany and Poland. She hadn’t been back to Poland, where she grew up, since World War II. So, I took her on this trip to go back to her home. And all of the relatives we were traveling with, only one of them spoke any English at all. And my German is extremely rudimentary. I can talk in first-person present and that’s about it. So, I did a lot of sitting around listening to people speaking German which I could kind of follow what they were saying, but yeah, you’re right. That did give me a lot of time to observe their interactions and step back and see what they were saying without saying anything.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I agree. And I think you brought up something really interesting about learning different human languages. So, German, Spanish, French, et cetera. That I think has been useful is, as someone who’s been programming for a long time I’ve kind of gotten to the point where learning a new language is second nature to me. I pretty much understand all of the ropes. It’s just learning the syntax. And I think one way that I’ve learned to empathize with people who are completely new to the industry who are just starting to learn how to code is thinking about my experiences learning new human languages. Because I think that’s the best way to understand what it’s like to come into tech and not know Ruby or Python or JavaScript or anything and have to learn that from scratch. It helps me just relate to people better. So, I can definitely understand you having to use German in a setting that was not normal to you and what that was like.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it’s so valuable too, with programming languages to know more than one language, because I think what happens is you start to understand underlying concepts outside of syntax. And I think that makes people better developers long-term, because you’re thinking about solving problems in the abstract and then translating them into syntax, instead of just trying to look for the canonical solution in the language that you happen to be working in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I agree. And I would also say, just different languages that have different characteristics and different sayings and just different ways of looking at how we communicate, I would say that programming languages are the same way. The way we actually write the code, the way that we… I guess just difference in style and how we target solving different problems can differ between languages.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it’s one thing to learn the syntax of a language and another thing to learn how to think in it, because they do each make you think differently. So yeah, I thought it was interesting that you compare learning a new human language to learning your first programming language. As in, that’s a whole lot harder than learning your second or third programming language.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, because I think part of learning your first language is learning things like if statements and while loops and for loops, and the concepts that underpin, this might be a fancy way to say it, but just the algorithmic thinking around writing software. And then once you figure that out, it’s just about learning, what is the special way that this language does for loops? What is the special way that this language addresses an issue that another language solves poorly? Whereas when you transition to learning a new human language, it involves learning a new set of grammar, a new way of thinking about the world almost. I think there’s a close connection between what we speak and how we see the world. And the transition into learning a new human language and the way it affects the way you see the world is very similar to learning your first programming language, learning algorithmic thinking and problem solving and how that changes the way you see the world and approach problems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Language definitely influences the way that we see the world. There’s been a lot of studies on that. And there’s this thing called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis which explicitly states that the words that we use influence the way we interpret things and events and people around us. There’s a great example of that. There was a bridge built in Europe. I can’t remember. I think it connects Spain, maybe Spain and France. And it’s the tallest bridge in the world. And the word for bridge in French is masculine. And someone did a study of the newspaper reports of the construction and finishing of this bridge. And in French, all of the words that were used to describe the bridge emphasized its mass and its strength and its material. Whereas in German, the word bridge, ‘die Brücke’, is feminine. And the German reporters use words like weightless and it floats above the clouds, and they emphasized its gracefulness. So, I thought that was a really poignant example of how language was… they’re looking at the same bridge and they’re seeing completely different things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, so fascinating. And I think just a great way to showcase something that I’ve been experiencing as I’ve started to adopt a more international focus with my writing and speaking in tech. it’s just the ways that developers in Germany or India or France see things differently from developers in the US. And I’ll admit that I kind of mostly lean towards presenting and blogging towards an American audience. But just recognizing and hearing back from people across the globe who read my work and realizing that they pick up on different things or that they interpret my tone in different ways has been really interesting. And that’s one of the things that I’ve made a personal focus recently, is becoming more empathetic in an international perspective. Because I would say that for the first part of my life, moving to America and having to learn English, it was a lot about conforming to American culture and fitting into the standard. And now I’m realizing that I kind of need to go back and connect more with the outside world, now that I’ve figured out how to speak English and how to live in America and how to interact with people in America. It’s just learning how to do that for people in other countries.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, that’s beautiful. Can you give us some examples of ways that developers outside of the US think differently? </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, one of the big things that come to mind when I think about how developers outside the US think a little bit differently than developers who are local is the attention to linguistic diversity that European developers have. And I think that comes as a consequence of the fact that Europe is about, I think smaller than the land mass of the United States but within that small area you have lots of different languages and lots of different cultures interacting with each other. So, one thing that I’ve found that is a little bit more common in developers in Europe is just a stronger focus or a bigger awareness of differences in culture within a particular region, or differences in language within a particular region. And I think that developers in America haven’t totally figured out because we’re used to looking at the world from the perspective of a Silicon Valley startup or from our tech hubs. Whereas if you’re in Europe and other places around the world, you’re more attentive to the nuances in language and thinking that occur even within a small region of the world. [Inaudible]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE: </b> I would argue that Silicon Valley companies do the same sort of thing except without that awareness. They’re influenced by the culture of a small geographic area because they think of their users as being exactly like them, right? And that doesn’t apply even across all of America. My dad expressed a little frustration. He lives in a very rural part of the country and doesn’t have high-speed internet. He has satellite internet which is throttled and metered. And so, a lot of the applications, the web apps that people develop assume a broadband connection when the significant portion of the country doesn’t have access to that. And as people in a bubble in Silicon Valley just assuming that everyone across America is just like them, then we see the same thing when those companies try and go international. They assume American culture, and specifically Silicon Valley culture, exists everywhere else in the world, too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that’s a great way of putting what I was trying to say. Everyone seems to think that, or I think most developers in Silicon Valley and our country think that everyone’s got the newest iPhone at a high-speed data connection with great internet at home. And the uncomfortable reality is that most of Silicon Valley isn’t like that. Not everyone in San Francisco has those kinds of resources. Certainly not everyone in America. So, building universal and approachable tech is really difficult.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, you know, this [inaudible] culture that we have in Silicon Valley, what is it like? What’s the experience like for somebody who doesn’t fit in that norm and their norm, or Silicon Valley’s norm? And what does success look for somebody who is trying to work their way up in that industry?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>To kind of establish to those who are listening or might not know me, as mentioned earlier I’m an immigrant. I’m a woman of color. So, I exist at the intersection of a couple of minority labels or minority identities. And I’ve been involved in tech for a little under a decade if you include all of my youthful shenanigans that I pulled when I was 11 and 12. But I’ve been directly engaged with different companies and different conferences and at events for probably six years now. And I’ve been this different person who doesn’t look like the “norm” in tech. And one of the things that I’ve seen in other successful minorities in tech and just in myself as I try to establish a career in the industry and develop something for myself in the industry is the fact that so often people who are not the norm in tech end up being tokenized a little bit. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One example that I think of, and I think this is going to be a popular example that everyone can relate to, is Admiral Grace Hopper. That name is probably recognized by pretty much everyone in the industry. There are conferences named after her. Her name gets used a lot as an example of a successful woman in tech. But one of the things I struggle with is of all of the people who know her name and know that she was a female computer scientist and one of the first, how many actually know what she accomplished? Grace Hopper had the courage to bring up the idea of a compiler in her time. This notion that instead of writing everything in low-level machine code and it being painstaking and difficult to debug, you can create compilers that could translate code in a language that a human could understand much more easily to something that a machine can process. And that idea was revolutionary. It’s the reason that we have things like startups. it’s the reason that we can even talk about people learning to code at home or at bootcamps or at universities, is because she reduced that barrier to entry. But I think so often when we talk about her, she’s tokenized for being a woman in computer science, that the intellectual and technical value of her work is overshadowed. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And that’s something that I think a lot of minority individuals struggle with. And something that I’m trying to struggle with is I don’t want to be remembered for being a woman of color who is an engineer. I want to be remembered as an engineer who happens to be a woman of color. And it’s so difficult because when you’re different from the mono-culture or from the norm, people want to focus on your differences, not how you’re the same. So,people want to focus on how I’m a woman of color and how that is something unique about me and not necessarily the fact that I’m a pretty darn good engineer and that I’m really great at maintaining open source projects. And that’s one thing that I’ve tried to think about a lot and dictates a lot of my interactions recently in tech, is I don’t want to be remembered for being a great woman in tech. I just want to be remembered for being a great engineer, a great business person, who happens to be a woman of color. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I’m sure that there’s more examples beyond Grace Hopper of people who have experienced similar tokenizations, I would say, where who they were and their identity quickly overshadowed what they did. And it’s tough to balance, because I definitely… who I am is a big part of my identity but it’s not all I am. So, playing this balancing act where I am comfortable with who I am and I recognize that it’s part of my journey, but it’s not my entire self. And I don’t want people to see me as that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that’s such a difficult balance too, because you want… I don’t want to project onto you. I want to open the way for other women in tech. I want to open the way for other transgender women in tech. I want to be a role model in some kind of way and I want to inspire people who are like me to succeed and show them, you can do these things and who you are isn’t a barrier. But like you, I don’t want to be, “Oh, Coraline’s a great transgender female engineer,” right? That’s not my identity, but it is part of who I am. And I think the struggle is being your whole self without erasing part of your identity or overemphasizing part of your identity. And that’s so difficult to navigate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, you just want it to be so that there are enough transgender women in tech that that’s not the first thing people notice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I agree with that. And I would say this is a problem that uniquely falls on individuals who are underrepresented minorities. And I think that’s something important for people to recognize when they want to be maybe good allies or just good friends and colleagues of underrepresented individuals, that we do have this kind of emotional burden that we’re carrying about how we move around the industry. Do we want to be seen as a woman of color? Is now the time to showcase the fact that we’re a strong engineer? Do we emphasize this part of our identity now or this other part? And that’s just an emotional and intellectual burden that is constantly on our minds that might not be a primary focus for somebody who is part of the norm or doesn’t have to struggle with being underrepresented in the industry.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I’m really curious about how that intersects with your conference speaking, because I know for me myself, I get a lot of invitations to speak at what I call unicorn talks where it’s like, “Oh hey, come be on this panel about women in tech,” or, “Hey, come be on this panel about X or Y.” And that’s like a hyper-focus on identity issues. I think it was Sandi Metz who said that she’ll know that the industry has changed when women in tech can go on stage talking about something other than being a woman in tech. Have you had that same kind of experience? And do you talk about your identity as part of your conference talks? Or what do you prefer to talk about?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. So, I haven’t had any direct experiences, and I might just not be recalling them at the moment, where I’ve been invited to speak specifically about being a woman in tech. But I can tell there have been instances where a conference just realized that a majority of their speakers were white men and it’s kind of rushing to invite minority speakers. So, I’ve never been in situations where I’ve had to speak about being a woman of color. But I have been in a lot of situations where I could tell that I was invited because I was a woman of color. And those are always really hard for me to navigate, because it’s like, “Okay, do I accept this invitation because I know it will push forward my career? It’ll help expose me to a new audience. It’ll be another speaking engagement that I could use to lead into a job or some sort of other opportunity.” Or, the fact that you know somebody invited you not necessarily because of what you did or your accomplishments but because of who you are, it kind of leaves a bad taste in your mouth going into the talk. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And I’ve learned to just take the opportunities regardless of the reasons that I’m invited. But I definitely think that when I am invited to speak because I’m a woman of color, even if I get to propose my own topic or speak about what I like, there is an expectation by the conference organizers sometimes that I will perform a certain amount of emotional labor and discuss the issues of diversity and inclusion. And it’s not an over-explicit expectation. But it’s definitely there, that we want you to tie this topic into your talk in some way because you are of a minority identity. And sometimes I will discuss it. I think the fact that I was an immigrant is a big part of my experience in tech. But oftentimes I try to avoid it and just focus on the fact that I have been in this industry for a while. I’m curious. I’m passionate. I like to build things. I have all of these attributes that we correlate with “good engineers”. And it doesn’t really matter who I am at the end of the day. It’s what I am. Such a weird way to phrase it. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And I think the fact that I’m struggling to convey what I mean right now is a big part of the problem. There’s just this emotional burden and this intellectual burden around my identity and who I want to be and how I want to present myself. And I’m constantly thinking about it. And I don’t think this is just an issue in tech in particular. I think anyone who is an underrepresented individual attempting to navigate career or social life or anything is going to struggle with this. I’m not like everybody else. It affects everything I do and I always have to think about it, so how do I manage that? I didn’t answer your question at all, I think. But I think the reason I can’t answer it is because this is still an ongoing journey for me. I’m still trying to figure out what my identity is and who I want to be represented as. And am I a woman of color first? Am I a startup founder or am I an engineer? What label do I want to put on myself? Because although labels suck, our culture at large is very obsessed with them and everyone needs to have a tag on them for you to be understood.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I myself also struggle with that. And for the first time, I listened to somebody who pretty much drew their line on the sand when it came to that. So, I was listening to a podcast and Neil deGrass Tyson was on it. And the interviewer pretty much asked him, “How do you feel about being one of the very few people of color in astrophysics?” And it sounded like he was frustrated. It sound like the question’s been asked a lot. And he sounded frustrated. And from what I understand, I think he said something along the lines that, “At the end of the day, I’m a scientist. And that’s what I want to be remembered and known as. And my knowledge is there for everybody. And I want to influence everybody.” And I had some feelings about that but for me it was just not my place to judge because like you said, everyone’s on their own journey. everyone’s still trying to figure it out. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And personally, I think that there’s so much value in conferences where yes, they might be reaching out because they see that you’re somebody in their… let’s just be honest about it, there’s space, who was different. And the fact that they find having that representation is… I guess in my opinion, is valuable, but also is valuable to you, like you’re saying. It’s a career booster. It opens you up to different audiences. And also, it opens you up to, just your presence in general, that somebody who is interested in maybe your technologies or somebody who maybe also identifies as a person of color, a woman of color, wants to explore something that you’re talking about and they’re excited about it. So, just being present can be just as important as a career booster. It can influence other people. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. And I think, I talked a little bit about how it’s an emotional and intellectual burden for me personally to navigate the world as an underrepresented minority. I’ve also tried to manage the chaos that comes into my head when I address those topics by just having a mindful approach to living. And this is for my personal life and for my career as well. Starting to be really introspective about my own goals. And am I doing something because I think it’ll align with the status quo or it’ll make me look more normal in this industry where I’m not normal? Am I doing something for me or am I doing it as a representative of a larger identity or group? And just sitting down and having really honest and sometimes hard to have conversations with myself about why I’m doing what I do and what part of it is for me and what part of it is for people who are like me who will follow me in the future. And what part of it is just to conform and to not feel like I’m different all the time. I’ve been trying to work on that a little bit more and I’ve developed techniques for just existing in this industry, this chaotic, always moving, always busy industry, in a more mindful way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you have any tips for us that you’re willing to share?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For those of you who follow me on Twitter, you probably know that I am totally obsessed with notebooks and paper and writing things down. And that’s just because I think, especially for us as technologists, we’re so busy just clackety-clacking away on a keyboard and regurgitating a lot of our thoughts very quickly to a machine, which is great in some cases. But sometimes I think it’s good to grab a pen and paper and just slowly write out your ideas. And I find that it’s been very therapeutic, because that kind of buffer or that lag between you having an idea and you writing it down on paper slows down your mind a little bit and helps organize information. So usually, I say that as a precursor, that a lot of my tips will involve writing things<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span>down, just because I find that it helps slow my mind down and clear my thinking as opposed to typing things in an email or notepad or something like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And I would say one of the first things that I’ve started to do recently,, and this is when it comes to big career decisions, for me a big career decision is like I’m invited to give a keynote talk at a really interesting conference or I’m invited to a residency program for my startup or I’m given a job offer, the one thing I like to sit and do is sit down and draw a quad diagram. And it’ll have two columns. And the columns will be me and others. For me, ‘others’ is the people that I prioritize in my life. So, it’s my family, It’s my immediate circle of friends. My immediate circle of mentors and associates. And then me is just, what is this, it’s me. And then I’ll have multiple rows and the rows will be 6 months, 1 year, 1 and a half years, and 2 years. So, just time. And I’ll write out, in six months, assuming that I take this offer or I do the best I can at this job or I speak at this conference and it turns out lending itself lots of other opportunities, what will this do to make me happy and what will this do to make others happy? </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And I’ve found that this is a great way for me to balance prioritizing my own feelings versus the feelings of others, because one of the big things that I struggle with especially as a young person is I have a lot of mentors and friends and family who want me to do things that I don’t want to do. So, physically writing down how something will make me happy versus how it’ll make others happy helps me manage those distinctions. And then I’ll go through and I’ll fill out that chart and I’ll think about the total value of my own happiness and success versus the happiness and success that others might derive from my actions. And I’ll just have a conversation with myself. Do I care about the fact that if I do this, other people will be happy but I won’t? Do I care about the fact that I’ll be happy but others will be maybe a little bit upset? And<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span>just sit down and have that conversation about how my choice affects not just me but others long-term. So, that’s one of the techniques that I utilize especially when I’m faced with decisions. Things like referrals where somebody referred me to a position or things like a job offer where my entire family wants me to take it but I don’t want to take it. Or things where my friends really want me to do something that I don’t want to do and vice versa where I can be very stubborn and headstrong and want to do something that other people don’t necessarily support or totally believe in, and just managing those distinct things. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So yeah, that’s one technique I utilize. And that’s more structured and chart-based. Others, I think it’s just really useful to write out your feelings sometimes. And I think that’s advice that’s been given a lot to a lot of people. And I think it’s because it genuinely works. Just grabbing a pen and paper and writing it all out. And if it helps, if it’s something negative that you want to take it out of your mind or your head space, just burn it at the end. But just trying as much as I can to take a lot of the conversations that I have about myself and my career, where I want to go, from my head to a physical medium like paper.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s a great perspective. I just recently started my first journal ever. And it’s really been a great exploration into the things that I’m feeling. And for a bit it was a little bit scary to write those things down, because I’m like, “This is me. This is mine. Why do I want to put this in this book?” But it’s really just therapeutic and it just feels really good to just get it out and get it there on paper and just being honest with myself. And that’s a great, great tip.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I did journaling a lot when I was younger. And when I wanted to start again, I found writing on paper very frustrating because I was thinking much faster than I could write. Plus my handwriting is super bad. So, I actually did video journaling for a while. I would just literally open up Photo Booth and start recording and take 5 or 10 minutes to express what I was going through and what had happened. And I found I could discover more things that were actually on my mind that way, because I didn’t feel like I had to have a narrative flow. I had random access as opposed to sequential access to memories. And get it out really quickly and skim over details if I wanted to without feeling the need to explain them. So, I think that’s an alternative, too. But I definitely see the value of putting things down on paper, too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can really relate to the taking video journals. I think it’s a really great alternative to people who think writing is too slow. One of the things that I actually did when I was working on building out the product for my startup, Zarf, was do a weekly podcast where it was kind of like an audio journal of what I’d worked on that week and what was on my mind. And I would just sit down in my bedroom, usually, at 10pm on a Friday, and I would just record what was going on, what I’d done, what was on my mind. And I would share it out with everyone on the internet. And there were quite a few people who were listening. There was that intimidating component that I was actually being heard when I spoke, that it wasn’t just this direct contact between myself. But I agree that audio and video are great ways if you want to just dump and not necessarily have to structure. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And I think sometimes, that’s another thing you have to be mindful about is, do I want to structure and take things slow and really think slowly about what’s going on in my head? Or do I want to release? That’s a choice that we have to make. So yeah, I think that video journal idea is really good. And I should probably start it up again. I’ll definitely try that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You mentioned the very conscious definition of success. And you defined it as you being happy and others being happy in the medium and long-term. How do you define happy? Is it like warm, fuzzy feelings? What does success mean beyond feelings of “woo!”? </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, I might get really dark here, but I don’t think true internal happiness exists, that there will ever be a case where you’re just satisfied with everything in your life. I think what I strive for is general ‘contentness’ in the things that matter to me. And I have some big life priorities that I want to accomplish. Some of them are personal so I can’t share them here, but some of them are career-oriented. Like I want to one day run a small tech company that has a diverse, dedicated, inclusive, and empathetic staff of engineers, designers, managers, et cetera. And that’s just a personal goal for me. And ‘contentness’ in that goal is once I’ve achieved it and just checked off all of the boxes in that goal. And then there are some things that are a bit less defined, like not very specific vision that I just laid out. But maybe I want to grow my technical skills in a particular language or framework. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And for me, ‘contentness’ is just, it’s so hard to explain because it’s, I would say it’s a deep sense of self-satisfaction, of being okay with yourself. And that’s such a hard thing I think for a lot of people to get or to achieve. It’s just being okay with who you are as things are and not striving for more. One of the things that I struggle with when I think about success and my vision of being content with the way things are is I’m a bit of a perfectionist. And I’m the kind of person who will check off one thing and immediately want to do the next. And I have this to-do list mentality that most people I think glamorize and think is the pinnacle of productivity. But for me, I’m just never going to be happy with what I’ve done. I’m always going to want to do more. So, success for me along that dimension is just getting to a point where I don’t feel like I need to do more, where I’ve conquered the intellectual and mental tick that I have that is always wanting to do something else.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But, would you even be you if you didn’t want to do more?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh my goodness. That’s a great question, because I struggle with this all the time. Like, “But wait. Is this aspect of my identity where I’m always a do more kind of person, is it me? Is it all I am? Am I going to eventually just hurt myself with my obsession of always doing more?” And it’s so difficult because I think with something like my need to always check things off a list and to always do the next thing, it’s great. Because I can be really productive. I can accomplish a lot. I can be a very dedicated and motivated person. But I can also just be consistently deeply unsatisfied with the way things are. And it’s this double-edged sword that I have to navigate. And like I was saying earlier,<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span>this is another thing that I’m working through in my journey of mindfulness. It’s just figuring out, am I this to-do list checker always doing the next thing kind of person? Or is there going to be a point where I can say, “Safia, enough. Be happy. Be content with what you’ve done.” And yes, it’s [Laughs] so difficult to figure out. But I’m working on it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Gosh, I can’t imagine being content with what I’ve done. But I do find myself content in the doing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I can relate to that. I’m definitely the kind of person who is most<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span>satisfied when I’m intellectually, physically, and mentally busy or occupied. But I can’t spend the rest of my life like that. Or can I? I have no idea. I’m also only 21 years old. So, I’m sure I’ve got several [Laughs] more years to figure this out. And I think one of the tough things is I do have that part of my personality that is very motivated and checklist-oriented and wants to make lists for everything and do the next thing. And I think the hard thing is I have that personality on my own but I also exist in an industry that ‘fetishizes’ it and treats it as this holy grail of productivity and success, is you’re just the person<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span>who always make lists and wants to do the next thing. I don’t know, Jessica. Do you feel like you are also… it seems like we’re the same kind of person where we’re always looking to do the next thing. Can you relate to that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, yes. And it’s never done. And yeah, I work at a startup now and I’ve just come to realize that there are many things that are not okay. This piece of documentation, not okay. This particular bug, not okay. This missing feature. It’s just, how can we even? But now, it is okay. We can’t do everything at once. The fact is we’re doing it and we’re looking around for information on which particular piece is affecting people and is most important right now. And so, I can be happy within the process. But I really have to be content with, “we are working on making the important things okay,” because it’s never going to be totally okay. It’s never going to be up to my standards. And if it ever is, I better raise my standards.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. And I really like the point that you made there, that I think ‘contentness’ is far more elusive than happiness to find. Being content is for me personally far more satisfying than being happy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, happiness is like a fleeting feeling of ‘woo!’. It’s supposed to come and go.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. That’s a great way to put it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. And one reason that I can never be content with the software that we have is because we don’t yet know what’s the most useful thing for it to do. And if we knew that, then we would already have written it. And then if I wanted to get it actually right, I would have to go back and write it again.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I agree. And this is something that I had a really extensive experience with when I was working on launching my startup product. And I actually ended up building it in four iterations before it officially launched the beta. And as of this recording, I’m working on doing yet another rebuild of the product. And I kind of tweeted a little bit about this before that I think it’s very healthy to rebuild things. And there is a part of me that from a philosophical and emotional perspective is really into destroying things I make and making them again. I don’t know what that says about me. But I’m definitely gone to a point where I’m comfortable building an entire app, deleting everything (don’t worry it’s backed up on GitHub) and then starting to build it again. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This has two effects for me. The first is I don’t become obsessed with the code. I think it’s more important when you’re building a product to become obsessed with what it means for your users and how it’s going to solve a particular problem than the actual characters that you write in a text file and execute or run. And that helps me be the kind of engineer who’s more focused on the problem than the particular solution they’ve crafted. And another thing I think it’s helped me do is the process of rewriting something helps me get a better sense of the problem with each iteration. Like in the destruction of the first iteration of an app or the first build, there is this process of learning that you can bring into the next version. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I know I’m kind of presenting this really huge scary situation where I build an entire app and then I start over again. But I also try and do it in small iterations. And this is something that was inspired by my friend Corey Haines, who’s on Twitter @CoreyHaines. And he talked a little bit to me about one of the development philosophies that his startup uses, which is they have feature branches that only last for a day. So, you have a day to get the code in for the particular feature or fix that you’re looking to implement and then it’s cleared out at the end of the day. And the effect is that A, you get to iteratively learn and be able to start from scratch every day and not have this branch that hangs around for three weeks that you’re working on (which I think we’ve all had experiences with). And the next is you start to think more about building things smaller and smaller. And eventually getting into a big feature or a big fix. And I think that’s the holy grail for me as an engineer is getting to a point where I can look at a problem and break it down to the smallest possible parts it can be and then work on those independently.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s so important. And I’ve been in this industry for over 20 years now and when I started we did a lot of prototyping. And the rule with the prototype is that you would write it and throw it away. The prototype was your learning exercise and it allowed you to explore different options for how to solve a given problem. And when you were done with it you literally threw it away. And we did it. And I think that with Agile, that’s something we’ve lost. Because we’re constantly thinking in two-week iterations. And you can’t spend the next sprint rebuilding what you did last sprint because that has to be done. It has to be cumulative, right? And I love the idea of throwing code away. It’s so freeing. And knowing that it’s okay to experiment and knowing that it’s okay to get it wrong because this isn’t what the code’s going to look like in its final form, I think that is so valuable. I wish we were more free in this industry to do things like that. Partly I think we don’t do it because we’re afraid. Partly because we get attached to the things that we create. And partly because our development methodologies don’t support it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I think you just did a great job laying out all of the reasons that I think this happens. And I’m hoping that at some point I’ll have the chance to write a little bit more about my, let’s call it destruction-focused development. [Chuckles] But just the idea of being comfortable deleting things and not being attached to code is really difficult to manage, especially when your label is software engineer and that is what you do. And maybe not the ‘summarity’ of your existence as job but a big part of it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So Safia, when you destroy a branch, when you destroy the app and build it again, how tempted are you to hold onto precious parts of the code where you’re like, “This was really, really hard. I don’t want to have to write that again. I’ll just copy that one piece over.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, I actually do that quite a bit, I’ll admit. So, it’s not completely destructive. But I would say it’s largely for things that are boilerplate or just logic that I know I’m going to need elsewhere that I can just copy over, which I’m comfortable with. But there are definitely times when I’ve had to write a lot of logic for something and then copy it over. And there are cases where it worked out well, where I was able to progress successfully with the new iteration of the app. And then there were cases where by bringing along that code, it actually brought all of the baggage that was needed to make it possible. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And I think that’s one thing I try to be mindful of, is every line of code has baggage no matter how insignificant. And when you bring it into a codebase, you’re bringing all of its baggage. Sometimes baggage is okay and sometimes it’s not. And I’ve definitely shot myself in the foot sometimes when I’ve brought a piece of code over and then I had to bring in the database migration and bring in this configuration and bring in all of this other stuff. It was just like, “Oh, come on. I could have just written this in a different way or taken this opportunity to think a little bit more about it.” But I would say in general I try to make sure that whenever I rewrite something, at least 80% of it is new, whether it’s using a different framework or focusing on different feature sets or fixing different bugs and letting other things slide. So yes, you caught me, Coraline. I am definitely guilty.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Of copying things over. [Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am reminded of part of the process that I use when I’m writing music. Sometimes a song will get to a point where I don’t like it anymore. There’s something fundamental that isn’t working about the way it’s been structured or the way the parts are coming together. So, I’ll start over. And there’s a lot of temptation to say, “That guitar part was so hard to play. I’ll just bring over that one guitar part.” And I don’t do it typically. And what I try to tell myself is that the important parts of the song are the ones that I’m going to remember. And if I remember them, I can do them again. And if I don’t remember them, they weren’t important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was so profound. I might need a couple of minutes to process it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter] </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, in the beginning when we just started to chat, you mentioned that you had some shenanigans back when you started coding. Can you explain or tell us about one of those shenanigans? </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Coraline mentioned during my intro that I started to code when I was 11 years old. And I think one of the big things for me in my journey as a young technologist, young being tween to teenager, is just I had this moment where I realized I could control the machine. The machine wasn’t controlling me. And it was a huge transition in the way that I approached software because I now saw the computer as this thing that would respond to what I told it to do, not just where I would go to play Neopets and Miniclip games and whatever it is I was doing when I was 11. And you know, I miss those days so much because I was just gleefully hacking and I wasn’t doing it for work or to close issues or anything like that. One of the stories that I tell a lot and I think about it because it’s very funny is I kind of taught myself HTML. And my goal there was to make my Neopets page super awesome and glittery and the best thing ever. So, I picked up HTML and CSS. And I tinkered a lot with the visual elements of software. I did some stuff in Photoshop and InDesign and a lot of digital media type stuff. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But it was the summer before I started high school, I was watching a documentary series about the history of computers and it talked about Charles Babbage’s analytical engine and the ENIAC and early IBM computers, and just the entire history of the field. And the last episode talked about Larry Page and Sergey Brin and how they build Google and what that experience was like for them. And mind you, at this point I could write HTML and CSS. I was familiar with Photoshop. I knew that you could code computers or write software for them but I&#8217;ve never actually written a computer program. So, after watching that episode about Google and Larry and Sergey I thought, “I’m going to build a search engine,” because at that point in time I thought this was a trivial thing to do. So, I spent a lot of high school just in my spare time after school, on the weekends, during breaks, learning about search engines and machine learning and AI and how we manage information. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In this age, I built a silly toy search engine. I did a lot of machine learning related projects. I read a lot of books. And those were the best times in my career as a person in tech because I didn’t really have a goal. I wasn’t looking to be hired by a company. I wasn’t looking to get an offer to speak somewhere or to contribute to a project. I was just doing it because I thought it was fun and it made me happy. And I call those kinds of things shenanigans because there was no point to them. They were just fun and joyful. And I feel like I have lost a little bit of that sense of joy and play around what I build and how I build it that I’m kind of trying to bring back into the way I write software. But yeah, it’s been a while since I’ve been able to just have fun and do something pointless on a computer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It’s amazing what you can accomplish when you don’t know what the impossible is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. That’s a great way to phrase it. That was definitely my head space at the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And you said there was no point to them, but didn’t we already establish that the whole point was making ourselves and others happy? [Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah. I would say [inaudible]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So in a way that it was direct. [Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would say this was… So, all of this was before I really started to think seriously about my life. I was doing this stuff when I was 14 and 15. And I was just a very self-centered teenager. [Laughs] So, the point for me was just to sit at a computer and do fun things and build cool things and not think a lot about why I was doing it or if I was going to make money off of it or if anyone was going to hire me. And I think as much as it is sometimes good to find things that make you happy or content, sometimes it’s good just to do things for the heck of it and for no reason at all other than it brings you joy at the time, as temporary as that time is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s so wonderful, Safia. We like to end every show with reflections, thinking back on the conversation we’ve had and picking out certain points or topics or ideas that were really meaningful to us. A couple of things that struck me about our conversation today Safia is first of all, the grid you described where you laid out these quadrants of what’s going to make you happy, what’s going to make someone else happy, and being really thoughtful about planning your finite energy and labor around those sorts of goals. I often find that I feel like I’m not doing enough and I haven’t defined what enough is. And I haven’t defined why I do the things that I do. So, I’d like to try that approach and see if that makes me more mindful about what my own success criteria are. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The other thing that struck me is the idea of being content versus being happy. And I don’t have an opinion on whether I think it’s more important to be content or to be happy. I’m actually afraid of being happy. I don’t know how I feel about being content. [Chuckles] So, that’s definitely something I want to think about some more. So, thank you for that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to thank you for diving into your feelings around representation, specifically in public events like conferences and speaking and things like that. It’s something also that I’ve struggled with when an organizer reaches out to me and asks, “Hey, can you do this? Because we need more women,” or they’ll explicitly say that. And I’m like, “I understand but it also feels almost like,” you were mentioning ‘ingenuine’ in a way. And it’s really great to know that that’s not… that’s a common feeling and that I feel like I can really explore those thoughts without feeling… that’s not unique. It’s something that we all struggle with. And so, thank you for that. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For the record, I don’t have any problem when conferences ask me, and I know they’re asking me because I’m a woman. Because I’m like, “I’m glad that y’all noticed that you needed more women speakers. And I’m glad conferences do this.” But I also don’t feel bad at all if I’m like, “No, sorry. Busy.” But my reflection from this episode goes back to something you said pretty early. You said that when you came to the US at 7 you learned to conform to standards and that now you’re returning to a more international focus. You’re able to, your phrase I think was go back and widen. You’re able to broaden your perspective because you remember reaching the perspective that most of us were born into. And that’s wonderful. That’s its own power that you came by through a lot of effort and continued effort. And the rest of us can gain that breadth too of both being able to meet American standards and understand and work with people outside of the US. We have to put in a lot of effort for that and I hope we do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAFIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, I guess in chronological order, I think it was really great that we had the chance to talk a little bit about the fact that the Silicon Valley mono-culture doesn’t capture everything. And as connected as we think we are with the internet and social media and all that, there are still experiences that we don’t capture, even within our own borders in the states, that we need to think about. I also like Coraline thought our discussion about content versus happy was really great. And Jessica, you did a great job of just making me feel better about what I was going through and showing me that I was not alone and just expressing some of the ideas that I had in different and interesting ways. And finally, I thought our discussion about tokenism was really great and addressed the difficulty of the conversation for underrepresented individuals. And that it’s an ongoing journey for me and I’m sure many others. So yeah, thank you for an awesome conversation, everybody. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Safia. It was so wonderful to have you on the show today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Safia.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to remind our listeners that we are listener-supported. And if you want to support conversations like the one we’ve had today with Safia, go to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode, pledge at any level, and get access to our exclusive patron-only Slack community, which is a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful place to continue conversations and have conversations like this. So, please think about supporting this. If your company wants to support us, we have a prospectus for sponsorship on our website at GreaterThanCode.com. And thank you all and we will talk to you again very soon.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content like this, please do so at </span></i><a href="https://www.paypal.me/devreps"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">paypal.me/devreps</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.</span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/paladique"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jasmine Greenaway</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Safia Abdalla: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/captainsafia"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@captainsafia</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://safia.rocks/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">safia.rocks</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://zarf.co/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Zarf</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/tanmulabs"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tanmu Labs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Join Our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">Support us via </b><a style="background-color: #ffffff; font-size: 1.8rem;" href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:53</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Safia’s Superpower: Sight</span></p>
<p><b>03:04 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Learning Languages &#8212; Both Human and Programming</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.blutner.de/color/Sapir-Whorf.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Sapir Whorf Hypothesis</span></a></p>
<p><b>07:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Empathetic in an International Perspective and Building Universal and Approachable Tech</span></p>
<p><b>11:19 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What does success look like for minorities in the Silicon Valley monoculture?; Being Tokenized</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Admiral Grace Hopper</span></a></p>
<p><b>21:59 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Accepting Speaking Engagements Because of Who You Are (i.e. as a woman, minority, etc.)</span></p>
<p><b>24:07 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Writing Things Down to Balance Prioritizing Decisions</span></p>
<p><b>30:46 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Defining “Happy” and Always Feeling the Need to Do More</span></p>
<p><b>37:02 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Destruction-Focused Development</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Destruction-Focused Development:<br />
write it, delete it, repeat.<br />
&#8220;I don&#8217;t become obsessed with the code.<br />
I think it&#8217;s more important to be obsessed with the problem.&#8221; <a href="https://twitter.com/captainsafia?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@captainsafia</a><br />
on <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/943551570591002624?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 20, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>43:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Safia’s Early Coding “Shenanigans”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Being thoughtful about planning finite energy and labor. Also being content vs being happy.</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="lt]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/paladique"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jasmine Greenaway</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Safia Abdalla: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/captainsafia"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@captainsafia</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://safia.rocks/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">safia.rocks</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://zarf.co/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Zarf</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/tanmulabs"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tanmu Labs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Join Our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">Support us via </b><a style="background-color: #ffffff; font-size: 1.8rem;" href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:53</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Safia’s Superpower: Sight</span></p>
<p><b>03:04 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Learning Languages &#8212; Both Human and Programming</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.blutner.de/color/Sapir-Whorf.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Sapir Whorf Hypothesis</span></a></p>
<p><b>07:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Empathetic in an International Perspective and Building Universal and Approachable Tech</span></p>
<p><b>11:19 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What does success look like for minorities in the Silicon Valley monoculture?; Being Tokenized</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_Hopper"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Admiral Grace Hopper</span></a></p>
<p><b>21:59 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Accepting Speaking Engagements Because of Who You Are (i.e. as a woman, minority, etc.)</span></p>
<p><b>24:07 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Writing Things Down to Balance Prioritizing Decisions</span></p>
<p><b>30:46 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Defining “Happy” and Always Feeling the Need to Do More</span></p>
<p><b>37:02 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Destruction-Focused Development</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Destruction-Focused Development:<br />
write it, delete it, repeat.<br />
&#8220;I don&#8217;t become obsessed with the code.<br />
I think it&#8217;s more important to be obsessed with the problem.&#8221; <a href="https://twitter.com/captainsafia?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@captainsafia</a><br />
on <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/943551570591002624?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 20, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>43:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Safia’s Early Coding “Shenanigans”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Being thoughtful about planning finite energy and labor. Also being content vs being happy.</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="lt]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/safia.jpg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/safia.jpg"></googleplay:image>
										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/1083/061-destruction-focused-development-with-safia-abdalla.mp3" length="51807920" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>53:58</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>060: Coping with Complexity with Kent Beck</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/060-coping-with-complexity-with-kent-beck/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 27 Dec 2017 05:00:01 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=1073</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Kent Beck talks about metaphors in software development, writing tests, complexity partitioning, and changing culture versus code.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Kent Beck talks about metaphors in software development, writing tests, complexity partitioning, and changing culture versus code.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>This episode is sponsored by </b><a href="https://cohere.city/"><b>Cohere</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img class="alignnone wp-image-1076" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Cohere-1024x387.png" alt="" width="426" height="161" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Cohere-1024x387.png 1024w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Cohere-300x113.png 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Cohere-768x290.png 768w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Cohere-600x227.png 600w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Cohere.png 1440w" sizes="(max-width: 426px) 100vw, 426px" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Cohere believes better teams make better products. </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Visit </b><a href="https://www.wecohere.com/greaterthancode"><b>wecohere.com/greaterthancode</b></a><b> to learn how your team can become greater than code.</b></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |<br />
</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Kent Beck: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/KentBeck"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@KentBeck</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Extreme Programming</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |<br />
</span><a href="http://agilemanifesto.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Agile Manifesto</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/013476904X/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=013476904X&amp;linkId=a629dc2d7f051450bfb3cee30e4083a4"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:19</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Kent’s Superpower: Putting Things Together That Don’t Necessarily Go Together</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465018475/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0465018475&amp;linkId=6b695b9a8370a14771836fb3671d11e5"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">by Douglas Hofstadter and‎ Emmanuel Sander</span></a></p>
<p><b>04:01 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Metaphors in Software Development</span></p>
<p><b>07:32 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Writing Tests and Keeping a Journal</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">The unit/integration distinction confuses me. I test at the level of, “Here’s a thought I need to capture.”<a href="https://twitter.com/KentBeck?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@KentBeck</a> on <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/938122417548881920?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 5, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>10:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Complexity Partitioning </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/one-bite-at-a-time-partitioning-complexity/1716882961677894/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">One Bite At A Time: Partitioning Complexity</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/kent-beck/unit-tests/1726369154062608/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Kent’s musings on the topic of unit versus integration testing after the show.</span></a></p>
<p><b>21:59 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Way Systems Change Over Time as an Important Part of How We Design Software</span></p>
<p><b>27:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Changing Culture Vs Code and Storytelling and Succession</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Join Our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">Support us via </b><a style="background-color: #ffffff; font-size: 1.8rem;" href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Jamey:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Thinking about the reasons why we do things. </span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> How computer systems are beginning to take on the complexity of biological systems.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> The concept of lumpers vs splitters.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> How strategies for dealing with complexity don’t just have to be about the problem itself, they can be about the emotional response of the programmer who has to get some work done.</span></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The for-allers vs the for-eachers; universalist vs existentialist.</span></p>
<p><b>Kent: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Not being bothered by culture change and helping people feel the same.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi everyone. Welcome to our 60</span><span class="s2"><sup>th</sup></span><span class="s1"> episode of Greater Than Code. I am Jamey Hampton and I’m here with my great friend and fellow panelist, Sam Livingston-Gray.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning from sunny Oahu. I’m here also to welcome my good friend Rein Henrichs to the show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning. And I am super excited to be here with my friend, Coraline Ehmke.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hey, everybody. It’s super cold here in Chicago so I’m very jealous of Sam being in Oahu. I’m happy to introduce my dear friend, Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning! I am thrilled to be on Greater Than Code today. We have a very exciting guest. Please welcome Kent Beck. Kent Beck is the creator of Extreme Programming and one of the original signatories of the Agile Manifesto, the founding document for agile, lowercase A, software development. He’s a strong proponent of TDD. He pioneered the software design patterns and he was responsible for the commercial development of Smalltalk. Kent lives in San Francisco and currently works for Facebook. Kent, welcome to the show! What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Jessica, thank you very much. My superpower is putting together things that don’t obviously go together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Like metaphors?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Like metaphors, yes. That’s a thing that I seem to be able to do that other people don’t do as regularly. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE: </b> Was that something you were born with or was that something you developed over time?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Some of each. My mom used to play a game with me where we would take a random two pencils and then we would pass the two pencils back and forth and make out of it the most bizarre possible thing. So, walrus tusks, and then somebody else would use them as chopsticks, and then back and forth. And we used to play this game for hours. And I think there’s a big part of… I’m just a curious person and I learn lots of stuff. But there’s also kind of a habit to it where I hear something and I immediately compare it to other things and things that rhyme with it and things that sound like it and stories that I remember and so on. Does that answer the question?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. It reminds me. I just recently read Douglas Hofstadter’s new book which is all about metaphors and analogies. And his basic premise is that we think in metaphors, we think in analogies, and that’s the basic mechanism of thought. So, being able to make associations between things is the source of innovation. And I kind of contrasted that with Dijkstra who said that it’s not advisable to approach new things with relating it back to things you already know, because new things need a new language, which I pretty strongly disagree with. But I’m curious if you have an opinion on that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. So, I go back to the ‘Embodied Mind’ from, I think that’s [inaudible], where I agree that all abstract thought is metaphorical. And his premise goes further and says that the fundamental metaphors are physical. So, we know about inclusion and exclusion because we have a body. And the way we think about up and down even metaphorically is grounded in our physical experience of standing up and sitting down. Of course, saying that abstract thought is metaphorical is a metaphor, since we’re computer scientists. We can’t avoid that conclusion.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Meta metaphor.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, because thought is actually this electrochemical goop in our brains and we use metaphors as a metaphor for thinking about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, I’m going to go. I’ll be back and I’ll be thinking for about five days.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I couldn’t believe that I could shut up the entire panel. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] In terms of metaphors and software development, I think a lot about metaphors. I’m working on an AI project to write a program that understands and can generate metaphors. And I’ve thought a lot about how we borrow metaphors from other disciplines. And for the most part, we borrow metaphors from engineering and construction and science. Do you think that there are metaphors in other fields of study that are applicable to software development?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. I think there are some metaphors that so built-in that we don’t even recognize them as metaphors anymore, like table or stack or…</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Data store.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Association.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Scaffold.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, yeah. And so, I think we already have metaphors from lots of different sources. And every metaphor’s a two-edged sword, to use a metaphor.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I’m sorry. I’m a computer scientist. It’s just a reflex. That it both reveals and conceals. And you say, well these two things are alike but they’re different. And if you get trapped into thinking that they’re exactly alike when they’re different, you’re confused. But if you think that two things are completely different when there’s actually similarities that would help you make some predictions, then you’re also losing. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I remember when I was doing some research from category theory. I wish I could remember and/or pronounce the name of the person who presented this YouTube series. But one of the things I took from my study of category theory is that traditionally, in science, we try to break things down into atomic parts and solve small problems and compose small problems into a grander solution. And category theory seems to take the opposite approach of taking a very high-level view of things, looking for ways that they are the same, and taking a macro as opposed to a micro approach.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think there’s an analogous split in programming where you have the ‘for all’ people and you have the ‘there exists’ people. The ‘for all’ people want to make universal statements about programs and derive their understanding of some particular situation from the universals. And the ‘for each’ people are, which is my camp, as the TDD works by induction. You say, “This works. And this works. And this works. And therefore by induction, a whole bunch of other things work also,” which we don’t have to exhaustively test all customers. We know that if they have a name and an age then this computation’s going to work correctly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Whereas that deduction is not mathematically valid. It is not literally a proof. But it’s darn well good enough for business software.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A thing that I think is really interesting is that even in mathematics, what constitutes a proof is determined by humans being confident…</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That a certain thing is valid.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. Proofs are about convincing other mathematicians. They’re not about universal truth.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I read somewhere the other day that reasoning is a social activity. We choose our beliefs based on whatever we do, usually people. And then we invent reasons for them in order to socialize them with other people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yup, I would agree. And the same is true in programming. You make a change to a program and it’s the beginning of a social process. It’s not the end.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. And I make tests and check them into the test suite for social reasons. As in [Laughs] I am going to make you uncomfortable if you change this.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Where by change I mean change the particular feature that I’m testing, if you change how that works, because I don’t want you to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And we write tests because we’re embarrassed not to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, that’s not why I write tests. But I can have many reasons for a thing and that is one of them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] Fair enough.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That depends completely who you are, because yes, as Kent Beck, or as we, I don’t have to write tests and I can say, “I didn’t test this one thing because it was too hard.” But I have a friend, Amy, who just started as a developer and she’s got a PhD in History. She knows what she’s doing in life generally but she’s got to build up this credibility as a developer. And she was telling me about this test that was being difficult and, “How do you mock a void method in Mockito to throw an exception?” And I was like, “I would not test that.” And she’s like, “Yeah, I know. But my job isn’t to write good code. My job is to get it past this particular code reviewer.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. And fair enough, if I was the code reviewer, I would want to know that somebody had taken care.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think tests are interesting because I find myself, when I have [failing] tests, staring at them and going, “Okay, the first thing I need to know is, is this test showing me that my code is failing or is there something broken with the test itself?” And then once you determine that, you can proceed. [Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I find sometimes I’m like, “I cannot proceed because I have to figure this out.” [Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. Have you ever kept a diary of unexpected test failures? This is a really fun exercise. Just keep an index card and even as simple as, “Was it the test?” Unexpected Failing Test: Was it the test or was it the code? I found that I had about one-third the test was wrong and two-thirds the code was wrong.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s interesting. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>On that one I want to mention that I’ve been keeping a work journal for the past five years. It started when I had a very picky client who wanted me to account for every minute of my day. But what I found is that going back to it, it was the same thing you get from keeping a diary in life. I found it helped me understand the context of where I was when I made a particular change or how I was feeling or it helped me look back at decisions I’ve made in the past and compared them to what I was doing today. And it gave me a lot of context for my work life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mmhmm.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you do that on paper or in [inaudible]?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have an… Emacs Org Mode has a journaling subsystem where I just say ‘start a journal’ and it puts me in a file with a heading for today’s date.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cool. I write down everything on paper. And I get made fun of a little bit by other tech people sometimes. Not all the time. Not everyone is a jerk.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But I feel like…</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Inaudible] Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Not everyone. No, lots of people aren’t jerks. And lots of people tease me in a way that’s not mean. But I feel like I’m very often the only person in a room writing on paper while everyone else is typing. I’m doing it write now, too. [Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For our listeners, Kent has held up his notepad as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well then, I’m in good company.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Notepads. I have a small format Clairefontaine, I’m a stationary nerd, for notes. And then I have a large format Rhodia with the spiral on top, of course, for writing longer form stuff. And everything that I write, the last two books, all my blog posts, everything gets drafted on paper first.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Why is that? I think it’s helpful. What do you think is helpful about paper?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can type faster than I can credibly think, but I can’t write faster than I can credibly think. I can get words out typing that I haven’t really thought about. And there’s a sync between my thinking speed and my writing speed.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s really interesting. I was doing some [research] recently and learned that in the early days of computers, when the lag between typing a command and the execution of a command was on average between three and five seconds, a lot of people didn’t see that as a problem because they actually saw it as an advantage because it would give the programmer time to think about what she was going to type next.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I hope you’ll use this time to think about what you’ve done.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I find it’s often useful to have to think about, “What do I expect to happen again?”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, I have a trick when I’m doing TDD that I predict the test run results out loud.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Calling your shots, yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. It’s such a simple change, it makes you sound a little bit odd if someone’s just listening in. But I’ve just come off a stint where I programmed for 30 or 40 hours in a couple of weeks and man, it just makes a huge difference.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that makes it an experiment where you’re trying to [falsify] what you think is going on. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Also, there’s a big difference between the test is red and the test failed the way I expected it to fail.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. And sometimes I’ll call a sequence of errors. Okay, now I’m going to get a null pointer exception. Okay, now I’m going to get array index out of bounds. Okay now, it’s going to pass. And if I’m making progress on the errors that I’m seeing in a predictable way, it feels almost as good as the test being green.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a saying that I never trust a passing test if it passes the first time around. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Chuckles] That is a worthless test.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I’m not testing something that I should have been testing. Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Inaudible]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE: </b> If the code doesn’t surprise me, then I’m not thinking of edge cases. I’m not doing something right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mmhmm.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it’s also interesting to talk about this in a more general sense. So, there are systems that take in feedback and make adjustments. But then there are steering systems that have a good enough model of the thing under control that they can make predictions and act on those predictions and verify those predictions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. And knowing which of those regimes you’re in is really important. So for example, blog posts, I have no mechanism for predicting the viewership of a blog post. So, I don’t bother trying to predict it. I just spew out whatever and then react to the reactions that I get. And sometimes, I posted something last week about complexity partitioning. A set of strategies I use to avoid having to bite off big chunks of complexity all at once. And the viewership was 10 times what my usual viewership is. And I thought it was not really my best work. So, if I’m in that regime where I can’t predict what’s going to happen then I shouldn’t waste any time, mental energy, trying to predict. I should just do something and see what the reaction is. But then the flip side, if you could predict and you choose not to or you just ignore that, then you’re also wasting possibilities.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, it’s interesting that you bring that up because that was one of the things that I was hoping that we could cover a little bit. But now I’m feeling all self-conscious that you didn’t think it was your best work. Do you have a hypothesis as to why that took off more than you thought it would?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My opinion of the work is kind of irrelevant.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] Fair enough.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It’s not just that I’m inaccurate in predicting how things will be taken. I can’t. And it’s irrelevant. The other previous big readership blog post was one called ‘Mastering Programming’ that had 10 times what the complexity one had. And that to me was just, I was just spewing out some notes. Did you have questions about the content of the complexity partitioning piece?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Could you maybe give us a very brief overview as to what that is?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. So, there are broadly speaking in programming, two camps: the lumpers and the splitters. And the lumpers don’t mind dealing with a bunch of complexity all at once because they can see it all in one place. And splitters, and I’m a splitter, like to take the complexity they have to deal with and break it into parts and deal with the parts. The bet being that if you deal with the complexity in parts, you can do a better job of each thing. And you lose the bet when you break something into parts and it turns out the interaction is more complicated instead of less complicated. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So for example, TDD is a complexity partitioning strategy that says, “I’m going to make this test work and then I’ll make all the rest of the tests work.” So, I’ve partitioned the complexity into this little piece that I have to do right now and a bunch of other stuff that I’m going to do later. Extracting a helper method is a complexity partitioning strategy where I say, “Okay, I don’t want to change this little bit in the middle of this big method so I’m going to pull out a helper so I can just change the whole helper method.” But I’m changing the whole thing all at once. That makes it easier for me to analyze what the effects are.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That kind of requires good integration testing, right? The way I see TDD practiced in the wild, at least for the companies that I’ve worked for, they tend to produce a lot of unit tests and then integration tests seem to be an afterthought.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I’ve always had a hard time with, even with that distinction between unit and integration tests, because my tests skip between different scales with wild abandon. And I don’t even care what I call them. Hey, here’s a thought that I need to capture. This is the need to do this. Adding these two numbers together there gives you the sum, or canceling a subscription results in a rebate. To me, those don’t seem like terribly different things so I don’t make a distinction.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It’s interesting. I use a taxonomy of unit and integration and short-span integration just because I find that it helps me think about the properties of a test. Can I run this one a hundred times in a second or am I going to have to throw this one at a server and let it run overnight [Chuckles] to do it? And the other thing that I find it useful for is thinking about how important it is to preserve this particular bit of behavior, right? If I’m looking at something that most people would call a unit test, then I can look at it and I can say, “Well, okay. So, this test is probably not terribly valuable. I can feel okay about changing it.” But if I’m looking at something that describes a large chunk of the application then I might be a little bit more cautious about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, because tests prevent change. And like I was saying earlier, I put in a test for stuff I don’t want people to change, but I try to avoid committing to the automated test suite anything that’s implementation-dependent that it would be legit for people to refactor as long as the API-level outcome is the same. Does that make sense?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT: </b> Yeah, yeah, a hundred percent. And I would say that even that is a complexity partitioning strategy where say, I’m going to separate the stuff that might change from the stuff that might not change. Now I can deal with them with different levels of rigor or concern.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Kind of funny. I write tests for completely different reasons. I see the primary value of tests as a form of documentation. I want to capture what the edge cases are so that the developers who come after me are aware of those edge cases. I want to have tests that thoroughly describe the functionality so that someone who goes back and reads the code can also read the accompanying tests and understand what it was that the code was trying to accomplish.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think I primarily write tests so I don’t need Zola. I have a lot of anxiety while I program. Like, “What could go wrong?” and “Am I really smart enough to do this?” and blah, blah, blah. And that’s the reason I do all of the complexity partitioning stuff is if I have a flow that lets me take one recognizably chewable bite at a time, then I don’t get overwhelmed. If I can stream a whole bunch of those together, then I have a really effective programming session.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You answered a question that I was going to ask, which was I was wondering if this idea of lumping versus splitting was necessarily just about actual complexity and efficiency or if it could also be about the emotional state of the person who’s doing the programming. And I think you answered that because I agree. I find splitting things into chunks, I do that a lot in my code and it’s not necessarily because I’m making a conscious decision like, “I think this will be better in terms of complexity in my application,” but just like, “I don’t think I can do this unless I split it up this way because it’s overwhelming to me.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. And at Facebook, I’m surrounded by lumpers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, yeah. I don’t [inaudible]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Lumpers sounds mean. I understand that it’s not mean.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But it sounds mean. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, I know some of the folks at Facebook like Simon Marlow and folks from the Haskell community and I’m fascinated [by code] to hear about the interaction between the Extreme Programming community and the Haskell ‘If it compiles, it works’ community. Because I’ve been a member of both.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I took Brian O’Sullivan’s Haskell course when he gave it at Facebook. I actually took it twice and I still can’t get my head around monads, so there you go. And that was the first place I identified this ‘for all’ versus ‘there exists’ people because the Haskell community is definitely… my first programming assignment for that course, I did it TDD style and Brian used my result as an example of how I had a bug and I missed it and a ‘for all’ test caught it in two lines of code. And the way that I do complexity partitioning test first, there has to be a way of doing the equivalent thing in Haskell. You don’t write a thousand lines at once. You still write them one at a time. So, there has to be some decision criteria for which line you write first and then which 999 you write after that. But I wouldn’t claim to have gotten my head around that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Kent, I’d like to maybe make something explicit which I think has been an implicit part of this discussion, which is the way that systems change over time as being an important part of how we design software. I think a lot of people think of systems as how they exist now and then how they exist at some point in the future and spend less time thinking about, “What is the best path from here to there through time?”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. I call that succession, that conscious decision of how you get from here to there. Sometimes, you can have a system in one state and you can imagine another state but you can’t get there and safe steps. And then either you have to do it in unsafe steps or you just have to heave a heavy sigh and realize you’re never going to get there. We talk about, design patterns are snapshots, but we don’t have a good vocabulary for talking about, “And then we… and then we… and then we… and then we&#8230;” </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So for example, one of those is the, if you’re changing a data store there’s a sequence that works really well which is, you start writing all the new data to the new data store as well. Then once you have that working a hundred percent, you start migrating all the old data in the old data store to the new data store. And once you have all of that migrated, then you start reading from both data stores. And when the answers get close enough and they’ll never be at a hundred percent, but once the answers get close enough, then you can just start reading from the new data store. So, as opposed to the, “We’re going to shut down the system over the weekend, run the migration script, and then magically this time everything is all going to work,” which that trick never works but that doesn’t stop people from doing it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Ah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I see that making a lot of sense if you’re doing a very specific task. What I don’t see a lot of is systems thinking in terms of, “How is the system going to evolve over time?” I see a lot of thinking in two-week increments. I see a lot of thinking about “This feature needs to be added.” And I don’t see a lot of thinking about, “Where is the software going to be in a year?” or “What is it going to look like when we’re all finished?” I feel like we take a lot on faith with sprint methodologies that somehow everything is just going to come together and we have the best, the system will be as good as it needs to be.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And even when you do have the sort of one-year architectural vision, in a lot of my experience, that’s where people stop. They say, “Okay, we know what we want the system to look like in a year and then we’re done.” In my mind, that’s where you get started because now the really hard problem is, “What is the path that’s incremental that we can make changes in a continuous way from here to there?”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And of course, we can’t predict what it’s going to be in a year but we can at least think about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. And we also have to keep in mind that where we think we want to be in a year is in fact not where we want to be in a year.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Alright. So, I’ve had seven years’ worth of lessons in this kind of architectural evolution, watching projects and being involved in projects at Facebook. And yeah, there are things you can predict. You can say, “Every user uses this many kilowatts and we have this many megawatts coming into our data centers,” and you can make some predictions based on that. But every once in a while, the users will suddenly get really excited about live video and then all your calculations go haywire. So, you have to have some model for long-term growth, especially for things like building data centers that have a really long lead time. But you also have to recognize, have the humility to recognize the limitations of those models and recognize when it’s time to abandon that path and move onto something else.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It gets back to what you said about the blog posts. You can’t predict what people are really going to resonate with. And so, you have to react.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or waste your time. You choose.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For me in my experience, the only systems that have ever worked under these circumstances are systems that take in feedback and react to feedback on a time scale where that feedback is still relevant. So, that’s why Waterfall became Agile for instance. That’s why SRE is focused on making changes based on feedback. All of these systems are now becoming cybernetic systems. I think that’s the way forward.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can I get a definition there?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. A cybernetic system is a system that takes in feedback and responds to feedback and makes changes to the underlying system in an attempt to keep it in a certain state or change its state in a certain direction over time. So, test-driven development is a cybernetic system. You write a test, you look at what the test says, and then you make another change.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But all of that is irrelevant if our teams don’t also react to change in the same way as our systems do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Our teams are part of the system. They’re not separate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But teams can resist change in ways that software… it’s easier to change software than it is to change people. It’s easier to change software than it is to change teams or organizational structure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. [Inaudible]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. You’ve been [impunitively] correct.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It’s easier… </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN: </b> Change to software may not be correct in your organization. It may fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the correctness of the software per se. I’ve seen that frequently.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. Right. You can rewrite a system that was messy and ugly in beautiful Haskell and if nobody knows<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span>how to write Haskell, it’s the wrong thing to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Kent, you look like you had a thought about what we were saying about changing organizations versus changing code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, so cultures change, period. And they do it without a lot of conscious thought. I’ve made at least part of my career out of trying to make those changes more conscious. So, I would say that the skills are different. The way you measure progress is different. But it’s… there are ways in which changing culture is easier than changing code. The outcome of trying to change, say a team’s culture, it’s harder to measure. You don’t get red and green. But you can look back and say, “Wow, six months ago this would have been a big fight and now we just had this conversation and resolved in 15 minutes. How did that happen?” Well, it probably didn’t happen at random. Somebody actually exerted some effort and now a team has learned conflict resolution skills.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, I agree with you at a team level. The interesting bit about changing software is that culture change at an organization level is much harder than as a team and slower. But software change at an organizational level is not any slower than at a team level in the strange way software scales. Like, if I push out a new version of something, I could push it out to a lot places and a lot of customers faster than I can, say, train all those customers in a new way. Or employees.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think again, try and change an API. Pushing out a new implementation is one thing. You can… push of a button. But if you have an incompatible API change, that’s a human problem. The human part of that problem is far more difficult than the software part of that problem. It requires completely different skills than deploying and implementation change. But…</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] Yeah, so maybe which one is easier depends on what skills you have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. So, I think storytelling is the fundamental skill for change. And once you learn how to, I guess it’s again this complexity partitioning thing, once you learn how to say, “Okay, what’s the next story that I need to tell? How am I going to tell that? Is it going to be literal? Is it going to be metaphorical? How much emotional content? What metaphors do I use?” all of this, once you get good at that, the strategy of storytelling, then culture isn’t scary or complicated or hard. It’s still risky but it’s not fundamentally harder than programming for me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that really depends on the person. We have classes where you can learn Haskell. We have classes where people can go to a bootcamp and learn how to be programmers. What are we doing to promote those storytelling skills?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I enlisted a storytelling guru. I practice. I read about storytelling. That stuff is out there. it’s just not maybe the classes that I took in computer science school. But people get degrees in Literature, which is all about storytelling. And if that’s not part of what we’re used to, that doesn’t… I realize that I have to play catch-up on storytelling.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wait, are you telling me that a Liberal Arts education actually is relevant for a STEM career? Who would have thought?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was in Computer Science and Music school every other year and I just ended up on the wrong year, so… </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The storytelling, I want to relate that back to what you talked about in terms of succession. Making change in software architectures is also a matter of that path from here to there and then you told a story about a database roll-out with migrations and double reads and dark writes. I injected the dark writes. And it’s the same kind of thing, right? The design pattern books contrast with for instance, refactoring. And the brilliance of Martin’s book there was that it took people step by step and told them the story of how to make the change. So, maybe storytelling is also how we get our software from one point to another safely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can I just add onto that a little bit? I think it’s not just that he told a story but he made us feel safe. He made us feel like… </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>He makes us change… The way he said we can make this change, that we’ll be okay, that things will work out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yup.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wait, are you saying that feelings are important?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It might [inaudible]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We have to change the nature of this podcast entirely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I thought it was all about technology, but I think we’re learning that people matter.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh. Yeah, this is…</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Only Jess’s feelings.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter] </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s what I learned.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What version of your API are we using, Jessica?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>At least 18.6.k.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to see personal release notes. That’s what I want to see.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I want an open source version of Jess’s API so I can feel the same feelings as her. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you get to submit a pull request?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Dude, if I could [inaudible] what it’s like to be in my head, I would be very rich.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM: </b> Let’s see. Aren’t the feelings an internal implementation detail that only leaks out through the API?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It leaks out pretty loudly in my case.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And with great enthusiasm.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That actually reminded me of a point I wanted to make about whether the people stuff is harder than the software stuff. And I think there is one objective way in which is harder, which is that software, computers are perfectly rational and humans are extremely not rational. And it’s much harder to predict human behavior on that basis, especially because… </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank the gods.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Groups of people are even more irrational than the sum of their parts.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, that good news then is that once you get to sufficient scale, computer systems look like biological systems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, because you can’t… </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wait, is that good news?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You can’t [inaudible] anymore at scale.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, it makes our job more interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT: </b> Yeah, I remember the first time I pushed code at Facebook and I was watching the IRC channel and it said, “This release has gone out to 6600.” I thought, “Wait a minute.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And I panicked. I grabbed the person next to me. I’m like, “What’s going on, on the other hundred machines?” They’re like, “Ah, who knows?”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It’s not causing any problems. We’re just not going to worry about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Those machines are just having a bad day. They need more coffee. [Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Coraline, you just got into what I was going to say, which is what… I think it’s really fascinating how people personify their technology.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE: </b> Don’t personify computers. They hate that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>All networks are rooted in the physical.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Rein was talking about computers are so logical. Obviously, in my rational mind, in my rational computer scientist mind, I know that that’s true. But when I think about writing code and working with computers, it definitely occurs to me that I often feel like, “No, it’s doing this to spite me. No, it’s fighting with me.” I’m like, “No, it’s doing exactly what I told it. It’s just, I don’t know what I told it because I’m the one that’s stupid.” [Laughs] I’m not stupid. But it’s doing what I told it to do but it feels like it’s plotting against me. I think about that a lot. Because wee all do this. We all give emotions to these things that we work with that don’t have emotions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We’re very happy that this episode, which is a very special episode for us all, is sponsored by Code Here. Code Here helps teams to be more effective by applying deep technical expertise with the human side of software. Code Here partners with companies to help them achieve their team’s goals through feature delivery, pairing, individual coaching, and group training. They would love to hear about your team and help you get your teams to the next level. For information, visit WeCodeHere.com/GreaterThanCode.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would also like to add a personal testimonial that I met several of the principals of Code Here at RubyConf a couple of weeks ago and they are lovely, lovely people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Also, thank you to all our supporters on Patreon because if you donate even a dollar, you get to be part of our Greater Than Code Slack team, which I really like that Slack team because everyone is nice to each other and we talk about interesting things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So unfortunately, we’re coming near the end of our show today. And we like to finish off our shows with everyone giving a reflection about something that stood out to them that they’ve been thinking about that we talked about on the show today. So, I guess I’m going to start. And the theme that I really got from today’s episode was thinking about the reasons why we do things. And I started thinking about this right at the beginning of the episode because there was a quote that Kent said about mathematical proofs, that proofs are about convincing other mathematicians, not about universal truth, which I thought was really interesting. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But then as we kept talking I think we talked a lot about why we do things. Like why do we write code the way we do? Why do we write tests the way we do? Why? Is it about our efficiency? Is it about our emotional state? Is it about the future of our codebase? Is it about how other people interact with it? And I think there’s a lot of different motivations that we may have behind doing something that all may be just as valid as another one. But I think it’s really interesting and maybe necessary to be thoughtful about why we’re doing stuff because I think that gives you a lot of insight into your routines. That’s very important. So, that’s on my mind, I guess. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, my reflection of all of the really interesting things that were said today is that when Kent Beck talked about how computer systems are beginning to take on the complexity of biological systems, I think this is in my mind one of the most important technical stories of software engineering for the next 20 years plus, which is that the system models that we currently use to understand software complexity that we largely brought from the mainframe era that got us here aren’t going to get us there. They’re going to fall apart when we have to start dealing with computer systems made up of 2000 machines that talk to each other in ad hoc or in emergent ways. These models are going to fall apart and they’re not going to get us where we need to be. And we need to start working on new models that are able to handle this level of complexity.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think one of the things that stood out to me that I want to think more about is this concept of lumpers versus splitters. As soon as he said that, I wanted to figure out, am I a lumper or am I a splitter? And I think the answer is both and it depends on where in the software development life cycle I am. I think in the beginning of a project, I’m a lumper. I’m thinking of the system as a system, not as component parts. And over time, as I’m building it out, I’m splitting things into smaller and smaller pieces. But at the end I have to come back to thinking of it as a system to determine if the software is successful or not. So, I think that was something that I particularly was interested in hearing about and thinking more about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, now I have a totally new takeaway, because that is fascinating. I am the exact opposite way. [Laughs] I start out thinking about splitting the system into little bits and pieces that I can actually understand. And it’s only over time that I’m able to put those pieces together and chunk them into something that I can lump together and think about as a whole. But interestingly actually, that does tie into the thing that I was going to use originally as a takeaway, which Jamey is something that you said about how strategies for dealing with complexity, they don’t just have to be about the problem itself. They can totally be about the emotional response of the programmer who has to get some work done. And yeah, that’s absolutely valid and a perfectly reasonable response to the complexities that we have to deal with.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, I have at least three different things I could reflect on, but I’ll go with the one about the for-all-ers versus the for-each-ers, universalists versus existentialists. And the for-all-ers wanted to go so abstract that things become the same. I’ve been thinking lately about the expression ‘It’s turtles all the way down’. We want the same mental model to work at multiple scales. We want to be able to zoom in and out and still think of things the same way. We want Agile to scale. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But the thing is, I started out as more of a for-all-er I think when I was younger and now I’m more of a for-each-er because to actually change anything at every level of scale, you need to get into the details. And most of programming winds up being about the details and the errors cases. And I think the for-each-ing becomes important. It’s different to change an organization versus a team. It’s different to change a distributed system versus a single service, a single compiled unit you can say different things about. So, I find that really interesting. They both have values but it’s important to create those metaphors. And then probably take them too far so you remember they’re just a metaphor. That’s my theory.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, my reflection from the conversation is that I&#8217;m comfortable with influencing human systems to change now in a way that I didn’t realize how comfortable I’d gotten at that. I’m comfortable changing technical systems and have been for a long time. But culture change doesn’t scare me in the way that it seems to other people. So, I need to think about first, whether that’s really true. Am I as good at this as I think I am? And second, if I am, what I can do to help other people learn it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Kent, thanks a lot. It’s been really great talking to you. I didn’t cover everything I wanted to cover but we only had an hour. So, thanks again. And I think this is going to be a really great episode that our listeners will really enjoy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow. Thank you very much for inviting me on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it was a real pleasure. Thank you. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks. Come back any time. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KENT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It’s a deal.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content like this, please do so at </span></i><a href="https://www.paypal.me/devreps"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">paypal.me/devreps</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.</span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>This episode is sponsored by </b><a href="https://cohere.city/"><b>Cohere</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img class="alignnone wp-image-1076" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Cohere-1024x387.png" alt="" width="426" height="161" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Cohere-1024x387.png 1024w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Cohere-300x113.png 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Cohere-768x290.png 768w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Cohere-600x227.png 600w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Cohere.png 1440w" sizes="(max-width: 426px) 100vw, 426px" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Cohere believes better teams make better products. </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Visit </b><a href="https://www.wecohere.com/greaterthancode"><b>wecohere.com/greaterthancode</b></a><b> to learn how your team can become greater than code.</b></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |<br />
</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Kent Beck: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/KentBeck"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@KentBeck</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Extreme Programming</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |<br />
</span><a href="http://agilemanifesto.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Agile Manifesto</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/013476904X/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=013476904X&amp;linkId=a629dc2d7f051450bfb3cee30e4083a4"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:19</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Kent’s Superpower: Putting Things Together That Don’t Necessarily Go Together</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465018475/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0465018475&amp;linkId=6b695b9a8370a14771836fb3671d11e5"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">by Douglas Hofstadter and‎ Emmanuel Sander</span></a></p>
<p><b>04:01 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Metaphors in Software Development</span></p>
<p><b>07:32 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Writing Tests and Keeping a Journal</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">The unit/integration distinction confuses me. I test at the level of, “Here’s a thought I need to capture.”<a href="https://twitter.com/KentBeck?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@KentBeck</a> on <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a hre]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>This episode is sponsored by </b><a href="https://cohere.city/"><b>Cohere</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img class="alignnone wp-image-1076" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Cohere-1024x387.png" alt="" width="426" height="161" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Cohere-1024x387.png 1024w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Cohere-300x113.png 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Cohere-768x290.png 768w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Cohere-600x227.png 600w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Cohere.png 1440w" sizes="(max-width: 426px) 100vw, 426px" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Cohere believes better teams make better products. </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Visit </b><a href="https://www.wecohere.com/greaterthancode"><b>wecohere.com/greaterthancode</b></a><b> to learn how your team can become greater than code.</b></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |<br />
</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Kent Beck: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/KentBeck"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@KentBeck</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Extreme Programming</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |<br />
</span><a href="http://agilemanifesto.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Agile Manifesto</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/013476904X/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=013476904X&amp;linkId=a629dc2d7f051450bfb3cee30e4083a4"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:19</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Kent’s Superpower: Putting Things Together That Don’t Necessarily Go Together</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465018475/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0465018475&amp;linkId=6b695b9a8370a14771836fb3671d11e5"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">by Douglas Hofstadter and‎ Emmanuel Sander</span></a></p>
<p><b>04:01 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Metaphors in Software Development</span></p>
<p><b>07:32 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Writing Tests and Keeping a Journal</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">The unit/integration distinction confuses me. I test at the level of, “Here’s a thought I need to capture.”<a href="https://twitter.com/KentBeck?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@KentBeck</a> on <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a hre]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/KB.jpeg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/KB.jpeg"></googleplay:image>
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					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>43:02</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>059: Science All The Things! with Pamela Gay</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/059-science-all-the-things-with-pamela-gay/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 20 Dec 2017 05:00:58 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=1065</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[In this astronomic episode, we talk to Pamela Gay about coding out of necessity, why understanding and knowing everything isn’t necessarily a good thing, and being a citizen scientist.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[In this astronomic episode, we talk to Pamela Gay about coding out of necessity, why understanding and knowing everything isn’t necessarily a good thing, and being a citizen scientist.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Pamela Gay: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/starstryder"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@starstryder</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.starstryder.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">starstryder.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:13</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Pamela Podcasting, Since&#8230;well, FOREVER!</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.astronomycast.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astronomy Cast</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cosmoquest.org/x/365daysofastronomy/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">365 Days of Astronomy</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curry"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Adam Curry</span></a></p>
<p><b>02:19 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Pamela’s Superpower: Solving Random Problems with Software</span></p>
<p><b>05:19 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Becoming a “Reluctant Coder” i.e. Coding Out of Necessity</span></p>
<p><b>10:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Battlestar Galactica</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> =&gt; Greek Mythology =&gt; Space =&gt; Astrophysics</span></p>
<p><b>14:52 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Doing What You Have To Do vs Doing What You Love To Do</span></p>
<p><b>20:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Goal of Podcasting and Target Audience</span></p>
<p><b>23:57 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Understanding and Knowing Everything: Good? Bad?</span></p>
<p><b>26:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Outsourcing Work as a Personal Loss and The Internet’s Graveyard of Abandoned Projects</span></p>
<p><b>32:06 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Open Sourcing Work Yourself for the Benefit of Others</span></p>
<p><b>36:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Writing Software to Engage People</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cosmoquest.org/x/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">CosmoQuest Citizen Science</span></a></p>
<p><b>44:22 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Crowdsourcing Requires Trust but Garners Better Results</span></p>
<p><b>48:02 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Motivation of Citizen Scientists</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/cosmoquestx"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@cosmoquestx</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Join Our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Jessica:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> The layers of people in software and people in software and how we’re all learning. It gets hard to separate the people from the technology. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Also, having goals you DON’T want to achieve.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Seeing crowdsourcing being successful.</span></p>
<p><b>Jamey:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Curiosity isn’t necessarily about finding out the answer. It’s the pursuit of the magic.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The tenuous path we all take in life, and what decisions cause us to be on the right path to the right here, right now.</span></p>
<p><b>Pamela:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> If we collaborate with the technology, maybe we won’t get silenced.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning and welcome to Episode 59 of Greater Than Code. I am happy to be here today with my fellow panelist, Coraline Ada Ehmke.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello everybody, and I’m happy to be here with Jamey Hampton.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks, Coraline. And I’m honored to introduce our guest for the show, Pamela Gay. Thank you for coming on the show. Pamela Gay is an astronomer, writer, and podcaster focused on using new media to engage people in science and technology. Through CosmoQuest.org, she works to engage people in both learning and doing science. She’s the Director of Technology and Citizen Science at the Astronomical Society of the Pacific. And we’re really happy to have her on the show today. So, welcome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I’m super happy to be here. It is awesome to be surrounded by other humans that are dedicated in code, but for more than just code’s sake. And other women who code, yay!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Pamela, how long have you been podcasting?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Forever. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, the first time I started podcasting was actually…</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Since before podcast was a word?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, yeah. I started back in February of 2005, back when no one knew what this RSS thing was and it was back in the days of Adam Curry being out there as our advocate and shining star, helping light the way for podcasting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Who’s Adam Curry? </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, man! So, Adam Curry was an MTV VJ turned podcaster who turned podcaster to start podcasting as this way that people could talk about their lives. And he’d record himself walking around his house doing his dishes and sharing out all the things he’d learned on the internet and just building a community. It was kind of awesome. So, it was back in the day. I think he kind of faded into oblivion now that there’s more than 12 podcasts out there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So Pamela, we like to start every episode by uncovering what our guest’s superpower is. So, if you could explain what your superpower is and when you developed or discovered that superpower.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] I’m told that my superpower is public speaking and getting other people totally engaged in science, which is kind of what podcasting is all about. But beyond that, my beloved superpower, the one I like to invoke, is solving random problems with software instead of spending hours and hours and hours trying to do things the hard, manual way, which…</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Ooh.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I think it’s kind of near and dear to this show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Automation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, not just automation but crowdsourcing and getting other people involved. So, I think the best example was back in, oh man, it was probably 2009 or so, I was at a meeting with the Astronomical Society of the Pacific before I worked for them, many, many years before I worked for them. And I met this scientists, Stuart Robbins. And this poor guy while working on his dissertation had drawn over three million circles on the surface of Mars. Not like literally on the surface. That would have been cool. But rather, on images taken of Mars. He sat there with his tablet, getting callouses from his Wacom stylus, and traced craters three million times. And I&#8217;m like, “Dear god. There must be a better way.” </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And the answer is write software that allows anyone who has five minutes to go in and help. Because Mars is cool. People like to draw things on Mars. People like to help us figure out, where is it safe to land a spacecraft? Where is the cool science? And they will help. And so, it wasn&#8217;t just automation. It was writing software to allow anyone how had spare time to help and to make his life easier with software, to get other people engaged in doing science through software, and to lighten the load and increase the good for all of us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe this is a good time for me to confess that I&#8217;m the person who put the face on Mars.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] Well, you did a mighty good job of it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I just wanted to throw people off a little bit, stir up some controversy. I didn&#8217;t use software though. I did it the old fashioned way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, you were out there with a shovel and&#8230;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Getting buried in perchlorates as you did it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Shovel and pail. Thank you very much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m learning so much about you, Coraline.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] That was a lot of digging. You certainly gave the Egyptians and the Mississippian people a run for their money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I try.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE: </b> I set my goals pretty high.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] We all need to have high goals. You can&#8217;t get anywhere without goals. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, when you recognize this problem that the researcher was having, did you already know how to code and did you already have the inkling of how to help solve that problem? Or is that when you said, “There must be a better way,” and you taught yourself? I&#8217;m interested in how you got started.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am what is perhaps best defined as a reluctant coder. My dad&#8217;s a professional programmer. And so, I grew up hearing the pounding of his mechanical keyboard and having to get out of bed and close his home office door so I could sleep at night, because mechanical keyboard. And now I love my mechanical keyboard. The tables have totally turned. And I was like, “I shall not be a coder,” but then I wanted to make a Battlestar Galactica fan fiction video in middle school and needed to do my own early version of CGI which was actually Logo. And so, I wrote code to make a viper and then figured out how to turn the turtle into the viper so the viper could fly around by doing turtle with &#8216;pen up&#8217; command. I was a weird middle-schooler. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And then in high school I learned Pascal. And when I started university, for a while I thought about getting a dual-degree Computer Science and Astrophysics. But the prof who taught all my algorithms courses, every homework assignment was hockey. And when I found out he&#8217;d be teaching Assembly, I was like, “I can&#8217;t do it. I don&#8217;t want to know how Assembly and hockey will be related.” And so, I didn&#8217;t get&#8230; </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA: </b> The CS degree. But at that point I was like, I know how to teach myself code. I know how to read resources. I hate hockey, except if I&#8217;m playing it. That was what I learned in my CS classes. I hate hockey unless I&#8217;m playing it. And so, I set out to learn how to learn and have been fixing problems ever since. I was a variable star astronomer as an undergrad, so I had to write software to find, how long does it take for this star to go from its brightest point to its faintest and back up to its brightest point? And I had to write code to sort out how different stars change over time. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And then in grad school I was dealing with thousands of galaxies as one does. And I had to figure out how to write software to go through catalogs of data of the entire sky looking for these points where there were overdensities. And so, it&#8217;s one of these things where I keep facing problems of, “Well, I could do this by hand. I could do this in Excel. I&#8217;m not going to do it in Excel. I&#8217;m going to figure out how to linked list the bajeezus out of this,” in the early days.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And now I figure out how to MySQL the bajeezus out of stuff. And life is better with code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve often said that every Excel spreadsheet is an application waiting to be born.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like the idea of code out of necessity or at least code out of doing a better way of what you&#8217;re trying to do. I actually even like this all the way back to the Battlestar Galactica example.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because it&#8217;s like, it&#8217;s a different kind of necessity but I&#8217;m sure when you were in middle school that seemed like something that just had to be. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was the most important thing ever. I needed to have my vipers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have to be honest. I learned my first piece of code that I ever wrote, was for, I had an X-Files fan page on Geocities, which obviously you don&#8217;t need to write code for Geocities but I was like, “I have to have a personality test.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Where you click the radio button and it tells you which character you are. And I built it in JavaScript when I was in middle school.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh my gosh, and JavaScript is black magic. So, you were a high sorcerer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] I&#8217;d like to still think of myself as a high sorcerer now. [Inaudible]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If you still do JavaScript, it&#8217;s really &#8216;The Wizarding World of JavaScript&#8217; as far as I&#8217;m concerned.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, compared to MySQL, JavaScript takes a lot of your brain. [Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, and there&#8217;s always those days when you&#8217;re staring at your code and either saying, “I don&#8217;t know why this works,” or saying, “Why doesn&#8217;t this work?” And I swear, there have been times I&#8217;ve deleted a line of code and typed the exact same thing back in and suddenly things are bouncing across my screen the way they&#8217;re supposed to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I find “Why does this work?” much more frustrating than “Why doesn&#8217;t this work?”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, yes. We were actually having this discussion yesterday in the office where we&#8217;re currently working on a project that will allow anyone with anyone with a camera that they can point at the sky to figure out, first of all, what it is they pointed their camera at, and second of all, if they take more than one image, to look for things that move and vary in brightness and do all the cool things that lead to science. And writing software to handle all this variety of data is an interesting challenge. And we&#8217;re trying to do all of this completely open source, building on existing libraries from the NIH. And the NIH wrote their libraries to deal with medical x-rays and MRIs and all sorts of image data than we have off of our telescopes. And so, there&#8217;s a whole lot of, “And now I shall hack this to do something it was never designed to do,” which is the fun of open source. And there has been a great deal of, “Why didn&#8217;t that work? Why didn&#8217;t that work,” random erasing of code, “Oh crap, why did that work?” And this was the discussion of yesterday.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s no code like no code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Pamela, you expressed your early interest in Battlestar Galactica. Obviously, you have a deep love of space. Are those two things related?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. I hate to admit this, but I actually got into space probably in part due to Battlestar Galactica. It all goes back to Battlestar Galactica. So, I am of the age that, I was like four or five when the show originally came out. And so, I grew up watching it in infinite re-runs and I remember arguing with my mother over whether she could use the television to watch Fame or I could use the television to watch yet again an episode of Battlestar Galactica I had memorized. And I noticed when I was little that all the characters had names that were out of Greek mythology, because I had a book on Greek mythology from the used bookstore. And then I discovered that all the constellations were named after the Greek mythology. And then I went down the rabbit hole of outer space. So it went from Battlestar Galactica to Greek gods to all of outer space in this crazy pre-Wikipedia rabbit hole of, well at the time it would have been the library.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, it probably wasn&#8217;t a hard decision for you to go into astrophysics when you got to college?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, it was because growing up, when you&#8217;re a girl in science, there&#8217;s always that person who&#8217;s like, “Well, you can&#8217;t do that. You&#8217;re not good about this.” There&#8217;s all that bias that comes down on you. So, my high school physics teacher at one point said he was giving me a C to keep me out of getting into a good college for physics because it&#8230; </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh my god.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA: </b> Would only lead to disappointment. And you hear all these things over and over again and you get patted on the head as the cute little girl doing science over and over again. And I actually started college thinking I was going to go into Science Policy. So, I started out dual-degree because I had way too many AP credits and it was like, “I shall get two degrees, because AP credits.” It started out dual-degree International Relations and Astrophysics. And by the end of my first year, I was like, “Oh dear, all of these international relations people are capable of dressing up business casual for 9am classes.” And I then learned macroeconomics and discovered I hate capitalism as something I have to understand. It hurts my brain to understand economic theory. And I didn&#8217;t want to study that for three more years. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So I was like, okay, I&#8217;ll do dual-degree in Computer Science and work on software for astrophysics. And I kept plugging at the astronomy in the background and loving it and loving every part of it. And a lot of my lowest grades in college were in my high-level physics courses because it was a struggle and I enjoyed the struggle. And in the end, I dropped the International Relations degree when I learned that it is economically better to kill someone than maim someone. I dropped my Computer Science secondary degree because I hated hockey, which is a very strange reason to do something. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But I kept going with the astrophysics and then I got into graduate school and I kept going with the astrophysics. And it turns out that I am totally capable of doing this. And I&#8217;ve used all those other classes I took because astrophysics is an international topic. And it is something that requires programming. And I love living in this interdisciplinary world where I get to travel our planet while exploring others with my software and the images taken by various spacecraft.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s beautiful. I love that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Beautiful is exactly the word that I was thinking of too, Jamey. I think it&#8217;s really wonderful when you have the privilege of working on something that is fascinating to you and that you have skills capable of exploring in depth. A lot of people don&#8217;t have that. A lot of people, like I think of my father who just, he was good at electronics and he worked as an electrical engineer and that killed his love of electronics. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And I think a lot of people face that and a lot of people get into coding for economic reasons and they get into the job and they find that they hate it. So, I feel very fortunate I love programming, because it is creative and I&#8217;m happiest when I&#8217;m creating and I don&#8217;t care what it is that I&#8217;m creating, whether it&#8217;s words on a page or pixels on a screen or music in someone&#8217;s headphones. But just having that creative outlet is really good for me. So, I definitely feel blessed to find that same satisfaction from creating code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And one of the things that I find is there are those days that you do something because you have to. For me, those are usually the days I work on budgets which I hate doing. But we all have parts of our job that we have to do in order to do the things we love. And when I get to solve random problems, and sometimes it&#8217;s truly random&#8230; one of the researchers I work with yesterday was getting extraordinarily frustrated because she wanted to do a pie chart that could then be exploded out to show finer granularity, like DaisyDisk does when you do an audit of your hard drive and it shows you, this is how many files you have that are in your personal documents folder, and then it explodes it out into your photos and your podcasts and everything. She wanted to do that with some research we&#8217;re doing into our Twitter audience and couldn&#8217;t. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And I&#8217;m like, this is a problem I can solve with processing, because it&#8217;s just a quick, simple bit of code. And everyone in my team is like, “Yes, but you&#8217;re the PI. Why would you sit down and do that crazy stupid little bit of code?” And I&#8217;m like, “Because it&#8217;s fun and I want to.” And I hate doing budgets, so I&#8217;m going to write this software. And finding that ability to solve someone&#8217;s problem, because she was getting angry at Excel, and solve it with something that&#8217;s colorful and fun and quick and dirty, because that&#8217;s what processing is sometimes, yeah I live for those moments.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You told a couple of stories of very specific moments when you were like, “This isn&#8217;t for me,” in school&#8230; </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>With the hockey and with the people in business casual. And I can tell that you really love what you do with astrophysics and stuff. Was there an opposite moment? Like, maybe you when you were in school or when you were first starting out where you were like, “Yes! This is it. This is the best.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think the way it worked was I discovered one day it was possible to get paid to do things that make me giggle. And that&#8217;s not the kind of thing that any guidance counselor tells you is possible. And it all came about from becoming an accidental podcaster. It wasn&#8217;t like, I have to admit, I didn&#8217;t originate the idea to become a podcaster. I had a colleague come up to me at a conference and he&#8217;s like, “Hey, I read this article in Parade magazine about this new thing called podcasting. You have a great voice. We should do this together.” And I was like, “Yes. I like doing things with my voice. It is fun. We shall do this thing.” And I wrote the website and I actually did that while watching the new version of Battlestar Galactica, because it always comes back to Battlestar Galactica. And so, Friday nights would be getting the new posts up, updating the RSS, updating the website. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And then I started applying for grants and putting out PayPal links and saying, “Hey, will people support us doing this?” And the answer was yes. And then we started looking to see, “Can we use this for astronomy to help promote education and get paid to do that?” And then we find ourselves going to science fiction conventions. And it just kept snowballing where I kept finding people are willing to pay me to do things I love to do. Why would I do anything else? </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And back in 2011 I basically did a cleaning and kind of shook off all the parts of what I was doing that I hated and made a promise to myself that other than having to do things like budgets, I would never apply for funding to do something that would make me miserable the entire time I was doing it ever again. And I would never apply for a job doing something just for the money. And I&#8217;ve been lucky. Not everyone can do that. There&#8217;s been times where I&#8217;m really grateful that I have a significant other who can keep a house over our head when I&#8217;ve had gaps in my funding because congress doesn&#8217;t always support science. But I made a conscientious choice that life is short and right now I&#8217;m in a position where I have that ability to do things that benefit science, that make other people happy, and except when I&#8217;m doing budgets, make me giggle while I&#8217;m doing them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA: </b> It helps to have a weird sense of humor.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It does. It does. If you can&#8217;t be sarcastic at your code, it will win.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, with your podcasting, what was the goal that you set out to do? Do you feel like you&#8217;re close to accomplishing that goal?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, if we were close to accomplishing the goal, we&#8217;d be close to ending the show. So, I hope we never get there. So, with our first podcast, Slacker Astronomy, our goal was to basically be the daily show of astronomy where we took on astronomy news items and produced them from a really weird and out there sense of humor, not always rated PG. It turns out there is a star that it&#8217;s abbreviated name is actually Tau Boo B. And if you say that quickly, it is worth giggling at.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And it has a planet. And talking about that planet was way too much fun. And so, we embraced the silly and that&#8217;s how we got the start. But sometimes you grow up and get jobs that don&#8217;t appreciate you doing off-color science. And we all kind of grew up. And as we moved away from doing that, I started doing Astronomy Cast with Fraser Cane who&#8217;s the publisher of Universe Today. And the two of us settled into this format where each week we take on a different topic and try and explain not just what we know, like the cover on all the news articles out there, but how did we figure this stuff out? How do we know general relativity is true? How do we know what color that asteroid from another star system that just whipped through our solar system is? How do we know it actually came from another star system? And because we do science to keep learning new things, if our show runs out of content, it means that we understand the entirety of the universe and that will be a very sad day. And I don&#8217;t think we&#8217;re actually going to get there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That could take at least a couple of years, couldn&#8217;t it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, we&#8217;re now in year 11. So yeah, science is making progress. We&#8217;ve had to update some of our episodes. But we&#8217;re not quite there yet on running out of content.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And who&#8217;s your target audience? Is it other scientists or is it amateurs who are enthusiastic about astronomy? </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We try and target our episodes at anyone who has an interest in science and is capable of thinking things through. So, some of the episodes are at a pretty introductory level where we take people through all the baby steps necessary to understand something. And then we&#8217;ll do a follow-up episode later. We&#8217;ve done this on relativity in particular where we do a deep dive into a particular concept. So, if you go back and listen to past episodes, someone coming in who is utterly non-interested in science and is getting dragged in by their child who&#8217;s like, “We&#8217;ve got to listen to this,” they&#8217;ll be able to follow along and catch up and learn. But someone who&#8217;s coming in with a deep passion for the subject already will also find new and interesting things to challenge their brain. We&#8217;re here for nerds and people who don&#8217;t know that they&#8217;re a nerd and are about to become a nerd.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome . I love that. I also love something you said a little bit ago that I wanted to go back to. Because you mentioned that the day that we understand everything about the universe is a very sad day. And that&#8217;s interesting to me, because I totally understand it once you say it, but when I think about science and curiosity, we want to understand. We want to understand everything. And how that intersects with the idea of, “But if we actually understood everything, maybe it would be kind of disappointing.” I don&#8217;t know. Do you have more thoughts on that? Because I&#8217;m just so interested in that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s sort of like as a young nerdling, I often had people like, “You think you&#8217;re such a know-it-all.” And I remember in middle school I thought it was the best retort ever. I was like, “I don&#8217;t know everything. But I want to know everything.” And it&#8217;s just like, what sort of retort is that? But it was true. It was a bad response but it was true. As a scientist, we don&#8217;t know everything and that&#8217;s why we science it so that we can discover the things we don&#8217;t know. It&#8217;s so that we can fill in the gaps and we can figure out the things we don&#8217;t understand. And it&#8217;s that curiosity that drives us. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So, sometimes you&#8217;ll be working on trying to figure out something and solve a problem and you tear apart electronics. You start knitting a new object. Whatever it is, you get halfway through it and realize you&#8217;ve figured it out. And it&#8217;s no longer interesting because you&#8217;ve figured it out. And so, it sits there undone because all the magic went away once it was fully understood. And with a lot of different things, it&#8217;s that pursuit of the magic. It&#8217;s that pursuit of this thing you don&#8217;t understand that drives the action. How do I do this? How does this work? What is the underlying stuff and things that make this go? And once it&#8217;s figured out, it just gets pushed aside and never completed because, boring.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m curious. I have an ongoing artificial intelligence project called Sophia that I&#8217;ve been working on for a long time. And for a long time, I was focusing on natural language processing. And I think I reached a point where it was similar to what you were saying where I recognized, “Oh, there are mechanical ways of doing this and I&#8217;m not interested in this anymore.” So, I ended up outsourcing the NLP portion of the project to Google&#8217;s NLP API because I was like, “This isn&#8217;t the problem that I&#8217;m interested in.” Do you run into that? You mentioned that you use libraries developed by the NIH. Did you find that you were in a similar position where you were excited about inventing and then realized that someone had already come up with a solution that was maybe better or more sophisticated than what you would have done on your own and said, “Oh okay, I&#8217;ll just use this library,” and was there a sense of loss that went along with that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, it didn&#8217;t happen with this particular project because it turns out, I had never had the desire to write my own libraries to read in images, because cameras like to do things in so many different ways that it&#8217;s just like, “I don&#8217;t want to be responsible for keeping up with Canon.” And if NIH is going to do that, more power to the NIH. Not an interesting problem. The place where I ran into that level of sadness was back in the early days of podcasting and website development and starting to develop frameworks. In the days before WordPress, because those days actually existed, I worked really hard to build my own content management system and I was so proud of it. It had a frontend. It had a backend. It had an admin account. It was glorious and it was mine and I used it for my website. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And then WordPress came out with way more functionality. And the things that I was working on, on my own for my own purposes, I realized I don&#8217;t need to do all of this on my own. I can hack WordPress. And so, I took to hacking WordPress. And then I was happy and I was customizing WordPress and life was good. And then they launched the ability to have plugins and all of the things that I had hacked into WordPress, I updated and they broke. And there were plugins. And it&#8217;s like, “Okay, we have reached a stage in life where I need to search for other people&#8217;s code before I try and do anything in WordPress.” Because there is someone out there who has more free time than I do and will have thus done a better job than be. And that makes me sad, because it brought me joy to sit on my sofa and hack WordPress. And now the joy is gone. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE: </b> I think every developer goes through that phase of&#8230;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Rewriting WordPress and coming up with a CMS. And it&#8217;s like, “How difficult could it be?” And of course the devil&#8217;s in the details. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. I at least wrote my first CMS before WordPress was a thing. I just decided to recreate the WordPress plugin independently multiple times. Don&#8217;t do that. Don&#8217;t do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel fortunate to be old enough to have been into programming early enough to have the opportunity to solve some of these classic problems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s true. I remember when a table was a big and exciting new thing to be able to do in HTML. And to have been along for the journey, to evolve past Flash to having HTML Canvas and figuring out the new things that you can do with Canvas. And there was one day we actually found a bug in HTML5&#8217;s implementation. And that was an exciting day because it&#8217;s like, we found a bug in how to do something that causes a memory overload because we&#8217;re doing something they didn&#8217;t think of. I love taking these new tools and pushing them to see just how far we can go and how much we can push them and break them in the process. And it&#8217;s been a great time to evolve as a web developer who is also working on big data problems behind the scenes, because it&#8217;s also been the advent of crowdsourcing and crowd engagement. And I&#8217;ve loved getting to weave all these things together from essentially day zero.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA: </b> I think it&#8217;s also made it easier for me to learn than it is for people just coming into the industry now. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s true. We didn&#8217;t have libraries when we started. We had to write our own libraries and it was uphill in both directions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Ah, ah. [Chuckles] Okay, this is a personal soapbox. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It is actually downhill invention, uphill analysis. Creating them is easier than understanding the ones that are out there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, that&#8217;s true so often. Yes, yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Which is good news. If you don&#8217;t want to ever understand everything, don&#8217;t worry. We&#8217;ll just create more software and then we can say, “I have no idea how this works.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] And that leads to the whole problem of some developer out there got bored with the library they created and then left it for dead as a zombie project on GitHub and your language of choice updates and your library of choice no longer functions. And then what do you do? I think the true skill set nowadays is figuring out how to pull that repo down and make it work when the developer abandoned it and you need it. And that ability to participate and contribute and be the person who&#8217;s capable of understanding somebody else&#8217;s code is a truly needed superpower today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Agree.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like this image of this graveyard on the web of abandoned projects. I think about this sometimes too when I&#8217;m trying to fix a bug and I find a Stack Overflow post or something of someone who had the same bug as me. And either there&#8217;s no answers or the absolute worst is when someone&#8217;s like, “Oh, I figured it out,” and then they don&#8217;t post what they did. And I&#8217;m like, “No!”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Someone I&#8217;ve never met abandoned this and they could have helped me in the future. [Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s true. It sometimes feels like there almost needs to be a plugin for GitHub or an extension or I don&#8217;t know what you would call it, but this ability to turn on a red alert banner of, “This code has not been updated in N days, months, years. Use at your own risk. This developer has not even logged on for this period of time,” just so you don&#8217;t go down the rabbit hole of, “I tried the plugin that was recommended on the Stack Overflow post that I didn&#8217;t notice was written three years ago and the universe has moved on.” </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I totally agree. Because if I see something and I&#8217;m like, “I&#8217;m not going to use this because it&#8217;s old,” then it doesn&#8217;t feel like a personal attack. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But if I&#8217;ve already gone down that rabbit hole like, “Oh, someone abandoned this project,” like I don&#8217;t know them and they bailed on this project, whatever happened, but I&#8217;ve already gone down the rabbit hole and I need it, I feel like they&#8217;ve abandoned me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA: </b> Yes, it&#8217;s true.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>GitHub did just introduce a feature where an open source maintainer can archive a project. And that makes it so that you can&#8217;t open any issues on it. But the problem is, if the developer has abandoned the project, what motivation do they have to go in and archive the project? Because they&#8217;ve probably forgotten about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. This is where you just need some sort of an auto feature that you can turn on and off to, as I said, that “Warning. Warning, Will Robinson. Use at your own peril.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or what if you had a browser plugin that recognized you were on a GitHub page and it noticed the commit history and how long it had been and the engagement level and the number of committers and changed the background of the page to get increasingly spooky as it was older?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And maybe played some scary music? </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is amazing and I want that to be a thing. And I don&#8217;t think I quite have the skill set to do that, because music. I&#8217;ve never figured out how to play music. But I could. I could.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Jessica, making it spooky would only make it all the more attractive to me. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter] </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, I think that would have the opposite effect.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA: </b> It goes to pastel. Would that turn you away? It would turn me away.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. That would definitely turn me away. So, I&#8217;m curious. Have you ever taken code that you&#8217;ve written and looked at it and said, “This solves a general purpose problem that I think other people would have,” and turned around and open sourced it yourself?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve released a few fairly stupid feeling, like this is not a serious problem but it is a JavaScript problem that has me super annoyed and I figured it out. And I&#8217;m posting this on GitHub because if I&#8217;m annoyed, somebody else is annoyed. Please steal my code. Right now, I&#8217;m in this weird situation where CosmoQuest&#8217;s code, we&#8217;re working on coming up with various ways to solve different, how do you annotate image issues. And we&#8217;ve developed our Citizen Science Builder software. And we don&#8217;t have our code public because I work with a lot of students. And our ability to inadvertently commit keys and passwords to the internet is great. So we keep everything locked down in case student has bad day and our AWS keys inadvertently get committed to GitHub. So, I have this love/hate relationship with internet security and open source community. Because I want to put everything open source, and I don&#8217;t trust myself to not commit a database password. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So, all of my code is available if you ask. Some of my code is available just hanging out on GitHub. I have code for if you&#8217;re interested in not paying someone to tell you who follows you on Twitter. I have written code to solve this problem. I do a lot of data mining of Twitter to figure out if we&#8217;re all actually talking to the same 12 people. And that&#8217;s all just hanging out because I&#8217;m working on that alone and not worried about the keys getting published. I hate internet security. I&#8217;m bad at it. I admit this freely. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Pamela, one of the things you talked about really early was writing software to engage people. So, it&#8217;s like people writing software that can bring in a lot more people as opposed to a lot more computers doing the work. Talk more about that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, it turns out that as good as computer vision is getting, it&#8217;s not perfect. One of my favorite ever computer vision flaws was Google Image Search mistaking me for Natalie Portman. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And you know, I&#8217;m good with that. She might not be. And computer vision is hard. And it&#8217;s getting far better. We&#8217;re getting better with biomechanics. And one of my favorite things I ever saw come up was c</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Catherine Havasi] when she was working on computer vision problems back in the early 2000s, late 90s maybe even. No, it was early 2000s. Her algorithm decided that any triangles that appeared in an image with a lizard must be sailboats. So occasionally, computer vision software just loses its little brain. Because it&#8217;s still learning. And with spacecraft we can&#8217;t afford mistakes. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And one of the things that is really important is to figure out how to map out other worlds so that we can direct spacecraft to go do interesting things, go pick a rock up off of the asteroid Bennu is one of the problems we&#8217;re looking at right now. The OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is on its way to the asteroid Bennu. When it gets there it&#8217;s going to do a touch and go where it essentially zooms in, grabs a rock, and bounces back off taking the rock with it. And we can&#8217;t trust computer vision to go, “This is a field of boulders. Let&#8217;s go pick one up.” So right now, we have to instead say, “Humans. Humans. We need all of you humans. We have 2 weeks to map out this asteroid and find the place that has the rock we&#8217;re going to pick up,” because if the algorithm screwed up that would be a waste of a spacecraft, which is bad. We&#8217;re not going to do that. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But at the same time, there are so many rocks. There are so many craters. There are so many fault lines. That we don&#8217;t want to spend the rest of human experience asking people to do what Stuart Robbins did and draw millions of circles on these different worlds tracing out craters. And so, what we&#8217;re trying to do with CosmoQuest is find that sweet point where we know the algorithms aren&#8217;t perfect, but let&#8217;s try and train them to do better. Let&#8217;s try an get our crowdsourced group of people to mark out the craters in the light-colored soil. Let&#8217;s get our humans to mark out the craters in the dark colored soils. Let&#8217;s do it with the sun at all different angles in the sky. Let&#8217;s do all these different kinds of surfaces and see just how many things do we have to measure in order to get the software to be 99% accurate so that we can trust it whereas currently it&#8217;s more like 75% accurate and we absolutely cannot trust it. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So, with what we&#8217;re doing, we have this weird suite of interplaying algorithms where we start out by trying to build that user experience that trains the random bored person on their sofa who is looking for something to do that maybe has a little bit of meaning, how do we train them to do the job of a PhD geophysicist and mark out and map out accurately another planet? So we figured out more or less how to do that. And our volunteers are getting the same accuracy as our professional scientists. So, that&#8217;s problem one.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Problem two is how do we then take all of these things that they&#8217;re marking out on the surface and use that to train our neural net to each year as we get more, hundreds of thousands more, millions of markings, how do we use that data to train our software to do better? And at what point do we get to the stage where we can just go in and correct what the algorithm did and that&#8217;s faster than going in and doing it ourselves? When we first started this, we pitched the algorithm versus the humans and it actually took longer to fix what the algorithm did than to just do it from scratch. And my goal is to change that. My goal is to get to the point that we are correcting our robot overlords as they mark other worlds for us and not having to mark three million craters. But at least right now, we&#8217;re spreading work out over hundreds of thousands of people. So, it&#8217;s a little bit easier.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is cool. So, we have people who write software that trains people to do the job of a geophysicist in order to teach software algorithms how to identify the rocks in order to teach the spacecraft to grab a rock so that it can bring it back to us so that we can learn about asteroids.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. What&#8217;s cool is we&#8217;re learning from the robots that are learning from us. And it&#8217;s software and humans layered all the way down.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s so interesting. It&#8217;s so integrated. I like how integrated this technology is becoming with us, because in a way it&#8217;s hard&#8230; you hit a point where it&#8217;s hard to separate the technology from us as the people who put it together, I think.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And what is amazing to me is we&#8217;re reaching the point with our technology where it&#8217;s starting to free us from the difficult tasks but it hasn&#8217;t got there yet. And so, there&#8217;s this rich interplay where we still have to use our brains. We still have to keep trying and poking and it requires creativity. It&#8217;s not that Star Trek future where we are all mindless slaves to our food replicator, as on one of the alien worlds they once visited they found, where people lost their intellectual drive because their technology took care of them. We&#8217;re to the point where it&#8217;s us and the computer working cooperatively to figure things out. And what I&#8217;m loving is it&#8217;s getting to the point where we can have conversations with our computer. No Siri, no. that&#8217;s not what I meant. Stop. And she ignores most of those words except for stop. And over time, the AIs are learning. Over time, we&#8217;re learning. And it&#8217;s a relationship. And it&#8217;s a relationship we&#8217;re learning as we map worlds and we&#8217;re learning as we figure out how to successfully turn the lights on in our house.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It strikes me Pamela that crowdsourcing requires a great deal of trust. And that trust goes in both directions. You have to trust the hundreds of thousands of people who are doing the work. You have to trust that they&#8217;re doing a good job of it. And they have to trust that the work that they&#8217;re contributing to is ethical, which in the case of astrophysics I imagine is not a very difficult question to answer. But a lot of other crowdsourcing does have that or can have that ethical dilemma as part of it. So, how do you feel about the relationship between the science you&#8217;re doing and the trust that you&#8217;re placing in the crowdsource?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s definitely a two-way relationship. And I have to admit, that&#8217;s part of why I love doing this, is our community of citizen scientists, it&#8217;s truly a collaboration and a community where we hang out on Slack together some. And just like a student can pop in my office for a question, they can pop in my DMs with a question. And everyone makes mistakes. So, what we found with our first really in-depth statistical analysis was that if you take 8 professionals and you ask them, “Map out all the craters in this part of the moon,” they&#8217;re going to hit a point where they&#8217;re tired. They&#8217;re going to hit a point of, “I am done marking all the little tiny craters. I am done. I am not marking all of them.” And it&#8217;s at a subconscious level that they make these mistakes. But when you look at all the results together, you get an aggregate result where maybe only five of the eight marked this one particular crater, but those five when you combine them tells you what&#8217;s there and what isn&#8217;t. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We then looked at, let&#8217;s get a groups of volunteers. Here we got 15, just increased the group size a little bit. And with those 15 you find actually a different set of mistakes. It turns out the volunteers were less likely to make the big craters and more likely to watch where the small ones were, which was an interesting difference between the pros and the volunteers. But when you looked at the aggregate results of getting 15 people who were randomly selected from all over the world to mark an image, versus those 8 pros, it was a one-to-one correlation. There was a greater error between any two pros than there was between the aggregate of the pros and the aggregate of the volunteers. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Now, we don&#8217;t have funding to ever get other than for this one statistical case, eight different people who are professionals to spend their professional day mapping the surface of a world. We can get one. We can&#8217;t get eight. So, this means we actually get better science by having 15 different volunteers each look at this piece of the moon, this piece of the asteroid Vesta and mapping out these different surfaces than we could ever get with the funding we have by relying on that one professional we could afford. So, we know we get better results. And it&#8217;s my job to make sure that those efforts are never wasted. It&#8217;s my job to make sure there&#8217;s someone out there who&#8217;s going to help transform all of these efforts into published new understandings. And all I can do is hope that I don&#8217;t disappoint our population who is doing so much to help us out in advancing the science.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What do you think the motivation is of the citizen scientist?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;ve actually asked that, because to me at a certain level having taught undergrads, it&#8217;s like I can&#8217;t make undergrads do this for their homework. Why do people do this in their spare time? And I love that people are often honest when you ask this question. And we&#8217;ve gotten responses from, “I&#8217;m retired. This gives my days meaning.” “I&#8217;m on permanent disability and this is something that fills my days with purpose.” And those are those deep, sincere answers that force you to get out of bed in the morning and keep doing what you&#8217;re doing. But we also have all of the people who are like, “I always just wanted to be a scientist but I didn&#8217;t want to take all that course work. And this lets me say that I&#8217;m a scientist. This lets me say I helped with this cool awesome thing with NASA stamped all over it.” And people just want to help and volunteer at the end of the day. While, there&#8217;s a lot of people out there that you might want to sweep off the edge of our planet if it was flat but it&#8217;s not, it&#8217;s a sphere so we can&#8217;t sweep them off the edge&#8230; while there&#8217;s a lot of&#8230; </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Lies!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] While there&#8217;s a lot of people you might want to sweep off at least your Twitter list, people in general are good. People in general will help. And this is the one thing I have learned from podcasting, from citizen science, from the open source community, is if you have a need and you ask&#8230; it&#8217;s the art of asking like Amanda Palmer the musician wrote about. If you ask, people will say, “I will try and help. Let me try and help.” And we can all lighten the load for everyone just by saying, “Yes, I&#8217;m here. I have a few extra cycles. What can I do?”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow. So, we have to ask. If our listeners want to help with citizen science, what can they do?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Go to CosmoQuest.org. And we have a variety of citizen science sites that you can explore the earth, moon, Mars, Mercury. Click on the planet of your choice and you will be off and able to help us map that world. We have a Twitch account that we go on and I solve random software problems coding live on Twitch, which means you sometimes get to see me make fascinating bugs which I did last night. But you also get to see just how we go through and code what we code, if you want to do that. Once of our postdocs, Matt Richardson, goes on and will math various science problems. So, join us on Twitch. And we talk about everything we do on Twitter. CosmoQuestX is our username on everything because it turns out CosmoQuest was already taken by the time we launched our site. So, look for CosmoQuestX on all the various social medias, new medias, medias of all kinds, and visit CosmoQuest.org.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m sold.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yay!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to be a citizen scientist now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yay. I love hearing that. And I hope to see all of you out there listening in our community helping us science, science all the things. All the things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think the quote is, “We&#8217;re going to science the fuck out of that.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. I didn&#8217;t know if you guys were PG or not, so I didn&#8217;t go there. Yes, we&#8217;re going to science the fuck out of that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We like to end each show with reflections on the conversation and highlight things that stood out to us. Jessica, I&#8217;m going to put you on the spot. Do you want to go first? </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. I&#8217;m definitely fascinated by the layers of people and software and people and software and how we&#8217;re all learning. And like Jamey pointed out, it gets hard to separate the people from the technology. That&#8217;s so true, both in what we work on and in the people who use what we build. I also am really interested in the part about we have goals that we don&#8217;t want to achieve because if we achieved them, then our organization or whatever it is we&#8217;re building would cease to exist, or cease to be useful. And I think that kind of goal is highly underrated. I don&#8217;t even like to use the word &#8216;goal&#8217; because that implies you&#8217;re supposed to achieve it. So, I usually call them a quest. The unreachable star that we aim for because aiming for it gets us somewhere useful. So, I think that&#8217;s beautiful. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m really interested in crowdsourcing and seeing crowdsourcing be successful. My initial impression of crowdsourcing was pretty negative with what Google did for the gamification of image identification where they had people put in tags. They would show people an image and put in tags and aggregate that data. And it seemed to me like that was a race toward the lowest common denominator because you were rewarded for coming up with a tag that someone else had already come up with. So, it seemed to me that from a game theory perspective, it made the mode sense to produce the simplest possible tag as opposed to anything nuanced. So, I&#8217;ve always had kind of a negative opinion of crowdsourcing. But I think you&#8217;ve changed my mind about that. And I am definitely thinking about how I could crowdsource certain aspects of my AI project involving classification of concepts. So, that&#8217;s something I&#8217;m going to be thinking about and might send [inaudible] to follow up on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The first thing that I&#8217;m thinking about is kind of related to what Jess said about the quest that you aren&#8217;t actually trying to achieve. And I think that my thought on it is the way that curiosity makes you think differently about things. Because I guess I&#8217;ve always kind of thought of curiosity as, “Yes, we want to find out. We want to know the answer.” And so, this idea that curiosity isn&#8217;t necessarily about finding out the answer, the fact that it is more about, I believe the phrase you used Pamela was &#8216;the pursuit of the magic&#8217; of not knowing something is a very different way of looking at that, that I really like. And I also noticed, when you were talking about creating a bug in HTML you were like, “Oh, so exciting!” And my first instinct was like, “Creating a bug isn&#8217;t exciting. It&#8217;s the worst.” But actually no, I get it. It is exciting. It&#8217;s exciting because you&#8217;re doing something new and you&#8217;re pushing the boundaries and that means breaking something. But I think that&#8217;s related again to curiosity making you feel differently about things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And then there&#8217;s one other thing I wanted to mention, which was I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot in general lately in my life about the tenuous path that we all take. Like, how did I end up here right where I am now? And what decisions in my life caused me to be on the correct path to be where I am right now? Because I feel like a lot of those decisions are at the time, they&#8217;re flippant or whatever. And it means that this path that I&#8217;ve taken to my current life was kind of tenuous in some ways. And I&#8217;ve been thinking about that a lot and I was thinking about it very strongly while you were talking about your background. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Because you mentioned that you didn&#8217;t get your CS degree because you didn&#8217;t want to do homework about hockey. And I feel like that&#8217;s one of those moments that I&#8217;ve been thinking about that&#8217;s like, “Well, if this had been a little bit different, everything could have gone in a different direction and it would be totally different.” And we talked too about loving Battlestar Galactica and getting interested in space. And it&#8217;s these little things that seem flippant or seem maybe inconsequential at the time are big things on the path of your life and how you end up at the destination that you end up. And so, I guess I don&#8217;t even necessarily have a thought about that. But it was playing into something that I&#8217;ve been thinking about a lot lately, so thanks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, in having this conversation, one of the things that keeps being brought home to me is the importance of not being in isolation. The importance of talking to other people, bouncing ideas around, of coding within an environment, of recognizing GitHub and staying engaged and staying active and not having zombie code. The importance of recognizing I can&#8217;t do everything with my software. I need to reach out whether it be to get help with my software or to crowdsource the thing the algorithm can&#8217;t do. It&#8217;s all about collaboration with people. It&#8217;s about collaboration with the technology. And to go back to Battlestar Galactica because everything goes back to Battlestar Galactica, if we collaborate with the technology maybe we won&#8217;t get Cylons. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Our podcast is all about what you just said. It&#8217;s all about the combination of people and technology and technology as an extension of who we are as people. So, I think that&#8217;s a very fitting end to our conversation. I want to thank you so much, Pamela. This has been absolutely wonderful and very eye-opening. So, thank you so much for coming on the show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PAMELA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s really been a pleasure. Thank you so much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just want to remind our listeners that if you believe in the kinds of conversations that we have on this podcast and want to support us, you can support us at any level on our Patreon at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. And if you support us at any level you get access to our Slack community where you can have conversations with our guests and other members of the community about the topics that we&#8217;ve talked about or about whatever is on your mind. So please, visit Patreon.com and support us. And if your company is interested in being a good citizen, we&#8217;re also looking for corporate sponsorships and we have information on that at our website at GreaterThanCode.com. Thank you everyone and we will talk to you again soon. </span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content like this, please do so at </span></i><a href="https://www.paypal.me/devreps"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">paypal.me/devreps</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.</span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Pamela Gay: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/starstryder"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@starstryder</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.starstryder.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">starstryder.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:13</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Pamela Podcasting, Since&#8230;well, FOREVER!</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.astronomycast.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astronomy Cast</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cosmoquest.org/x/365daysofastronomy/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">365 Days of Astronomy</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curry"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Adam Curry</span></a></p>
<p><b>02:19 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Pamela’s Superpower: Solving Random Problems with Software</span></p>
<p><b>05:19 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Becoming a “Reluctant Coder” i.e. Coding Out of Necessity</span></p>
<p><b>10:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Battlestar Galactica</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> =&gt; Greek Mythology =&gt; Space =&gt; Astrophysics</span></p>
<p><b>14:52 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Doing What You Have To Do vs Doing What You Love To Do</span></p>
<p><b>20:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Goal of Podcasting and Target Audience</span></p>
<p><b>23:57 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Understanding and Knowing Everything: Good? Bad?</span></p>
<p><b>26:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Outsourcing Work as a Personal Loss and The Internet’s Graveyard of Abandoned Projects</span></p>
<p><b>32:06 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Open Sourcing Work Yourself for the Benefit of Others</span></p>
<p><b>36:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Writing Software to Engage People</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cosmoquest.org/x/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">CosmoQuest Citizen Science</span></a></p>
<p><b>44:22 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Crowdsourcing Requires Trust but Garners Better Results</span></p>
<p><b>48:02 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Motivation of Citizen Scientists</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/cosmoquestx"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@cosmoquestx</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Join Our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Jessica:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> The layers of people in software and people in software and how we’re all learning. It gets hard to separate the people from the technology. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Also, having goals you DON’T want to achieve.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Seeing crowdsourcing being successful.</span></p>
<p><b>Ja]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Pamela Gay: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/starstryder"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@starstryder</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.starstryder.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">starstryder.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:13</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Pamela Podcasting, Since&#8230;well, FOREVER!</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.astronomycast.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astronomy Cast</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cosmoquest.org/x/365daysofastronomy/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">365 Days of Astronomy</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curry"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Adam Curry</span></a></p>
<p><b>02:19 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Pamela’s Superpower: Solving Random Problems with Software</span></p>
<p><b>05:19 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Becoming a “Reluctant Coder” i.e. Coding Out of Necessity</span></p>
<p><b>10:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Battlestar Galactica</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> =&gt; Greek Mythology =&gt; Space =&gt; Astrophysics</span></p>
<p><b>14:52 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Doing What You Have To Do vs Doing What You Love To Do</span></p>
<p><b>20:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Goal of Podcasting and Target Audience</span></p>
<p><b>23:57 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Understanding and Knowing Everything: Good? Bad?</span></p>
<p><b>26:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Outsourcing Work as a Personal Loss and The Internet’s Graveyard of Abandoned Projects</span></p>
<p><b>32:06 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Open Sourcing Work Yourself for the Benefit of Others</span></p>
<p><b>36:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Writing Software to Engage People</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://cosmoquest.org/x/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">CosmoQuest Citizen Science</span></a></p>
<p><b>44:22 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Crowdsourcing Requires Trust but Garners Better Results</span></p>
<p><b>48:02 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Motivation of Citizen Scientists</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/cosmoquestx"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@cosmoquestx</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Join Our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Jessica:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> The layers of people in software and people in software and how we’re all learning. It gets hard to separate the people from the technology. </span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Also, having goals you DON’T want to achieve.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Seeing crowdsourcing being successful.</span></p>
<p><b>Ja]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Pamela.jpg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Pamela.jpg"></googleplay:image>
										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/1065/059-science-all-the-things-with-pamela-gay.mp3" length="56666267" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>yes</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>Yes</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>59:02</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>058: Kindness and Patience with Tara Scherner de la Fuente</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/058-kindness-and-patience-with-tara-scherner-de-la-fuente/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 13 Dec 2017 05:00:31 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=1057</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Tara Scherner de la Fuente joins us to talk about conflating patience with kindness, company culture, advice for early career developers, and remote working.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Tara Scherner de la Fuente joins us to talk about conflating patience with kindness, company culture, advice for early career developers, and remote working.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tara Scherner de la Fuente: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/MediaRemedial"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@MediaRemedial</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.mediaremedial.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">mediaremedial.com</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/GoatUserStories"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@GoatUserStories</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to Episode 111010 of the Greater Than Code Podcast!</span></p>
<p><b>02:09</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Tara’s Superpower and Origin Story: Patience</span></p>
<p><b>04:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Conflating Patience with Kindness</span></p>
<p><b>07:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Is writing code making us less thoughtful? AKA Patience in the Workplace</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://jlelliotton.blogspot.com/p/the-economic-value-of-rapid-response.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Economic Value of Rapid Response Time</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (The Doherty Threshold) </span></p>
<p><b>16:22 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Warning Signs that a Company’s Culture is Not a Good One; Also, is it the company or is it individuals within a company?</span></p>
<p><b>22:59 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Looking for and Interviewing for a Job at a Less Toxic Environment</span></p>
<p><b>33:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What does it mean to be a developer?</span></p>
<p><b>36:33 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Interviewing and Privilege</span></p>
<p><b>39:35 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Advice for Early Career Developers</span></p>
<p><b>44:10 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Remote Work Culture</span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Being patient and kind.</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Software development is always something you can continue to improve at.</span></p>
<p><b>Tara:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> People don’t have to be exactly like us to be a person that we want to work with. Being different can be an asset.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Interviewing somebody should be able finding out how they think and not about what they necessary know at the moment.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE: </b> Hello and welcome to Episode 111010 of the Greater Than Code Podcast. I am Coraline Ada Ehmke and I am joined by the lovely and talented Astrid Countee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Coraline. And I am also here with my great friend Sam Livingston-Grey.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello, thank you. And I’m here to introduce our guest today. Our guest, Tara Scherner de la Fuente is a Ruby and Rails developer at Allovue. She’s had other careers in academia, human resources, and private investigation. And she has an expensive t-shirt collection and masquerades as a goat for the Twitter account @GoatUserStories, which if you’re not following it, you really should be. Tara pair-programs with her cat Lulu via a remote/distributed/caffeinated living room office in sunny Portland, Oregon. Welcome to the show, Tara.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. It’s really nice to be here, especially since it’s not sunny. I’m really not a fan of the sun.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I’m not either.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is that okay to admit here? [Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was in South Africa in February and, very sunny. We were on African savanna. I had to wear a cardigan everywhere I went to keep the sun off of me. One day in a cab I forgot my cardigan and I was sitting on the side of the car and the sun was shining through the window onto my arm. And I ended up breaking out in hives. And when I got back from South Africa, I had an appointment to get a tattoo on my right arm. And luckily because of my sleeve length or the way the car was designed, the hives stopped just below where my tattoo was going to go, which was very fortuitous. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And my tattoo artist was like, “Coraline, what’s up with the skin on your arm?” And I was like, “Oh, I’m allergic to the sun.” And he just looks at me and says, “You are so fucking goth.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Took the words right out of my mouth.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You really don’t like the sun. [Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Inaudible]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It burns.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So Tara, we like to start off every episode asking our guest what their superpower is and how they discovered it. So, what do you think?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Honestly, I think my superpower is probably patience. It sounds awful actually, in some ways, to talk about having a superpower. But I think that superpower is mine. I can appreciate standing in a long line because it gives me an opportunity to think. I need a ton of patience with myself and with code when I’m working on it. And so yeah, I think patience is my superpower. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE: </b> Were you always a patient person? Or is that something you developed as you grew up?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Except with the sun, I think I am [Laughs] very patient. Sun, traffic, and bad internet connections are the only things that really throw me off. But I think even as a child I was a patient person, other than that first trip to Disneyland, which then I actually don’t really like Disneyland anymore. Man, I’m talking about a lot of things I don’t like today. But [Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, just go with it. Just go with it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] I’m just going with it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It’s my negative influence. I’m sorry.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] I’m getting more goth as I sit here. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I actually think that is a really great superpower. I was listening to a podcast the other day and it was talking about crime as a disease. And it was describing a program that they were trying to do some sort of intervention with kids who were growing up in areas where there’s a lot of violence. And one of the things that they described was how important it is to take a moment. So, something happens, take a moment before you respond. Because the people who do are way less likely to do something that’s going to cause violence, that’s going to cause them to do something that’s going to change their life in a negative way. So, I think patience is kind of not really talked about that much but it’s actually a huge superpower that I don’t think most of us have, honestly. Because we’re not really socialized to care.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I remember thinking that when smartphones were really popular, it took a long time for me to even get a cellphone, and then a long time for me to get a smartphone. And I remember thinking that I didn’t want a smartphone because I thought it would take away from my ability to be patient while standing in lines [Laughs] because I would no longer have to rely on my own thinking and my own ideas about what was going on in the world. And I knew that that would probably disappear. And it’s true that sometimes even when I’m waiting in a line and I pull out the cellphone, I think, “You really didn’t want to be doing this [Laughs] back in the day. And now here you are. Oh well.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Tara, I tend to conflate patience with a sense of kindness toward the world and kindness toward yourself. Do you feel like there’s something to that in your own life?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that patience does provide a sense of quietness and thoughtfulness about the world at times. And I think that those two ideas can be conflated and they can work in tandem with one another. I’m not sure that I’m as kind as I’d like to be. [Laughs] So, maybe I hope that patience will help build that into me. But kindness, I wish that was my superpower. It’s certainly one I strive for.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And it’s really difficult I think as a software developer. We’re often placed in situations where patience is not expected and in fact is not rewarded. And really, neither is kindness.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s a good point. I’ve certainly experienced that in my coding life, both simply internal [Chuckles] when I’m sitting there with just me and the code. But also, in some of the environments that I’m in. You know, kindness and patience can do wonders for a working environment and also even just a personal environment.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that’s kind of sad though, because patience is a trait that we often have to have if we’re going to become programmers because we have to be willing to sit there and struggle with the computer for hours at a stretch and try to figure out what the heck is going on. And kindness is one of those things that if you can summon a reserve of kindness when you’re reviewing some code that you can’t figure out what the heck it’s doing, that really helps you figure it out and have some patience to be able to deal with it and to be able to essentially forgive the person who wrote it, especially if that person is yourself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s a good point. I do actually, I live alone and I only work remotely. Well, I live with Lulu the cat. But I live alone and work remotely so I do find myself talking to the code. And I would say that I’m rather kind with the code…</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When I speak with it. And I do ask it questions about what it’s doing and what it thinks it’s doing or where it’s hiding its secrets. But that patience is truly important as you mentioned, Sam. You’ve always got to try that one more thing, right? And you have to have the patience to think of the next 43 one -more-thing’s and keep trying those as well. So, it’s important to be kind with yourself too, when you realize it takes into the 40 tries to get the thing working.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I recently was reading about the Doherty Threshold which I learned about by watching this amazing show called Halt and Catch Fire which I highly recommend.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love that show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. So, the Doherty Threshold came out of this paper by a couple of IBM engineers. And the prevalent thinking before their research was that the time it took for a computer to respond to a typed command which back in the 80s was between two and three seconds, the prevailing wisdom was that that gave you time to think about the next thing that you would tell the computer to do. And this paper dispelled that myth and said that the faster the computer responds, the more productive you would actually become as a programmer. And there was like a 130% increase in developer productivity when they got the response time down to 0.3 seconds. But I really wonder if we lost something by having this immediacy to the way we write code. Is that making us less thoughtful?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, my own personal experience in dealing with unit testing is that when the tests take a couple of seconds, I’ll sit there and deal with it. But if they give me immediate, instant feedback as soon as I hit enter, I can keep my state of flow much more easily</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE: </b> That’s true.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I think there are trade-offs. I really like narrowing down my test to that one test I can run locally that’ll pop right up. But on the other hand, Sam introduced me, as a Ruby on Rails developer, I am now a Ruby, Rails and Ember developer theoretically. I think I have now written two things in Ember and it has been with assistance. But I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but restarting the Rails Server happens pretty quickly. Restarting the Ember server, I can make some coffee and I can go and I can pick out a snack. And I have time to think about things. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So, I think there are a couple of things happening. I can stay in that flow when I am working in Rails, especially since I know it well. And maybe it’s because I don’t know Ember well that I appreciate how long it takes for the Ember server to come back up [Laughs] because I have that time to think to myself, “Okay. There are about 50 things I don’t know how to do. How am I going to do those [Laughs] when this server pops back up? And do I even know what I’m checking next? I’m not sure.” So, I can appreciate the different levels that technology has changed. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> You did make me think that I’ve heard a similar story about typewriters and about how that’s why they made the keyboards like they did for typewriters because back in the olden days I guess when the keys would hit the paper they’d get all tangled up if they were say, laid out alphabetically, if people were going in the right order. I’m not sure if that’s true or not, but I love that we keep retelling stories and they change with time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have heard this particular apocryphal story as well. So, it must be true.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There you go. That’s it. Abe Lincoln said it was true on the internet and there we have it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, the thing I was alluding to before is that patience isn’t always rewarded in the workplace. I think a lot of people work in so-called Agile shops where you’re expected to deliver a certain number of points every sprint and the pressure is kind of on and you might have a Scrum master who’s tracking your velocity and saying, “Tara, we expect you to deliver 12 points this sprint. And so far, the burn-down looks like you’re only on track to deliver 8.” How do you communicate that sometimes these things take time and that estimation is a lie and that you need other people to be patient with you too?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The wild guess form of estimation. Yeah, you know it’s interesting that you ask that question because I did recently leave my former employer. And we didn’t have a problem so much with the “guesstimation” of the work that needed to be done or the drive, but there was a serious drive often driven by one particular client. And it drove some folks so hard. We had two different employees be hospitalized as a result of the stress. And some people might argue that it wasn’t just as a result of the stress, but I think it was pretty clear that that was a large contributing factor. And to be in an environment like that is incredibly stressful. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It does require… honestly if you’re going to do your best work for an employer, and I honestly believe that if I have accepted a job and said that I’ll do it, that I want to give that my best effort, my best work. And if I’m in, then I’m in. And if I’m not in emotionally or mentally, then I’ll get out. And I think that that requires patience with the employer and the environment that you’re in when you come across situations like that where there is an immense amount of stress. And to be patient with the environment and just to be able to accept your limitations and just do your best work and filter out what is happening there is a very difficult skill. And it’s not even just a skill. Sometimes, we simply don’t have the resources to be able to manage that kind of stress. But I think patience and kindness come into play quite a bit. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And I will say, I am so pleased with the coworkers that I had at that last position. Because everyone was so supportive of the people who needed to step away and take care of themselves physically and mentally and emotionally. And everyone was really rallied around those folks. And that was wonderful to experience. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Anyone who knows my story knows that I had the opposite experience with a big company recently where I too was hospitalized and I did not get that kind of support. So, it’s amazing and wonderful that you did feel supported like that. But at what point are you punished for that patience? At what point do you need to decide, “This is not a good environment for me,” and what do you do?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, that’s absolutely an important question and I think it definitely varies with the individual. I’ve now left that particular company and one person who was in that situation chose to leave and one person has chosen to stay. And so, it’s definitely a very personal experience and a personal decision to make. And I don’t think there’s one right or wrong answer. As you spoke, I began to think that what I felt was support from the individuals that I worked with. But of course, individuals make up that collective company experience, right? And where is that boundary between, “Here are the people that I work with who I feel supported by,” and at what point is that the company where I’m not feeling the support? And I think some of that probably comes into play as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really like that you’re trying to find that distinction between the people and the company because it is absolutely okay to have loyalty to people. But a company, a corporation, cannot have loyalty towards you. And so, it shouldn’t be reciprocated because it can’t be. And yeah, I struggle sometimes to figure out where to draw that line as well. Although sometimes, I draw it along hierarchical boundaries. Like, the people who are my peers, they can be my friends, but the people who are one or two levels of management up, I need to treat with a little bit more care.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that’s an important distinction. And it’s difficult, at least I’ve found it difficult, to figure out where to draw that line and where that loyalty lies, especially in a smaller company where you know the “sea-level employees” as it were. You’ve maybe sat next to them at dinner or traded, I don’t know, goat noises with them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hypothetically, that could have happened, and compared your best bleats with somebody at that level. It’s hard at that point to really say, “You know what? I like this individual person and this is a person that I feel some affection towards,” and then these people make up this company that is maybe doing some things I’m uncomfortable with. And that is difficult to navigate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, one thing that I was thinking about when we were talking about possible topics for this show is, are there warning signs that people should look for that may indicate that the company’s culture is crossing a threshold from healthy into something that you need an extraordinary amount of patience to deal with?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There are certainly warning signs. I would say in the last experience that I had, it was a struggle to see those warning signs until things were changing. But it wasn’t completely clear. And then as I described it to someone at the time, suddenly I was Bambi in the forest and all the animals seem to be running past me, fleeing from the forest fire. At which point I thought, “You know, I should probably look around a little closer.” And so, that was beyond a warning sign. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But really, most of the people and the women had left, especially the women leaders in the company. We had had a really strong woman leadership and we had had really strong people of color leadership and they were fleeing the company. And if that isn’t a warning sign, I don’t know what is. I think if your strong leaders who are not in say, the majority vision of the company, if you’re non-white male colleagues, that’s probably a sign. And of course, it’s not just them. But that is probably a clear warning sign that the folks who maybe feel marginalized in different ways in the world begin to leave the company and they are leaving in droves, there’s no better warning sign that you can get, that the people who get the shaft on a regular basis in life are suddenly leaving the environment that you’ve been working in and striving towards, that is probably a clear warning sign.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, I have struggled with this in some of my own experiences of trying to understand, “Is it the company? Is it certain individuals?” Because it could be really hard to tell. And I was wondering Tara, what you thought about when there are certain people who may raise a flag and say, “I have a problem,” or, “Something is going on that I think is wrong,” that are not necessarily the most reputable, then how much should you really take that into account? Because I wonder sometimes. Like, I’ve had that experience where everything was good until it was really, really bad. And then I was trying to understand, did I just miss all the signs or did it really change that quickly? And one of the things that I realized was that part of the problem was some of the people who were saying that there’s a problem are people who were not very reputable employees themselves. So, it’s hard to tell. Are you complaining because you complain or are you complaining because there’s something real going on? So, if you have any ways to try to suss out the difference?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It’s interesting that you bring that up because I was just having a conversation this morning with a former colleague of mine. Well, there are a couple of things going on there. First of all, I think there’s one thing when say, someone brings up some issues and it’s someone I haven’t necessarily bonded with or I don’t necessarily view them as a reputable source. And then there’s also the person who’s bringing up issues who isn’t seen necessarily as valuable or important, it would seem, to the employer and doesn’t have the reputation or just the perceived value from the employer. And I think there can be a couple of different things going on there. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So certainly, if it’s someone who is raising concerns where I’m not really sure what to believe, I would say right now we’re seeing a whole lot of assaults on women being reported in the media right now from really well-known people. And I think it’s incredibly important to believe what we’re hearing when we first hear it. And I think it’s certainly important that just like a lot of these things aren’t look into when they happen, that we do look into them. But I think believing when somebody says, “I’ve been hurt,” or, “I’m experiencing something that isn’t right,” I think it’s important that we step into that with the belief that there’s somebody who needs protection or there’s somebody who needs an ally or there’s somebody who needs support. And I do think if we can do that, that that’s best. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Now, in terms of when action really takes place, it probably takes at least two people in either of those scenarios to say, “You know what? There’s something that isn’t right that’s happening.” And it can be somebody who you’re not sure you believe but you want to be open to that at the beginning. But I do think it’s human nature maybe to want some backup or you want somebody else to say, “Well heck, the #MeToo hashtag.” Maybe if one woman says it then it’s one woman and you want to support that person and you want to believe that person. But it does help just because we’re human beings to hear it from more than one source. And so, that is a big thing. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But I do think it’s really important especially as I think about my colleague who didn’t have the reputation as a solid, say, a tech leader. She reported some things and it wasn’t taken seriously by her supervisor, by human resources, by anyone. And I think it’s so important that as colleagues we at least try to support one another. We don’t need to require all of the forest animals to run past us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That we should be able to reach out a hand and say, “I don’t know what you’re experiencing. I haven’t experienced it. But let’s figure this out.” And at least to be able to listen at the very beginning [Chuckles], to be able to listen. And certainly as more and more people left my company for example, each one was at least a yellow flag, if not a red flag. So, I think in some ways you start that way. There’s one person or there are two people, or there’s more talk about a thing and your eyes get wider and wider. And hopefully, you know something is going on before the forest fire whips you in the ass.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So Tara, we talked about work environments and warning signs and when it’s time to get out. I’m curious about the natural consequence of finding yourself in a toxic environment and that is looking for a new, hopefully less toxic environment. So, when I’m interviewing, one of the things I’m definitely trying to figure out is, “Does this company value the things that I value?” and “Are we aligned in our values?” And that’s a very difficult thing to suss out during the interview process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think you’re absolutely right that it is difficult. I’m not sure I had the best approach to looking for a new job while working in a toxic environment, which is to say I never reached the point where I began looking for new work. And I know plenty of people did and they got out. And plenty of people have done so since I left, and they have gotten out. But I sort of go from, “I am here and I am giving you my best work,” to “If a position comes across my plate, I am going to look at it. And I’m going to see what it is that you’re offering.” And it could be a technical recruiter reaching out or in my most recent case, it was former colleagues that I had worked with at a previous position. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And what happened is apparently I really like animals rushing past me, because I had a former colleague reach out to me about a potential position and wanted to meet up with me and I made that arrangement. And within the same week, three different former colleagues in addition to that person reached out to me about positions, all from the same company. So, let me tell you, networking is important. [Chuckles] It is important, too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Chuckles] Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>To bond with your colleagues in at least natural ways, in being yourself, because four different colleagues, four different companies reached out to me, all in the same week. Which is again, I was not looking for a position. So for me, this happened very naturally. And I talk with inanimate objects and I also believe that the universe was talking to me. there’s no clear sign that the universe is saying, “You don’t seem to be actively looking for a job so here are four people who would like to work with you again. Why don’t you speak with them?” And so, that is exactly what I did. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And I do think for me, the experience of interviewing again was thank goodness not as stressful as the first time I was looking for jobs and not as stressful as the second time I was looking for jobs. And it certainly helped that I had been referred by somebody at each of these positions. That was a big thing. But I was still looking for the same thing I think all of us look for when we are going through the daunting technical interviewing process, which is just often torment. And I think it’s easier when you’re less stressed and you can’t regulate that necessarily. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But it’s easier to spot some of the things, some of the warning signs in the interview process about, “Here I’m with, this is the type of person that I’ll be working with.” And this person maybe asks questions that aren’t necessarily relevant to what I’ve been doing or even what I’ll do at the next company.” And that’s a big warning sign to me. Someone who cares about those technical questions more than they care about what I’m like to work with is a warning sign for me. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I actually was invited to reinterview with a company that I had interviewed with before about a year and a half earlier. And I actually remembered one of the interviewers’ questions before I went into that interview. And I thought it would be really interesting if that person interviewed me again and asked the same sort of gotcha question. And I’m going to look up the answer. And I looked up the answer so that I was ready for it. And sure enough, there he was, and there was his gotcha question. And I came off looking awesome. And I thought, “I don’t want to work with this person.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is what happened.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Was it a gotcha that was relevant in any way to the work? Or was it one of those invert a linked list in linear time kind of a thing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was minorly relevant to the work…</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span>I</b>n that it asked basically about the difference between include and extend in Ruby.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mm.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Which, I mean, it’s in Ruby. So, that is the programming language that I use. But do I ever necessarily need to think about that or can I ever not just look that up if I need to know that know? [Chuckles] And…</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mmhmm.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is the difference really important to discuss? Not really. And somebody else had me, somebody else in that same interview session because of course I met with, I don’t know, 50… no, I didn’t meet with 50 people. I think I met with four or five. And I was asked a lot of questions about things I don’t necessarily do or haven’t done, things like in the Inspector in Chrome and where to find different things. And you know, I mean I can figure that shit out if I [Laughs] Find something out in the Inspector, in the Developer Tools. I mean, I can figure that out if I need to find out where the Console is or need to find out how fast something is loading on the page. That just isn’t the key things that I’ve been doing. If I’m a Ruby on Rails programmer, that isn’t the key thing. It is something that I might check later. I might say, “Oh, is this faster than this?” But that isn’t a key element of my work. And so, even some of those clues like the things that are being asked of you, do they know what you do day-to-day? Do they have questions that are going to be relevant with what working with you is like? Those are the things I care about. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And I was very fortunate the company that I did end up accepting a position with, I think part of it was their warm, relevant, technical interview style. I did also meet with four different people with that experience. But some of it was, “Bring us some code that you have worked on and talk to us about why you made the decisions that you made. And walk us through the code.” So, some of it, they got to see some of the technical things that I’d done. But it was also very relevant to what I’d done, including my decision-making process, which is really important. They had me pair with a junior developer to see what my patience is like with a junior developer. And as we know, that’s my superpower. So, it went really well. But [Laughs] But also, what pairing with me is like. And so, that was a great experience. And I think one or two of the other conversations were conversations, not necessarily, “Do you know the difference between include and extend?” And so honestly, that interviewing style, they were selling themselves on me, because they cared about what was relevant to me and to my life. And one of them said the word “guys” and corrected himself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Without me prompting him. And I have found that after joining the company, that I see similar senses of awareness of things that have happened among more than just the one awesome person. But there are many awesome people within the company. And that interviewing style really reflected what I’ve found now that I’ve joined the company. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So, I do think that even if you don’t get somebody who’s like a total A-hole during an interview, you can pick up on how they’ve thought about their interviewing process. Maybe it’s that private investigator background that I’ve got, but those are the clues I’m looking for. there’s nobody who’s going to say straight-up, “I hate cats,” or something. But they’re going to give you clues as to who they are and what that environment is going to be like. So, I’m sorry. I kind of went on there for a while. But that interviewing experience, it is daunting. And you have to look for those clues and not rely on just the animals fleeing the forest. [Laughs] </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. My most recent interview experience, I work at [Stitch Fix] now. And [Stitch Fix] has what they call their OS. And it’s based on kindness, being bright, and being a leader. And I found that that was really reflected in the interview process. And I always felt really well-treated. And those were the criteria they were evaluating me on. So of course, there was a technical exercise and did have to walk through code because that’s a core skill set. But that wasn’t the majority of the interview experience. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And I got an interesting reminder of that as I started taking part in the interview process for new candidates. There was a pairing exercise that we did. And I was shadowing the main person doing the interview to be able to huddle after the interview. And this person was like, “Well Coraline, what did you think?” and I said that I was alarmed at some of the mistakes that the person had made and I had questions about the depth of their technical knowledge. And the other interviewer was like, “Yeah, but did they seem bright? Programming can be improved really easily and they’ll learn from their peers and there will be code reviews and they will learn and grow on the job. But did they meet our criteria for kindness and brightness and having leadership qualities?” And that was a great reminder to me that that’s what we value, that’s what we interview for.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s a great response.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For an interviewer to have. So, I’m thankful Sam was one of my first interviewers for my very first engineering position. And I’m [Laughs] I’m really grateful that he leaned on appreciating my person and potential more than my<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span>ability to code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Aw, shucks. Yeah, it’s interesting. Yeah Tara, you were talking about people who ask just little detailed questions about the Chrome Inspector or include versus extend. And I feel like that belies an understanding of what it is to be a developer. Is a developer somebody who has a vast collection of tricks and individual bits of trivia or is a developer somebody who has a mindset that they can use whatever tools are at their disposal to build something useful for another human being? And it sounds like Coraline, at [Stitch Fix] you’re aiming towards the latter as well. So, that’s really cool to hear.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would agree with what you said Tara, about it being about the conversation. Because when I think back on some of the best job experiences I’ve had, the interview was getting to know me in some sort of way and not just a ticking off of, “Do you have this, this, this, this, and this?” And then having had other experiences and also helped with hiring, what I think about now is if you’re calling me in for an interview, how are you spending our time? From the interviewee perspective, I think about that, because I feel like there are some things that you can determine prior to asking me to come in for an interview. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So, if we’re going to spend an hour together and you’re going to spend 45 minutes of that going over things that are something that’s not really relevant or something that’s just about trying to assess me, then it makes me question as a manager, “Are you going to do that too?” Because I don’t really want to have a manager who can’t see the forest for the trees. I’ve been in those experiences where you’re really a good team player, you’re working hard, you’re helping other people, and then when it comes time for evaluation it’s like, “Well, you needed to do this many. You didn’t do this many.” And it seems like that’s not the big picture. And although I do understand having to meet certain things, you should think about, you should weigh that against the impact somebody has on the team. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And I think one of the things that I’ve started to do which has also been helpful is in the interview process I try to ask them a question about something that would be related to their management style that would help me understand how they think about assessing people. So, it’s usually something like, “What would success look like?” because their version of that answer varies a lot depending upon how they think. Usually, I think people don’t get to ask these questions because they usually sit back and like, “Whoa.” But it helps me try to figure out how you think about me, like how you spend the time. And then how you answer questions that are qualitative, not just a yes or no or a specific answer. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It matters to me because then it tells me something about what you’ll probably do when I’m working there. Like, if I have a question, are you going to spend time to actually give me a thoughtful answer or are you going to push me off and tell me to just not worry about it? Because I think those types of things contribute over time to that toxic culture that you try to get out of and you can’t always see when you first get there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love how you framed that. And that’s such a specific piece of advice that’s work taking, asking that open-ended question like “What does success mean to you?” You can get so much information just from that question, not only the content but how they communicate with you. And that’s a great tip right there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things that I struggle with in working with early-career developers and mentoring them is I became very aware that I have quite a bit of privilege when it comes to interviewing because as someone who is highly experienced, who’s been in this industry for over 20 years, I am easily valued, that I’m in demand and I can pick the company I work for. But early-career developers, they’re looking for companies that are willing to take a chance on someone who doesn’t have that experience and they’re much more limited in the companies that are willing to do that, willing to hire someone who’s early-career and develop them and provide a fostering environment. So I’m really torn about telling them questions they should ask to evaluate the environment when I know that their choices are going to be so limited.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s a really important awareness to have, because it’s true. I would consider myself still in those early years and person who has to look up the difference between include and extend before getting that anticipated question. So, I definitely don’t have my pick of places. But it is important to have an awareness of things that should be red flags and things you can work with, and things that you can actually maybe improve and/or it can be a really great experience, even if there might be… it’s not the ideal interviewing scenario, for example. Not everyone can work for a warm company where people are aware of all the things. But can you thrive there? Can you learn? These are important things to consider, depending on what it is you’re looking for. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Certainly, you still don’t want to work with A-holes. And I have… I don’t know why I’ll say ‘fuck’ but I won’t say ‘asshole’. That makes no sense. [Laughs] But I did have an interview way back in the beginning, looking for my first job, and I had an interview with somebody who just went on for about 20 or 30 minutes before he passed me off to the coders who would actually evaluate my skill. But he just went on this monologue for about 20 to 30 minutes. And so at the end, he literally sat back in his chair and went, “So, why should I hire you?” And I just thought, “Oh please, don’t.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do not hire me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can I go now?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] Yeah. And then I did have to go do some Fibonacci in the next room. But I just thought, “Please, do not like me. I want to leave. Now.” Sometimes even when you’re looking for your very first job, there are places you [Laughs] should not go.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Chuckles] Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And that would be one. I went back to my coding bootcamp and reported that no one should go for an interview there. [Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Coraline, what kind of advice do you give right now?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it’s really critical, especially for your first or second job, that you’re in a nurturing environment. And I don’t believe we have a pipeline problem so much as we have a retention problem. And people who have taken a chance, people who have invested in learning and getting themselves in the position where they’re ready to be a developer, I hate it when I see those people saying, “This is not for me,” and it’s the result of a toxic workplace. So, I do share tips for trying to figure out if it’s going to be a nurturing environment for you. I tell them, you don’t want to be the first early-career developer at a company if you can help it. You want to talk to other people who are in a similar situation and find out what they’re experience has been like. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And use the whisper network. Early-career developers don’t have access to that whisper network necessarily because they haven’t had the networking experience and they haven’t built up that collection of trusted people in their professional lives. So, one of the things that I try to do is get them connected as quickly as possible so that they do have people they can ask those questions of. Like, “Has anyone here worked at X company and what was it like and would you recommend that I work there?” Those personal experiences that their peers have had I think are the most critical questions that they should be asking even before they get themselves into an interview situation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that’s really great advice. you’re absolutely right. It’s so hard to establish that network of people who can give you that key advice. And it’s also sometimes hard to discern whether they’ve had experience with a newer developer. And it’s important to be able to ask those questions. That’s probably a good question to ask in an interview for a newer developer, is whether or not the company has had experience developing developers. [Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or have they even thought about what it’s going to take for them to be able to support a new developer?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I’ve heard some rough stories out there. I was very fortunate to come into that first position. Thank you Sam, again, for hiring me. [Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Happy to do it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or speaking up for me. And you know, I think that was a really unique situation also to join a company that had developed its own internal bootcamp and so had had some experience with bringing on junior developers, some of whom they raised from infancy development, as it were. And so, that was a very unique experience. And I really hope that more experiences, not necessarily an internal bootcamp, but more companies do think hard about what it will be like to bring on a junior developer and what do we need to do to build that infrastructure to make that a successful experience for a developer. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>On the other side of that, I find that injecting early-career developers into a development culture, those are the people who are going to make the biggest changes. Those are the people who can see their culture for what it really is even before day one, even during that interview process. And it’s really important to listen to them and ask them questions about, “How is it here?” and “How are you being supported here?” and “What do you like about it here?” and “What should change?” Because those are the people who have the perspective that as a more seasoned employee or someone who’s been there for a couple of years, you don’t see these things. You need that fresh perspective. And early-career developers bring that perspective to you. They’re such a valuable resource on so many different levels.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I would agree with that. Even though as I was thinking about it, in some ways your junior developers are going to be the canary in your company, right? And hopefully, they… </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hopefully they thrive. We don’t want to go around… oh dear, I’ve stumbled into a metaphor about killing junior developers. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But hopefully the canary thrives. Let’s just focus on that. We want the canary to thrive at the company. And if your canary is not thriving, there are changes that need to be made, absolutely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Tara, are there things that we did not cover yet that you’d like to have us talk about?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There are so many different things. You know, I will say that we touched a little bit on the fact that I work remotely. And that is another thing that can be revealed in a technical interview about what technology is set up for that interview experience. How thoughtful are the people interviewing you about timezones, if timezones are going to play a part in the role. And how well does the company work asynchronously? Those are some good questions to ask in a tech interview if you are in a position like I am where you’re going to be working remotely, and how does the company thrive like that? I think we’ve come up with some good questions both to ask and be asked and some not-so-great questions about that. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But some of those good questions to ask, if being a remote employee is important to you, is going to be, how do you work asynchronously with your colleagues? How is that supported? For example, in my current place of business there’s a strong focus on working asynchronously and stand-ups are done via a Slack bot sort of an experience. And they fly all of the remote employees or whatever means of travel, horse I suppose if you wanted to travel by horse, that could happen. But everybody comes to the headquarters in Baltimore quarterly. And I think having some awareness of the importance of bringing people together is also an important thing to ask. So, I suppose I’d just throw that in, since we did talk about tech interviews. For me, how the company is going to work with remote employees is a really important factor.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s such an amazing point, because the interview experience itself can tell you. Like, do they expect you to interview at 8am Eastern Time? </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is it ironic when you’re interviewing for a remote position and they want all the interviews to happen at headquarters?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. And you know what? You bring up a very specific example. When I did accept the position that I am currently in, I had made it through the on-camera and phone interview experience and they wanted me to fly out to New York. And part of me really wanted to not fly to headquarters. And in fact, I’ve actually never gotten a job after an in-person headquarters experience. I’ve certainly gotten in-person interviews, but not flying to a headquarters that isn’t in my city. And part of me just thought, “You know, if we can’t make this decision without me flying across the country, then maybe that isn’t a good fit for a remote employee.”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Another really, like this is really basic one, but one conversation that I have had in the past is if I&#8217;m interviewing for a company that happens to be located in my hometown and I ask them how they feel about working from home, that’s going to give you some information, too. It’s like, “Oh yeah, we work from home whenever it suits us and however it works and we’ve set ourselves up in such a way that it doesn’t really matter that much where you are because we have a remote-first approach,” versus, “Well, you know some people work from home one day a week. And we could see about maybe getting that to two.” Even that will tell you something about how they approach remote work and to some degree what their level of trust is in you as a potential employee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I never understand why it’s such a big deal. I always feel like if I come to work and I put my headphones on and I sit here all day and work, then why do I have to be here to do that? Especially if I have to commute to do it and now I’m taking time to get there, and then because the commute is bad I have to take time to get into the mode of working. And then I have to gear up for the commute later. I mean, why would you… I guess it’s just hard for me to understand why there is this resistance to having employees work remotely. Like, what is it that you think is happening that you can’t see? Because the way I feel about it is, if you have employees who aren’t working, they can not work in your office. That happens all the time. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But you should deal with those employees, as opposed to make some sort of big company-wide rule as though it’s kindergarten and we want to make sure everyone plays inside the fence. I really hate that kind of mentality. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But Astrid, how can they look over your shoulder and see what website you’re browsing if you’re at home?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know, spyware.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Corporate spyware. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I need to browse those websites. They’re important for my process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, I need to check in on social media before I dig into the next big project. That’s just how it works. But I will say, actually that experience is how I got into tech. My last position where I worked for somebody else before I got into tech, I was an Assistant Dean for a university PhD program. And we were not allowed to wear jeans to work. And there was one day that just stands out into my mind where I got dressed in the… there was a skirt involved and there was I think, I don’t know if it was a blouse, but it was a shirt of some sort. And I got… </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Battle gear.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] Battle gear is what I got into. And I parked my car. I walked up the back stairs into my office, which it happened that nobody else in my particular large room was working that day. They were off-site or something like that. So I went into my cubicle and I sat there and I did my job all day long. And then I departed in my skirt. And nobody saw me even once. No one saw me at all. And I thought, “Why did I show up here? Why couldn’t I wear jeans here?” And I made it like a career goal. I wanted to wear jeans and t-shirt every day for the rest of my life. And I thought, where can I do that? And I thought, tech. Those tech folks know what’s going on. They are wearing… </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Chuckles]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Jeans and t-shirts. And then it sort of built up on that that I became a remote employee as well. But I still wear jeans and t-shirts every day. And I have made that a career goal and a career achievement. So, I’m pretty excited about that. But honestly, that remote, I don’t know why people want to drive into a place, especially if there’s no one there to see you and what websites you’re surfing. I don’t know why people want to do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And for all you listeners who can’t actually see this, Tara is in fact wearing her Greater Than Code t-shirt today. Thank you, Tara.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am happy to do so. I’m also wearing jeans. I realize they’re off-camera. But trust me, it’s happening.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I believe you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sam, for those listeners who want a Greater Than Code t-shirt, what are their options?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, one of their options would be to go back in time to last week and catch up with me at RubyConf. Mandy shipped me literally 22 pounds of t-shirts to give away and I’ve spent two days of RubyConf dragging my carry-on around full of t-shirts and giving them away to anybody I could find. But perhaps a more reliable and non-causality-violating way to do that would be to join us and sponsor us on Patreon. If you go to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode you can sign up at any level and we’ll get you into your Slack community. But I believe $25 a month is the level at which we will send you your very own t-shirt. Somewhere in there, there’s a level that will get you stickers as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome. Tara, it’s been a great conversation. We always end our conversations with our guests with taking time to reflect on the conversation that we’ve had and think about what stood out for us and things that maybe we want to turn over in our brains a little while after the conversation is over. And I think one of the topics we opened up with really touched me, and that’s talking about patience and kindness. And I worry that I’m not as patient as I should be. I’m definitely not very patient with myself. I get frustrated with myself very, very easily. I’m definitely kinder to other people than I am to myself. And you immediately focused on being kind to yourself when we were talking about that, and being patient with yourself, and being comfortable being still with yourself. That’s something I really want to work on and that’s something I really want to reflect on. So, thank you for bringing that to the conversation. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have been thinking about that quite a bit. And because I think I also mentioned at the beginning of the conversation that I do sometimes have trouble with kindness or I struggle with things that I don’t necessarily like. And I’ve come to realize that especially with people, that the things that I don’t necessarily like in another people is something that I don’t like in myself. And so, I’ve found that if I’m kinder to myself, I can be kinder to other people who reflect those qualities that I struggle with in my own world. So, what you’ve just said and our conversation that we had earlier has made me really think about that a little more. And I too am going to work on my own kindness.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, mine is actually something that you said, Coraline, when you were relaying the experience that you had for the person who you were interviewing. And what I like about that conversation you had with the other interviewer regarding that junior developer is that it’s a great reminder that software development is something you can always continue to improve at. But being a certain type of person who is easy to work with, someone who is open to learning, that’s something that you really need to put as a priority number one. Especially as someone like me who’s newer to this whole environment, there’s a lot of emphasis on specific skills and wanting to master those skills and less emphasis on being, I guess having a certain mindset about what it means to be a software developer. And I think it’s good to have a reminder that being a certain type of person can be in a lot of ways more valuable than just a specific skill. Because being a certain type of person will allow you to gain those skills in a meaningful way that can be used and then also be useful on a team.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One point of clarification. This was not an early-career developer that we were interviewing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, okay.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Which is why… I would definitely be more patient with someone who is earlier on, but I was like… </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No shade, Coraline. No shade.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>“This person is going for a mid-level role. Shouldn’t they know this already?”</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And I was happy to be corrected on that point. But, thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I do want to hear Sam’s reflections, but before we do, I want to say that you did make me think about how important it is. We do need to build up our skills that make us the kind of person that we want to work with. We want to be the right person for the right company. But at the same time, I do think having that awareness that especially when we’re interviewing people, that they don’t need to necessarily be like us to be a person that we want to work with, and that even being different from us can be an asset to the company as a whole, just having those many different perspectives and those many different assets and strengths. I want somebody obviously who I can get along with and work well with, but I am trying to be more cognizant of the fact that someone who isn’t like me is still bringing strong, important strengths to the company, or could if we hire them.<br />
<b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, definitely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, after all that mine may be a little disappointing. But let’s go ahead anyway. So, one of the things that I took away from this is that apparently I really need to watch the show Halt and Catch Fire.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It’s an awesome show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, I have added it to my Netflix list and will sit down and try to watch it sometime soon. I also really liked, really to echo what we were just talking about, this idea that interviewing somebody should be about finding out how they think and not necessarily which set of facts they happen to know at the moment, or even which set of facts they can retrieve at the moment. And I have a lot of experience on one side of the interviewing table. But as I spend more time interviewing other people, that’s something that I really could stand to remember. So, thank you for highlighting that again.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This has been a really great conversation. Tara, I want to thank you for coming on the show and for being so open and being so honest and sharing your experiences and your thoughts. And just, thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TARA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you so much for having me. It’s not often that I get to talk with people who aren’t Lulu the cat [Laughs] during the day. So, this has been a delight.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And thank you to all our listeners and we will talk to you again very soon.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content like this, please do so at </span></i><a href="https://www.paypal.me/devreps"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">paypal.me/devreps</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.</span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tara Scherner de la Fuente: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/MediaRemedial"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@MediaRemedial</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.mediaremedial.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">mediaremedial.com</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/GoatUserStories"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@GoatUserStories</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to Episode 111010 of the Greater Than Code Podcast!</span></p>
<p><b>02:09</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Tara’s Superpower and Origin Story: Patience</span></p>
<p><b>04:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Conflating Patience with Kindness</span></p>
<p><b>07:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Is writing code making us less thoughtful? AKA Patience in the Workplace</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://jlelliotton.blogspot.com/p/the-economic-value-of-rapid-response.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Economic Value of Rapid Response Time</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (The Doherty Threshold) </span></p>
<p><b>16:22 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Warning Signs that a Company’s Culture is Not a Good One; Also, is it the company or is it individuals within a company?</span></p>
<p><b>22:59 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Looking for and Interviewing for a Job at a Less Toxic Environment</span></p>
<p><b>33:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What does it mean to be a developer?</span></p>
<p><b>36:33 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Interviewing and Privilege</span></p>
<p><b>39:35 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Advice for Early Career Developers</span></p>
<p><b>44:10 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Remote Work Culture</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Join Our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">Support us via </b><a style="background-color: #ffffff; font-size: 1.8rem;" href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Being patient and kind.</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Software development is always something you can continue to improve at.</span></p>
<p><b>Tara:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> People don’t have to be exactly like us to be a person that we want to work with. Being different can be an asset.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Interviewing somebody should be able finding out how they think and not about what they necessary know at the moment.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE: </b> Hello and welcome to Episode 111010 of the Greater Than Code Podcast. I am Coraline Ada Ehmke and I am joined by the lovely and talented Astrid Countee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-conver]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tara Scherner de la Fuente: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/MediaRemedial"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@MediaRemedial</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.mediaremedial.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">mediaremedial.com</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/GoatUserStories"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@GoatUserStories</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to Episode 111010 of the Greater Than Code Podcast!</span></p>
<p><b>02:09</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Tara’s Superpower and Origin Story: Patience</span></p>
<p><b>04:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Conflating Patience with Kindness</span></p>
<p><b>07:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Is writing code making us less thoughtful? AKA Patience in the Workplace</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://jlelliotton.blogspot.com/p/the-economic-value-of-rapid-response.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Economic Value of Rapid Response Time</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (The Doherty Threshold) </span></p>
<p><b>16:22 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Warning Signs that a Company’s Culture is Not a Good One; Also, is it the company or is it individuals within a company?</span></p>
<p><b>22:59 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Looking for and Interviewing for a Job at a Less Toxic Environment</span></p>
<p><b>33:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What does it mean to be a developer?</span></p>
<p><b>36:33 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Interviewing and Privilege</span></p>
<p><b>39:35 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Advice for Early Career Developers</span></p>
<p><b>44:10 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Remote Work Culture</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Join Our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">Support us via </b><a style="background-color: #ffffff; font-size: 1.8rem;" href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Being patient and kind.</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Software development is always something you can continue to improve at.</span></p>
<p><b>Tara:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> People don’t have to be exactly like us to be a person that we want to work with. Being different can be an asset.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Interviewing somebody should be able finding out how they think and not about what they necessary know at the moment.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE: </b> Hello and welcome to Episode 111010 of the Greater Than Code Podcast. I am Coraline Ada Ehmke and I am joined by the lovely and talented Astrid Countee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-conver]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Tara.jpg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Tara.jpg"></googleplay:image>
										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/1057/058-kindness-and-patience-with-tara-scherner-de-la-fuente.mp3" length="50777640" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>yes</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>Yes</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>57:59</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>057: Everything is UI with Christina Morillo</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/057-everything-is-ui-with-christina-morillo/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 06 Dec 2017 05:00:10 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=1049</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Christina Morillo talks about automation processes: discovery and reconnaissance, multitasking and context switching, and being kind to your busy self.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Christina Morillo talks about automation processes: discovery and reconnaissance, multitasking and context switching, and being kind to your busy self.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>This episode is sponsored by </b><a href="http://upsd.io/2wmwtFp"><b>Upside</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-785" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png" alt="" width="1000" height="128" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png 1024w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-300x38.png 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-768x98.png 768w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-600x77.png 600w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo.png 1382w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Bundle your flights and hotel. Save money. Earn gift cards.</b></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Christina Morillo: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/divinetechygirl"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@divinetechygirl</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.christinamorillo.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">christinamorillo.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/wocintechchat/albums"><span style="font-weight: 400;">WOCinTech</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:08</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Christina’s Background and Superpower: Multitasking and Automation</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">See Also: </span><a href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/2017/11/22/episode-056-systematize-your-hustle/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">GTC 056: Systematize Your Hustle with Kronda Adair</span></a></p>
<p><b>04:42 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Automation Processes: Discovery and Reconnaissance, and When Human Judgement and Input is Necessary</span></p>
<p><b>10:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Multitasking Timescales and Context Switching</span></p>
<p><b>16:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Decision-making Functions</span></p>
<p><b>23:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Kind to Your Busy Self and Choosing What NOT To Do</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062693980/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0062693980&amp;linkId=36d5c466dd58a3659f9dc2c31e7c8554"><span style="font-weight: 400;">We&#8217;re Going to Need More Wine: Stories That Are Funny, Complicated, and True by Gabrielle Union</span></a></p>
<p><b>32:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Making Accomplishments Visible to Yourself and Having a Culture of Acknowledgement </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">For more discussion on congressive/ingressive behavior, see also: </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><a href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-038-category-theory-for-normal-humans-with-eugenia-cheng/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">GTC Episode 038: Category Theory for Normal Humans with Dr. Eugenia Cheng</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Operant Conditioning Chamber</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (Skinner Box)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Being self-aware of how much is on your plate, how you’re feeling about it, and then being able to say no, which is really saying yes to what YOU want to do, what YOU want to spend time on, and how YOU want to live YOUR life.</span></p>
<p><b>Janelle:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Taking the time to remember and that remembering takes time.</span></p>
<p><b>Jessica:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Choosing the group that you’re being generative with.</span></p>
<p><b>Christina:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> UX is everything and everywhere. </span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Welcome to Episode 57 of Greater Than Code. I&#8217;m your co-panelist, Rein Henrichs and I am happy to introduce Janelle Klein.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi and I&#8217;d like to introduce Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning and I&#8217;m really excited to introduce our guest today. She is Christina Morillo. Christina is an information security and tech nerd with a background in enterprise identity and access management, network administration and information security. By day, she works as a senior program manager at the Azure Information Protection Cloud &amp; Engineering Team at Microsoft. You might know her as the co-founder of a community for women of color in tech, which produced some wonderful stock photos of women of color on computers, which was remarkably lacking in the world and it&#8217;s a great resource. Thank you for that, Christina.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;re welcome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But today, we&#8217;re here to talk about many things, starting with what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My superpower is multitasking.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Really?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and how did I require it? Just being in the struggle, not by choice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You are a mother.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, among many other things. It came about before I was a mother. Back in my college days, I was actually working on two degrees simultaneously while I work in the full time. That&#8217;s where my ability to multitask came about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How do you define multitasking?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think for me, it&#8217;s the ability to shift your focus or slice up your focus and priorities into different chunks like a pizza. You have a full pie of things to do and being able to accomplish pretty much all of those things. A real world example would be like working full time, studying for professional development, so to speak, having more than one child, a husband, a household and having to do everything in between that comes along with that and only having one you. Unfortunately, I don&#8217;t have a [inaudible] yet to help me out so I just have to figure that out on my own.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You are into automation, though.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I love to automate things or processes that don&#8217;t need to be manual. For example, if I can automate emails or even use Alexa to remind me of things. I love those things just because there&#8217;s so much to do. One of my positions, my job was to deploy an identity and access management application globally across an enterprise. Part of that was automating their on-boarding, off-boarding and access request processes like taking them from phonecall to helpdesk, helpdesk to data entry, taking that from that to click, approve, done, which saves time, more productive and saves money in the end.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, totally. I like it at enterprise scale when a task is repeated so many times that obviously should automate it. But I also like your examples of things that only you do and yet, automating helps you be able to do more things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. I think it&#8217;s important when you think about establishing a new process or revising a process to start from the beginning of your thought process and think, &#8220;Can this become a repeatable a process?&#8221; or, &#8220;Is this a repeatable process?&#8221; and that&#8217;s how you know you can automate it or not. It doesn&#8217;t apply everywhere and to all the things but where it applies, I think it&#8217;s extremely helpful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That ties in to the last show. Kronda is talking about making systems for herself and the first step is writing down what she does and making it repeatable, even if she&#8217;s the one who&#8217;s repeating it and then she can ask someone else to repeat it for her.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right and I would say that&#8217;s a form of automation. I think we like to tie these words to systematic processes or applications but that&#8217;s a form of automation. As long as I am not doing it and someone else is doing it for me, I&#8217;m automating my processes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Delegation is a form of automation. That&#8217;s interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. Why not?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In my mind, when it comes automation, I&#8217;m curious of what are your processes. In my mind, you start it with writing a script for a human to do and then the human does the things in the script and then you make a computer do some of those things and the human now tells a computer to do the things and then eventually, the computer does all of the things and then you can just have a computer do the thing automatically somehow. What process do you go through, from start to finish when you have some manual task that no one really knows how to do and when you want to turn it into a thing that a computer does for you?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>From experience at that company where I had to automate the processes, I first try to understand what the process is today, like what is the current state? How do you do this today, whoever the human is that&#8217;s actually doing it? I look at all the stops. Step 1, the stops. Step 2, the stops, then three, the stops and what is required from a manual perspective. I try to understand what systems we have in place today that can help me clean this manual process up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s pretty much like doing discovery. I learned this new word last week &#8212; reconnaissance &#8212; so I&#8217;m going to start using that in my vocabulary because I think it&#8217;s awesome. In doing that, you have to do that recon. You have to first understand how is this thing done to then, being able to give the computer instructions. I always like to say, &#8220;You don&#8217;t understand what you&#8217;re doing.&#8221; The tech is not going to help you. It&#8217;s pretty much the people that like to throw a technical solution on top of a broken process. To try to fix something, you just end up getting garbage-in/garbage-out. The tech doesn&#8217;t fix it. I think it&#8217;s a combination of both. That&#8217;s actually is my process. I do a lot of the discovery first to understand the problem, understand how I can fix the problem. First, manually and then, how I can fix it via automating.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s interesting that you were talking about if you don&#8217;t know what the process is and try to tell a computer to do it, the computer will just do the wrong thing. The greatest blessing and curse of computers is they do exactly what you tell them to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and the hard part of programming is figuring out what you want the computer to do. Telling it is easy after that, possibly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. I think that&#8217;s the hardest part &#8212; understanding and then translating that. Not to say that coding it is not difficult because it can be in certain situations but depending on how intense a solution is, it shouldn&#8217;t be but it can be. But I feel like using our human brain to think these things out or through, that&#8217;s hard.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s beautiful. Just me talking about the first step is to understand the problem, figure out what problem are you trying to solve and then come up with a way to first solve it manually and then automate it. If you jump too fast in implementing the solution, it&#8217;s really easy to miss the problem altogether.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yep and we see this often, even today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and if nothing else, if you threaten down the repeatable process, even if you still do it, every one of those things you wrote down as a decision, you don&#8217;t have to make again.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. It&#8217;s also interesting to me how valuable human judgment still is despite computers being able to do things a million times faster than us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>They can do the wrong thing over and over and over.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly. I think we&#8217;re not there yet with artificial intelligence, where computers can make some judgment. I think we will be and I know they&#8217;re working on this but we&#8217;re just not there yet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the hardest things for me is trying to automate processes that require human judgment. Usually, when that&#8217;s the case it&#8217;s because there is something that you can&#8217;t tell a computer to do, which there&#8217;s a lot of factors that go into making that judgment. It might be hard to just say, &#8220;Here&#8217;s a checkpoint. Talk to a human.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah but one thing that we forget sometimes about automation is it is totally fine to use humans to do what they&#8217;re good at like, &#8220;I&#8217;m ready to do this deployment. Somebody watch these graphs for me,&#8221; and let the human make the decision that people need to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s not to say that you may not automate an entire lifecycle. It could be that there may need to be human input at some point or maybe like first stop human, then Steps 2 to 10, computer and then Step 11 maybe, output human like go pick up that paper at the printer. I don&#8217;t know. Just an example.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and then the automation becomes about supplying the human with the reminder like Alexa will do. Also, if it&#8217;s a decision that we need to make all these supporting information.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. Sometimes, that&#8217;s what it takes. You can take that type of shape where it&#8217;s like half-human, half-machine, like in stages. Stage 1, it can be human and machine and then Stage 2, maybe all machine, no human. It can take different shapes, I guess.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah because we can work best when we do it together. I want to get back to the multitasking as humans thing. I had a question, when you talk about multitasking, you&#8217;re talking about doing a lot of different things in a one life. What time scale are you multitasking in? Are you doing a lot of things in a week? In a day? In a minute?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would say, all of the above. If we&#8217;re going to break it down granularly, it&#8217;s in a day and by hour. I rely heavily on my calendars. I try to merge, instead of keeping a personal and a business. A lot of people like to separate it but I like to see my full day at a glance so what I do is I just input both of my personal to-dos tasks and reminders in my work calendar so that I can see my entire day and plan it out by hours.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m not extremely like one of these people that has planned every second of their day but I try to do it in half-hour to 60 minutes slots so I know that I have allotted two hours for, let say this conversation to me. But I know that at three, I have a meeting and I know that at 3:30, I have to pay a bill. Then I know that at five, I have to remember to book that appointment. That&#8217;s my process and flow and that&#8217;s what allows me to multitask so I can do a little bit of personal and some business throughout the day so that I can focus and be productive and then sprinkle some more personal around my afternoon, evening and stuff like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you have any suggestions for becoming better at context switching?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was going to ask that same thing. Essentially, I was just sitting here listening to this thinking, &#8220;Wow, this is a major superpower,&#8221; because I imagine if I try to apply what you just described to my life, I would explode because I&#8217;m so not used to operating that way with larger task that require a lot more focus. I&#8217;m just curious what type of impacts you&#8217;ve seen from shifting focus specifically on restarting a task and refreshing your brain with that context? Are there things that you do to make that brain-refresh easier?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wouldn&#8217;t say that it&#8217;s all easy. I think it is difficult. I had grown used to it. I think at times, I make sure that I do take a break. I think that&#8217;s super important to me. I actually taking my time for lunch because what I notice is that when I try to multitask too much and let&#8217;s say I&#8217;m eating while I&#8217;m working, I just get burned out. My goal every day is to try to avoid getting burned out because I feel it. It really takes a toll. I try to take a break. I work at my own pace.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think it&#8217;s important to understand that you have this schedule but you may not accomplish everything that you plan today and that&#8217;s okay, unless you have a deadline, where you may have to pay your credit card bill today because they&#8217;re going to charge you with late fee, then get that them today. But if it&#8217;s something that can wait until Friday or maybe you&#8217;re free to do it on Sunday because you have more time on Sunday, then be flexible. I just think it&#8217;s important to be flexible and not be so hard on yourself. That&#8217;s what works for me. It doesn&#8217;t make me feel like a failure if I can&#8217;t accomplish everything on my to-do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A friend of mine is actually doing it and she went analog. She&#8217;s doing it on notebook and she carves out her day in squares, like by priority level. That&#8217;s a lot for me. I&#8217;m not there yet. She&#8217;s very, very strict and disciplined. I just try to play it by ear and see how am I flow with the day, so to speak by just keeping my top priority items, top of mind.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s interesting for me because when I was younger, I used to think that making a reminder for myself was a sign of weakness like my brain should just remember all the things at all times. As I&#8217;ve grown older, I realize that I need that help. I need the assistance to be able to keep everything all the plates spinning at the same time. I&#8217;ve been in a situation where I&#8217;ve come from a meeting directly into another meeting and I&#8217;m the one owning the agenda for the meeting but I don&#8217;t remember what the meeting supposed to be about because I didn&#8217;t take good notes or there wasn&#8217;t a clear agenda set and I just floundered for the first five minutes and it was a really bad meeting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. That&#8217;s difficult. First of all, I never try to put back to back meetings. Sometimes it happens but what I do try is I try to take, even if it&#8217;s just bullet points. I tend to overprepare. I&#8217;m a little bit typing when it comes to stuff like that. I don&#8217;t like to get caught. I try to prepare as best as I can. For some reason, I don&#8217;t like to wing it. Do you know what I mean? I like a little bit more structure. I can wing it but it just takes too much energy so I like to be a little bit more set up but I totally understand what you&#8217;re saying. It&#8217;s difficult, especially when it&#8217;s a meeting that this could have been accomplished in four bullet points.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One tip that I&#8217;ve learned is always try to keep a five-minute buffer in between meetings so when meetings end at 55 till and not on the hour.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. I agree. I&#8217;ll be [inaudible] to 10 minutes. I try at least 30 minutes but I need to do decompress a little bit more.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Whenever there&#8217;s a meeting that really runs on and I show up a minute late, I&#8217;m just completely frazzled so I&#8217;m learning that I just have to not do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s a good point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sometime you have to pee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There you go. You know, if I&#8217;m feeling like that, I actually walk out and excuse myself from meeting, go to the restroom and pee, wash my hands, stand there and then just to decompressed and then go back.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Totally. I do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One thing I have learned that may be helpful to other people and if you&#8217;re in that situation, where you forgot what you&#8217;re doing and you&#8217;re trying to pick up the pieces. Stop and take the time to actually remember and don&#8217;t just try to muddle through it. It will only end up worse.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah. It&#8217;s like in public speaking. It&#8217;s fine to pause and be silent for a little while. It&#8217;s much better than saying, &#8220;Umm,&#8221; or using filler words. Somebody told me once.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; Where I come in a minute later because I just got out of a meeting and it was late and everyone was stressed out. I just have to say, &#8220;Look, I need to take three minutes to review my notes and then we can get started,&#8221; and apologize but if I don&#8217;t do that, if I just said, &#8220;Try to build the bridge as I&#8217;m crossing the river,&#8221; that kind of thing is a disaster.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yep, I agree. That&#8217;s a good point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One thing that I was thinking about is a lot of the times when we are building out automation systems, we think of ourselves as the part of the system that&#8217;s in control and what I&#8217;m sort of realizing with those systems where the computer does a bunch of things and then it needs a human to help, like a human has to go look at this dashboard or a human needs to make a decision. It&#8217;s better to think of it as the automation system is the thing in command and the human is just a decision point because then, I think for a variety of reasons, it helps prevent the human from having to feel like they have to own the entire process and lets the person just take an action and then go back to their day.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. A perfect example of that is in identity access management, it encompasses like when you start a new job and you have to get your log-in and your email set up and all of that stuff, it&#8217;s that process. Back in the day, people would have like a helpdesk or system administrator to manually set up your credentials and maybe get a ticket from the helpdesk ticketing system and then close it and get an email approve and all that stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When I say automated on-boarding, it&#8217;s leveraging systems API and when I enter these details and I click this submit, what&#8217;s going to happen is that the service economy system will automatically go to the system to create the credential using the information that it has and then it&#8217;s going to pass an email or a notification to the approver listed based on some tables and complexity and say, &#8220;Jane Smith, is it okay for Bob to have access?&#8221; and Jane does says, &#8220;Sure.&#8221; She just clicks on a button that says, &#8220;Yes,&#8221; or, &#8220;No,&#8221; and that either let the workflow continue or stops the workflow in its track. Jane doesn&#8217;t really have to type anything in. There&#8217;s a stopping point where her interaction is necessary. The process is still automated but still with human interaction.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is really cool because I think it ties in a little bit to multitasking context switching and how do you present the context you need to make a decision or to switch on to a new task as efficiently as possible.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and I think that one of the techniques that I use is asking in the form of a question. If I say, what do I need Jane Smith to do? What is her involvement? &#8220;Jane, I need you to approve this person having access to this resource.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re literally talking about user experiences on here. We&#8217;re talking about, &#8220;What does Jane need as a user to do Jane&#8217;s job? What should their experience be of doing this in performing this task?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. I never knew that it was that. See, that&#8217;s [inaudible]. That&#8217;s in my bio and now I just &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This falls into my, &#8216;everything is UI philosophy,&#8217; so I&#8217;m happy about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve been thinking about this like a chain of decision making functions. For each decision I need to make, I&#8217;ve got inputs for that decision and I may need to do some tasks in order to create these inputs that go into that decision I have to make. When I decide something, then I end up with these outputs and I need to make sense of those outputs. I think of this workflow of decision making functions and you&#8217;re basically designing this workflow system based on breaking down all these human component parts and stuff. It&#8217;s just a brilliant insight. I&#8217;m really loving this.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. It can get complicate quickly or it can look super simple. Let&#8217;s say you ordered a pair of sneakers at Nike.com, I&#8217;m sure thought that&#8217;s easy for them. It look so easy for us, the process is super simple: you pick your size, you add to cart, you check out, input your credit card or your PayPal or whatever and then your order is done. Voila. It&#8217;s magic. But imagine the processes that are happening in the background that we never see, where the warehouse gets notification or whatever it takes away from the inventory. It&#8217;s just amazing. It&#8217;s so fascinating.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Have you ever bought customs sneakers from Nike.com? They are so awesome. I kind of pair it with stars on one side and stripes on the inside. It&#8217;s a really impressive UI.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, I haven&#8217;t but I think I&#8217;m going to have to. I actually ordered a custom sneakers for my husband and he really like them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Talking about quality workflows and decision points and all of that, reminds me a lot of state machines and one thing that I&#8217;ve noticed is that whenever you&#8217;re building out a workflow like this, where there are decision points and you have to choose a path. Then based on where you are, choose another path and things like that. Often, we just do it in an implicit way, where we don&#8217;t model the state machine. We just think about the decisions we have to make in detail. One of the things that I found extremely helpful is to just draw out a flowchart, draw out a state machine, look at it, share that, make sure everyone agrees that this is indeed the process we&#8217;re modeling and the mental model we want to have of it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like that. I love flowcharts by the way, especially when you&#8217;re building these processes. I love the flowcharts. I feel like I&#8217;m a visual person so I like to see, so that I can better understand how things flow from top to bottom or end to end. I think that&#8217;s a really brilliant recommendation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And you can make this really useful. We have an on-boarding process for a new customer and for that, the flowchart has points where we color it based on like, &#8220;This is a thing a customer needs to do so it&#8217;s blue. This is a thing engineering needs to do so it&#8217;s green.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Then there&#8217;s this implicit arrow from every shape in that flowchart that says, &#8220;In case of failure, contact the human.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I need to take a flowcharting class.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s so interesting to me one of the overall topics so far has been, &#8220;How can we present information so that humans can gain context well?&#8221; The color coding there just means that you can look at the flowchart and see more in five seconds than you could have otherwise.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a question about your experience. One thing you mentioned that&#8217;s something that helps you with your multitasking of doing too many things is letting yourself not accomplish everything that you hope to that day. Specifically you said, not feel you&#8217;re a bad person for that. What was your phrase?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes and [inaudible] that you&#8217;re a failure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think we&#8217;re extremely hard on ourselves. I know I am personally and I feel like I&#8217;m supposed to be doing a lot without taking into consideration the things that happen that are out of my control like one of my children are sick or something or whatever, like the monkey wrench days. Then I feel that I catch myself or I found myself feeling such a failure like, &#8220;Oh, my God. I didn&#8217;t do everything that&#8217;s on my own list,&#8221; and I&#8217;m just like I have more work to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;ve been really intentional about giving myself that break or that flexibility to say like, &#8220;Listen, I didn&#8217;t do it today. It&#8217;s fine. I didn&#8217;t die. The world didn&#8217;t end. I could get it done tomorrow. Let it go,&#8221; and it worked. It&#8217;s actually working because I&#8217;m giving myself that room to maybe say, &#8220;You know what? I am not going to do A, B and C because I need to focus on this task at work,&#8221; or I want to get ahead of my schedule or ahead with this work or this project that I have. I&#8217;m going to focus on it for two days and pick other things up in three days and that&#8217;s okay.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s another thing so you&#8217;re deliberately choosing things not to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, I have. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine and I, we started women of color in tech chat. We started it as a Twitter chat. We initially did it because we felt that we didn&#8217;t see representation in tech. We didn&#8217;t see this visual representation of people that who look like us. We&#8217;re both from New York City. Our family were for both first generation. Our families are from Dominican Republic and we&#8217;re both educated and we both have careers in technology.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We started on this journey and out of that came the idea for the woman of color in tech stock photoshoot project and all of that. With that, that took a life of its own. We started getting calls from journalist and to appear in newspapers and magazines and all that other stuff. At that point, I felt like, &#8220;Oh, I needed to do this.&#8221; I needed to jump into the game full force and attend as many events as possible and say yes to as many panels as possible and do all the interviews and response at every email. What happened was at the time, my job sucked so I got burned out. Extremely burned out and I just cannot function, like I was done.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Last year was a really difficult year for me. At the beginning of the year, not really a New Year’s resolution but I said, &#8220;Okay, Christina. This year, you&#8217;re going to get a new job and you need to focus on you.&#8221; You need to shift your mindset from the &#8216;say yes&#8217; mindset to when you say no, you&#8217;re actually saying yes to yourself because I thought a lot of guilt. I felt like I needed to help people and mentor people that reached out to me for mentorship, like that was my duty. I started to say no. I got the job &#8212; my current company &#8212; and I said I really need to focus. I really need to get this. It&#8217;s a great opportunity. It&#8217;s my dream job. My dream come true and it just worked out. It&#8217;s a remote position. It&#8217;s beautiful. It&#8217;s perfect. It&#8217;s everything I wanted so don&#8217;t mess it up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I just had to say no and I didn&#8217;t want my fate to be full with external things and it&#8217;s worked out great. I&#8217;ve been able to focus on my job, focus on my family and that&#8217;s it. I just said, &#8220;This year is about you,&#8221; and also, considering all the things that are happening outside like our current political climate, the world is falling apart, I don&#8217;t want to add that heavy burden but it&#8217;s been great so far. It&#8217;s working and I think it&#8217;s super important. I know everyone is like say yes to opportunity but I&#8217;m like, &#8220;No, not if it&#8217;s going to cost me my sanity and my peace of mind.&#8221; I rather be the snail &#8212; slow and steady.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Man, there are so many good things in there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. It sounds like you had a time when the thing to do is default to yes and let more things into your world and then you reach the time when the thing to do is start saying no so that you could grow the things that were already in your world and most important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And most important. Right, exactly and just inching back slowly, like being very&#8230; I want to use the word strategic but I feel like that world sound a little bit cold &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But it did and somebody tweeted the other day that, &#8220;I&#8217;ll know that that&#8217;s your strategy when you tell me what you are not doing.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, I think it&#8217;s really easy to get caught up, especially you&#8217;re on social media and you&#8217;re in tech and everything and you think so many people are doing so much and you feel like you have to be part of this community and all that. It&#8217;s really easy to get caught up into that whirlwind of stuff. It&#8217;s easy to forget what it is that you really want to do? What is it that you love doing? What do you feel like doing? Do you feel like working on a side project? Do you feel like contributing to open source? It’s okay to say no. It&#8217;s fine.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But if you&#8217;re on social media and you&#8217;re part of the tech ecosystem, it&#8217;s not fine. It&#8217;s just like society pushes you towards like this is what you need to do, to build your skills sets. This is what you need to do. Guess what? I don&#8217;t feel like it. I actually view that attitude, being from New York City, we don&#8217;t like to be pushed around or bossed around so we kind of push back a little bit. I think it&#8217;s serving me greatly right now because I needed that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like there are so many people that need that. I&#8217;m sitting here thinking of how many times the story has probably echoed through time of getting to the point where you&#8217;re just completely overwhelmed and completely breaking and then you see somebody that needs your help and you&#8217;re like, &#8220;I have to help them. I have to get involved. I have to contribute my opinion. I&#8217;m needed in so many ways and if I go away, then I&#8217;ll feel bad. If I say no, I feel bad,&#8221; so you push yourself all the way to the breaking point and then it&#8217;s like, &#8220;All right. I have to hit the reset button here,&#8221; and that it&#8217;s actually the [inaudible] thing to do to say no and getting to the point of pushing back and saying no. Anyway, I&#8217;m sitting here glowing as I&#8217;m listening to you, things you&#8217;re saying that just makes me so happy to hear.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was listening to this audiobook, not tech-related. It&#8217;s from an actress. Her name is Gabrielle Union. Sometimes, I listen and do other things like take Japanese lessons and do other things to take me out of the box, to free my mind. Listening to her audiobook, she said something that really resonated and she said, &#8220;People don&#8217;t know what to do with you if you are not trying to assimilate.&#8221; I thought that was such a great quote because I have find myself this year, having the year pushing back and saying, I&#8217;m not going to somebody. I&#8217;m not going to do what people expect. I&#8217;m not going to be that hacker with a black hoodie just because you think that&#8217;s what a hacker with the black hoodie looks like. It&#8217;s okay if I get that pushed back. It&#8217;s okay if nobody wants to be my friend. It&#8217;s okay if I&#8217;m out here in the world because I feel like it&#8217;s so much about quality over quantity.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If I have this one friend that appreciates who I am and what I bring to the table, I&#8217;m good. That&#8217;s all I need. I&#8217;m okay. If I have none or if Twitter doesn&#8217;t love me or if I don&#8217;t have followers, I don&#8217;t care about that. That&#8217;s not important to me but the five followers that engage with me are super important to me. It&#8217;s kind of like in that context.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is a journey that I&#8217;ve definitely been on as well and there&#8217;s so much of what you&#8217;re talking about resonates with me but there are a couple of things that I have found to be really helpful. One of them is making sure that all the work you do is visible, especially to yourself because you may not always get all the stuff done that you want to but you should be able to look back and see what you did accomplish and not have it hidden. That&#8217;s why on our teams, we have a rule that if you&#8217;re working on something, there has to be a story for it because we want to make sure that all of the work that people are doing is acknowledged.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, that&#8217;s an interesting point and it&#8217;s great that you brought that up because I find that for some of us, it&#8217;s really difficult to pat ourselves on the back. I know that is something that I struggle with. I think there&#8217;s a thin line between the patting yourself on the back and boasting and it&#8217;s really, really hard for me to acknowledge out loud what I&#8217;ve done or what I&#8217;ve contribute or how far I&#8217;ve come. Then there are moments where I remember like just something that jumps in my head that I thought and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Wow, I&#8217;ve really done a lot. I should be proud of myself. I&#8217;m the woman, you know?&#8221; I think I should do that more often. I guess, how do you pat yourself on the back without feeling like you&#8217;re not humble. I don&#8217;t know if that makes sense but &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It does and that brings me to my next point, which is get someone else to do it for you. We try really, really hard to have a culture of acknowledgment, where we don&#8217;t just say, &#8220;You did a thing. Thank you.&#8221; We try to say, &#8220;You did the thing and it helped me.&#8221; For instance, I had too much work on my plate last week and I was able to delegate some of it to someone else on my team and they did it better than I would have in the first place and I think that when I said specifically, &#8220;You know, I want to thank you because you really made my week better and I was able to focus on other things that I had to do and I don&#8217;t think I would have been able to do it without you.&#8221; Intentionally, trying to create a culture where you would thank people for the work they do, eventually comes back to you, is what I &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I agree and I find it easier to acknowledge and thank other people. I definitely agree with that. I like that reminder.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s like the gratitude culture, basically.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And I love that, Rein because it explicitly acknowledges the generativity in what the other person did.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right and you&#8217;re kind of [inaudible] both of your cups, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it raises that level of output of the whole team. It&#8217;s not just about what you did. It&#8217;s about how what you did helped everybody else do stuff too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and that&#8217;s why I try not to just say thank you. I try to be specific about what it meant to be.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. On the flipside, working as part of a team that I always try to think not what would help me out but what would help the team. Not like, &#8220;Oh, I need to do this because this will going to help me get promoted.&#8221; No. Put the team first like what would make our lives easier? What are the low-hanging fruits or what is our biggest pain point? It could be creating a document or maybe automating something or creating a landing page for us to whatever, creating a new SharePoint site. It&#8217;s something that would make our lives collectively easier. I try to think from that perspective mostly. I think we tend to do that. Especially women, I mean men too, but I feel like women always put others before us. That can be good and bad but I try to take the good from there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, we have words for that. It&#8217;s congressive and ingressive. Ingressive as advancing yourself and congressive as doing things together to advance in the group.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve just been listening to this and so much beautiful stuff has come out of this conversation. One thing that you said that really struck me of just a story of my life is that people don&#8217;t know what to do with you if you&#8217;re not trying to assimilate. I don&#8217;t never fit in. My whole life, I&#8217;m struggled with loneliness and trying to do things for people so that they would like me, so they would love me and give me that feedback, give me that gratitude. I was trying to earn their affection so that I could be seen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I feel like that&#8217;s where a lot of that pull comes from of not wanting to say no because we need that love, we need to be seen, we need to feel like we matter and being invisible, this stuff is hard. But at the same time, eventually I got to the point of just having this rebellious energy of, &#8220;I don&#8217;t care anymore. I&#8217;m going to say no. I&#8217;m going to do what I want. I&#8217;m going to be who I want to be and screw you all!&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s a balance between things because I basically shifted to that mode 15 years ago and I recently got to the point in that kind of mode where I ran all the way off the cliff with essentially being kind of an antibody respond to most of my former self because I turned into this table flipper, rebellious energy, &#8216;I&#8217;m going to go do things my own way.&#8217; There&#8217;s a balance in that though and I feel like if you can create this gratitude culture as a precedent of filling the love tanks of the people, it takes love energy to do our jobs. Even though it&#8217;s not something that&#8217;s necessarily easy to measure or to put metrics around, how does it ever matter?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it absolutely does and I think that that&#8217;s just a part of being human. I think we all crave, even if we say we don&#8217;t crave attention and validation and like you mentioned, feeling like we do matter but I think it&#8217;s important to understand that when you&#8217;re feeling that you don&#8217;t matter and you&#8217;re feeling a little bit sad about that, it&#8217;s important to catch yourself and feeling this way and acknowledging and saying, &#8220;Yes, I feel this way,&#8221; but then countering it and saying like, &#8220;You know, I do matter. I am important and my voice does matter.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That’s what I noticed and I noticed that similar to you, I also catch myself like, &#8220;Why do I care if that person doesn&#8217;t see me.&#8221; I try to drill down like, &#8220;Why is this important to me? Why isn&#8217;t what I feel from myself enough? Why do I need external validation? How does that change who I am?&#8221; I started to ask myself these questions because all my youth, I was driven by the same thing. It was important to me. What other people saw in me was important and I think with age, as I got older, I started to say, &#8220;I don&#8217;t have time for this.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When I started to value the relationships that I do have with people and know that, &#8220;These people love me. I have only two people love me? My husband and my kids?&#8221; I&#8217;m fine with that. But I think it starts with a lot of introspection and feeling you have to feel that. You know what? My voice does matter. I don&#8217;t care what you say. I matter. I&#8217;m important to myself and that&#8217;s really all there is to it. I think even though with social media and the internet, it now really exploits our psychological weaknesses and they knew that when they did it &#8212; all the validation that is part of just social media in general: likes, loves, favorites, retweets.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. They&#8217;re a giant awful Skinner box.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What? Wait, they&#8217;re what?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Skinner boxes. You teach a monkey to press a button and get food, that kind of thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know you are going to bring psychology into this somewhere.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oops.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a Rein theme. An important one. I called these as puffs. They were like little puffs that push you up just a tiny bit but they come from strangers so they&#8217;re not really that deep but you can get dependent on them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s an addiction. You become addicted. Even though like swipe down to refresh or pull down to refresh. There was a really good Wired article that I read a couple weeks ago about the engineers who actually create all of these features wanting no parts of any of it. Pretty much going off the grid, hacking their phones so that they couldn&#8217;t download any social media application onto their phones, just like crazy stuff and these are the engineers that created these features. Again, these are the engineers that created these features and they see the damaging effects.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s one study about endorphin levels while people tweets are being liked.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, they should. That&#8217;s a good point. I&#8217;m sure they probably won&#8217;t talk about it and if there isn&#8217;t, there should be. It&#8217;s addictive. It&#8217;s like an addiction.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hold on. I&#8217;m Googling that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s actually pretty fascinating, though. What did you call it, the web box?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Skinner box.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s actually pretty fascinating, I guess from a psychological perspective. I don&#8217;t know anything about psychology. I would be interested in reading more about the techniques they use to convince us to do these stuff or convince us to stay on our phones for two hours straight just refreshing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The technical term is operant conditioning chamber.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I learned that word the other day &#8212; operant conditioning. It&#8217;s when you get trained that you do one thing and another thing follows.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s basically training or learning through word and punishment.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s very boring compared to learning through creativity.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Skinner is operant, push a button and get food. Classical is like the Pavlovian response, where you learn to associate the ringing of a bell with food, even though you&#8217;re not being rewarded for ringing a bell.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, it&#8217;s just like correlation &#8212; this happens then this happens?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, so basically the bell is a neutral stimulus that is been associated with something positive through correlation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That would be like, &#8220;Whoop!&#8221; Notification sounds?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And then you start to consolidate because it is going to be so tasty?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, for sure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or wake up, I hear, &#8220;Twoot! Twoot!&#8221; in the middle of the night at 3 AM and I go, &#8220;A message is going to be great. No Jess, go back to sleep.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s why you need to turn all of notification off all the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I totally do. I just forgot last night but I succeeded that I did not look at it and it was a good thing because in the morning, when I did look at it, it said, &#8220;Oh, sorry. That wasn&#8217;t for you.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was dopamine. I was almost right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This might be a good segue to tell you that this episode is brought to you by Upside. One of DCs fastest growing tech startups. Upside is looking for innovative engineers who want to disrupt the norm and they&#8217;re always hiring. Check out Upside.com/Team to learn more.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was amazing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What was?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love doing commercials.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This brings us to reflections, the part of the show where we reflect on things, which is why it&#8217;s called reflections. See? I think mine is really everything you&#8217;re saying about being self-aware of how much is on your plate, how you&#8217;re feeling about it and then being able to say no and how that&#8217;s really saying yes to what you want to do and what you want to spend time on and how you want to live your life. That&#8217;s huge and that&#8217;s something that I really need to spend more time working on my own life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So many amazing, beautiful things in the show. I&#8217;ve just been sitting here blown away. I know I keep saying that but so many insights and things that just resonate with a lot of the struggles in my life and I&#8217;m really excited to share this with everyone because I&#8217;m just sitting here and going, &#8220;Man, everybody needs to hear this.&#8221; That&#8217;s pretty amazing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the things that struck me that I haven&#8217;t gone and got all excited about already, was your comment about taking the time to remember and that remembering takes time. We talked about setting up buffers between meetings and how long of a buffer do I actually need. If I&#8217;ve got inputs that I may be prepared for, how long does it take me to prep those inputs and if I need to spend time thinking about that, don&#8217;t just rush ahead and start doing it, even if you&#8217;re running behind.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Take the time to stop and think because it&#8217;s only going to get worse and remembering that thinking takes time and the way that you manage your workflow with these human processes, it&#8217;s like there&#8217;s this implicit undercurrent realization of thought-work itself. What is the thinking that needs to happen in order to get through this process? Then once you have your process flow down your workflow of your thought-work, then you can figure out how to automate various pieces of it but first just see it. First, just understand the problem you&#8217;re trying to solve. That was just beautiful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love how this episode started talking about multitasking and Christina described how she&#8217;s good at doing a lot of things, then it got to talking about how she&#8217;s good at doing fewer things. There&#8217;s a time for inviting everything in and there&#8217;s a time for when you choose the group that you&#8217;re going to focus on. It feels selfish to say no but really, Christina isn&#8217;t saying, &#8220;I&#8217;m not going to help anyone. This is about me.&#8221; She&#8217;s saying, &#8220;I am going to help my group at work and my family and a few other specific people who are actually meaningful to me, instead of trying to help everybody a little bit in the way that they think I&#8217;m good for.&#8221; It&#8217;s about choosing the group that you&#8217;re being generative with.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And taking responsibility for your life and how you want to run it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and it&#8217;s still congressive. It&#8217;s not about advancing her. It&#8217;s about advancing people but we can more effectively advance people when we&#8217;re not trying to advance everybody in the world who asks for mentorship or anything else.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Just a reminder that you can&#8217;t pour from an empty cup.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, so you matter. As a mother, that&#8217;s totally part of my philosophy of I have to be happy in order to keep you happy so yes, I&#8217;m going to travel one week a month. I know it&#8217;s not your preference but trust me, all of our worlds are better this way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. One thing that stood out was that Rein mentioned UX and I feel that I often forget that UX is everything and everywhere. It becomes transparent to those of us that are not looking but when you really think about it, the user experience is everything, no matter what you have or no matter what fancy tech is working behind the scenes. If the user experience isn&#8217;t there, nothing is going to work pretty much. That was a good reminder to keep that top of mind all the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a quote that I like to drop every time this comes up and I wish I could remember who it&#8217;s by but the quote is that a computer, to the people using it is not the hard drive or power system or anything like that. It&#8217;s the monitor and the keyboard and the mouse. That&#8217;s what it means to use a computer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Those are representation that we interact with.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>All that other stuff is not the interface. The interface, what it means to be a computer in terms of how you interact with one is it has a monitor and a keyboard and a mouse. Everything else is just an implementation detail.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yep.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This was so much fun. Christina you are a beautiful human. I rather [inaudible]. It brought me so much happiness being you talk about these core of things that matter about life and love and taking responsibility for being a happy whole human. It&#8217;s what I get out of the show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks. I feel that I&#8217;m working progress. I&#8217;m not all energy-producing every day but again, that&#8217;s okay. It&#8217;s part of growing and learning, I guess, just kind of discovering. I think it&#8217;s important to stay open at all times. From a mental perspective, stay open to different ideas on what makes you happy, basically or what makes you feel good because sometimes you have to do things that don&#8217;t necessarily make you happy, like wake up very early in the morning. Just follow what makes you feel good and if something doesn&#8217;t make you feel good, then you have to remove it from the equation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to do another reflection just so I can name drop Chomsky and make Jessica happy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yay! Philosophers. I totally make fun of you but I actually really like that you bring philosophy and all these non-tech references into the discussion.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We were talking about Skinner. Skinner&#8217;s idea on human agency was that much more is determined by the environment, than by human agency. In terms of our ability to create the environment around us. Skinner thought that was mostly just the environment acting on us, rather than the other way around. Noam Chomsky, who I may have mentioned a couple times, reviewed Skinner&#8217;s book about verbal behavior. His argument was that if you look at how children learn language, the pace at which children learn language far outstrips their actual experience of language. He called it the lexical explosion. I think that this is a phenomena that doesn&#8217;t happen just in language acquisition. If you look at human capacity, I think in general, it far outstrips the mere behavioral concerns of what in the environment has impinge on us and we as humans, our capacity far outstrips our learning histories and that&#8217;s really interesting to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Lexical explosion.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s [inaudible] for the podcast. I&#8217;m now realizing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can we use that as our fake name next episode?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. &#8220;Welcome to lexical explosion.&#8221; That&#8217;s going to be great. Christina, thank you so much for being our guest today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHRISTINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. Thanks for having me. This was a lot of fun.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If you just can&#8217;t get enough of Greater Than Code, then donate any amount to our Patreon because we&#8217;re mostly listeners-supported and then you can join us on Slack. It&#8217;s my favorite Slack. It&#8217;s the only one besides my work Slack that I totally check all day long because people there are so nice and the discussions are really great. It&#8217;s a wonderful place to ask hard questions that you&#8217;re not sure where to ask.&#8221;</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content like this, please do so at </span></i><a href="https://www.paypal.me/devreps"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">paypal.me/devreps</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.</span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>This episode is sponsored by </b><a href="http://upsd.io/2wmwtFp"><b>Upside</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-785" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png" alt="" width="1000" height="128" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png 1024w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-300x38.png 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-768x98.png 768w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-600x77.png 600w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo.png 1382w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Bundle your flights and hotel. Save money. Earn gift cards.</b></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Christina Morillo: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/divinetechygirl"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@divinetechygirl</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.christinamorillo.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">christinamorillo.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/wocintechchat/albums"><span style="font-weight: 400;">WOCinTech</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:08</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Christina’s Background and Superpower: Multitasking and Automation</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">See Also: </span><a href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/2017/11/22/episode-056-systematize-your-hustle/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">GTC 056: Systematize Your Hustle with Kronda Adair</span></a></p>
<p><b>04:42 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Automation Processes: Discovery and Reconnaissance, and When Human Judgement and Input is Necessary</span></p>
<p><b>10:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Multitasking Timescales and Context Switching</span></p>
<p><b>16:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Decision-making Functions</span></p>
<p><b>23:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Kind to Your Busy Self and Choosing What NOT To Do</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062693980/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0062693980&amp;linkId=36d5c466dd58a3659f9dc2c31e7c8554"><span style="font-weight: 400;">We&#8217;re Going to Need More Wine: Stories That Are Funny, Complicated, and True by Gabrielle Union</span></a></p>
<p><b>32:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Making Accomplishments Visible to Yourself and Having a Culture of Acknowledgement </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">For more discussion on congressive/ingressive behavior, see also: </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><a href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-038-category-theory-for-normal-humans-with-eugenia-cheng/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">GTC Episode 038: Category Theory for Normal Humans with Dr. Eugenia Cheng</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber"><span style="font-weight]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>This episode is sponsored by </b><a href="http://upsd.io/2wmwtFp"><b>Upside</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-785" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png" alt="" width="1000" height="128" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png 1024w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-300x38.png 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-768x98.png 768w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-600x77.png 600w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo.png 1382w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Bundle your flights and hotel. Save money. Earn gift cards.</b></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Christina Morillo: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/divinetechygirl"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@divinetechygirl</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.christinamorillo.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">christinamorillo.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/wocintechchat/albums"><span style="font-weight: 400;">WOCinTech</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:08</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Christina’s Background and Superpower: Multitasking and Automation</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">See Also: </span><a href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/2017/11/22/episode-056-systematize-your-hustle/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">GTC 056: Systematize Your Hustle with Kronda Adair</span></a></p>
<p><b>04:42 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Automation Processes: Discovery and Reconnaissance, and When Human Judgement and Input is Necessary</span></p>
<p><b>10:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Multitasking Timescales and Context Switching</span></p>
<p><b>16:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Decision-making Functions</span></p>
<p><b>23:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Kind to Your Busy Self and Choosing What NOT To Do</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062693980/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0062693980&amp;linkId=36d5c466dd58a3659f9dc2c31e7c8554"><span style="font-weight: 400;">We&#8217;re Going to Need More Wine: Stories That Are Funny, Complicated, and True by Gabrielle Union</span></a></p>
<p><b>32:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Making Accomplishments Visible to Yourself and Having a Culture of Acknowledgement </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">For more discussion on congressive/ingressive behavior, see also: </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><a href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-038-category-theory-for-normal-humans-with-eugenia-cheng/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">GTC Episode 038: Category Theory for Normal Humans with Dr. Eugenia Cheng</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operant_conditioning_chamber"><span style="font-weight]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Christina.png"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Christina.png"></googleplay:image>
										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/1049/057-everything-is-ui-with-christina-morillo.mp3" length="50777640" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>52:53</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>056: Systematize Your Hustle with Kronda Adair</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/056-systematize-your-hustle-with-kronda-adair/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 22 Nov 2017 05:00:18 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=1022</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Kronda Adair joins the panel to talk about why you should strive to systematize all the things within your business to reclaim your time, life, and to successfully allow others to help you.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Kronda Adair joins the panel to talk about why you should strive to systematize all the things within your business to reclaim your time, life, and to successfully allow others to help you.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Kronda Adair: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/kronda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@kronda</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://kronda.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">kronda.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://karveldigital.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Karvel Digital</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:26</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – SYSTEMS! Implementing Repeatable Processes Via Automation</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/160832253X/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=160832253X&amp;linkId=f57a3d32a89bacda9cd41b76756a0de2"><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less by Sam Carpenter</span></a></p>
<p><b>09:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Strategies for Implementation</span></p>
<p><b>12:18 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Reclaiming Your Time and Cheap is Always Expensive</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.workthesystem.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Work the System</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (Online)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1936661837/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=1936661837&amp;linkId=9ff8a84f2eba0bc21a1d6739ee254949"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.eosworldwide.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Entrepreneurial Operating System</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (EOS) </span></p>
<p><img class=" wp-image-1023 aligncenter" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/GOOD-FAST-CHEAP.jpg" alt="" width="384" height="310" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/GOOD-FAST-CHEAP.jpg 575w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/GOOD-FAST-CHEAP-300x242.jpg 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/GOOD-FAST-CHEAP-372x300.jpg 372w" sizes="(max-width: 384px) 100vw, 384px" /></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Solopreneurship: &#8220;It&#8217;s never just you. There&#8217;s present-you and future-you&#8221; <a href="https://twitter.com/kronda?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@kronda</a> on <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/928323310416486400?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 8, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>23:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Choosing Successful Customers and Avoiding Perfection Paralysis</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">If you don&#8217;t have a system, your system is, think really hard about it every time.<a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@geeksam</a> on <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@greaterthancode</a> with <a href="https://twitter.com/kronda?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@kronda</a><br />
me: or worse, don&#8217;t</p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/928327947030851584?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 8, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>28:44 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Successful Use Cases</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.activecampaign.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Active Campaign</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.systemhub.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">systemHUB</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Join Our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p><b>35:33 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Iterating and Changing Processes</span></p>
<p><b>42:31 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Kronda’s Superpowers</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Jessica:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> As developers, and as we’re writing automation for other people, we can also think at a meta level, and automate the parts of our jobs so then we can spend more thinking time thinking about the interesting part of code, like how to achieve the results that we want.</span></p>
<p><b>Kronda:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Things that are easy vs things that are effective.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_dysfunction"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Executive Dysfunction</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and the idea of making decision rules.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to Episode 56 of Greater Than Code. I&#8217;m Sam Livingston-Gray. I&#8217;m pleased as Punch to welcome my friend and co-panelist, Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning. I am thrilled to be here today because our guest is Kronda Adair. Kronda is the CEO of Karvel Digital, a digital marketing agency that helps established businesses double their revenue in 12 months using online marketing. She loves empowering small business owners to not be intimidated by all this tech stuff and she&#8217;s often covered in cats. Kronda, how many cats?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Two. Not quite a cat pile but enough.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But they&#8217;re entitled enough so they can cover you, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, they can totally cover me. There&#8217;s a recent post of just shenanigans under a blanket happening while I&#8217;m trying to nap. It’s epic.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cats make better blankets than pillows.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is true. They get cranky when you try to lay on them. That&#8217;s the most enthusiastic introduction I&#8217;ve ever had. Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, you&#8217;re welcome. I am really enthusiastic today because you said you want to talk about systems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s pretty much all I want to talk about these days.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sweet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Why are you excited about systems? I&#8217;m always curious.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I could go on about this for a while but &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What do we mean by systems?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good question. I recently read a book called Work the System by Sam Carpenter and he points out repeatedly that everything that ever happens on planet Earth is the result of a step-by-step process: one, two, three, four equals result. The whole premise of the book is that if you manage your systems so that you control the output, rather than fire-killing and dealing with the bad results of unmanaged systems, you will have a better business, a happier life, etcetera, etcetera.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting because I think of systems quite the opposite as one, two, three, four of result. In my reading, the interesting bits about complex systems is that there is no clear causality in most cases. We only construct the causality retrospectively but there are many conditions that make it possible for something to happen and then one trigger, which is often small.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow, so this should be an interesting conversation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>All right, reconcile those in 30 seconds. Go!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Like your website went down because one database [inaudible] had a network partition but there were six other conditions that led that to cause your whole website to go down. In a lot of what we do in devops and in infrastructure these days is mitigate those possible failures and make the conditions not exist.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But the mitigation is the system management. If your website gets down and you say, &#8220;It went down because of this,&#8221; then you further say, &#8220;It went down because of this. How can we prevent that from happening again?&#8221; That part is system management, where you go back and say, &#8220;This partition went down so we need more redundancy,&#8221; or we need whatever it is to keep that from happening again. That&#8217;s system management and you can do it proactively but you&#8217;ll never going to get everything perfect. When there are either mistakes or accidents or whatever, those are gifts basically telling you, &#8220;Your system could be better,&#8221; and inviting you to go and fix it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, so it&#8217;s kind of one, two, three in parallel conditions and then four and then something happens.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I don&#8217;t think we actually disagree.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. It sounds like we don&#8217;t.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>On the face of it, it seems like a lot of creative people wouldn&#8217;t object to that mechanistic sounding description of one, two, three, four because if I sit down to write a piece of code or I refactor somebody else&#8217;s bit of code, if I sit down and analyze it very deeply there are one or 17 steps in my head but they&#8217;re all the result of my own life experience that nobody else can duplicate. But it sounds like you&#8217;re talking about a little bit more repeatable process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, yeah because the context of this book is business and I&#8217;m running a business. That&#8217;s the context in which I think about it. It works for pretty much every part of life but particularly in a business, especially a business that you want to grow beyond just being one person, if you don&#8217;t have repeatable processes and you start hiring people, then you can&#8217;t really be effective because they&#8217;re all just waiting on you to check their work or tell them what to do or etcetera, etcetera.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One way that I put this in place is I have been sending out a newsletter every Sunday and that means I think of the ideas, I write the newsletter, I spell-check the newsletter, I put it in an ActiveCampaign, I schedule and all the stuff. When I got a virtual assistant, I filmed myself doing all of the steps for spell-checking and putting into ActiveCampaign and scheduling and I sent that to the VA and I said, &#8220;Write a process for this based on this video.&#8221; Then I took what he wrote and said, &#8220;You left out this part,&#8221; and we worked on it until I felt like, &#8220;If you follow these steps, you&#8217;re going to get the same result every time, which is the newsletter that goes out at 6AM on Sunday.&#8221; Then my job became just write the newsletter and send it over and then he would schedule it and do all the other things, then I get that hour back every week.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Like Mandy does for this podcast. We just show up and talk to people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. They all seemed to have a pretty good system.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mandy has a system. Yeah, it&#8217;s sweet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m basically trying to do that for everything in my business, figuring out what are the things that happen over and over again and writing processes for them. This is the part of business that most people don&#8217;t want to do and find boring so they don&#8217;t do it so then they wonder why everything is chaos. It&#8217;s really interesting once your mindset changes to then, look at the world and look at how other people managed things and go, &#8220;Oh, yeah. That could be really a lot better and a lot less stressful,&#8221; if you would do these things but you won&#8217;t.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That sounds like just applying a developer mindset or a programmer mindset to business systems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly. That&#8217;s what we do when we code things, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That we have to set down all the steps in order and exactly what to do in each contingency. It&#8217;s automation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Pretty much and people think that automation means that you can&#8217;t be creative but I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s true either. I think once you understand what your role is and what the outcome is supposed to be and the steps to get there, then within that, you can be really creative.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and especially, I was going to say that one of the steps in programming can be throw up your hands and wait for a human to solve it. That&#8217;s raising an exception, which you can totally do. If you can automate 90% or even 80% of the boring stuff, then that leaves you so much more time to deal with the special cases and the interesting parts.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. I&#8217;m basically trying to write myself into the position where my job with the company is mostly to work on strategy with clients and write content marketing. That&#8217;s what I would like to do all the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, so you&#8217;re automating yourself but in the sense that you write a process for people, instead of the computer like we do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. I&#8217;m programming people now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That sounds messy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s super messy. Someone recently said to me about their mentor who doesn&#8217;t really code much anymore. He said, &#8220;Yeah, I&#8217;m programming grad student now.&#8221; For a long time, when I first started my business, I really didn&#8217;t have aspirations to hire people or grow or do any of that stuff. I was like, &#8220;People are messy and it&#8217;s hard and I&#8217;m just going to code my way until sunset,&#8221; and then I realized if I want to have a life, then I have to build something that runs without me and that means other people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It&#8217;s hard finding people. I recently had to let go my first virtual assistant because there wasn&#8217;t enough attention to detail, like I was writing all these things down and they weren&#8217;t being followed and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Come on.&#8221; If I&#8217;m going to spend all this work, then you got to follow it. It&#8217;s super messy and this is something actually now that I think about it, one of my early mentors at the one tech company that I worked at, it kind of went through the same process where he was really, really amazing developer and then moved into management and running the company. He was like, &#8220;The challenges are really kind of the same,&#8221; like you&#8217;re just programming and people and spreadsheets. It&#8217;s just different challenges but at the same kind of mindset, in terms of getting the output that you want.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And completely different strategies for doing it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What I heard that you wanted to talk about systems. My first thought was about something like for example, getting things done or Personal Kanban or some of those other systems that people use to manage their own volume of work. I&#8217;m wondering if you use one of those, if you have managed to make one of those stick.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I haven&#8217;t really gone deeply into any of that. I know about getting things done and I know the premise of it and I think, maybe a few years ago, I sort of made a half-hearted effort but nothing has stuck. I think the strategy that I&#8217;m using right now is to try to focus on one thing and fix it basically, forever. Right now, my email is a disaster because I&#8217;m focused on fixing something else. I&#8217;m focused on the process and documentation for the business because that&#8217;s going to allow me to bring in people and say, &#8220;I need these things done,&#8221; and I can just say, &#8220;And here&#8217;s how to do it,&#8221; and it&#8217;s all documented. That will give me my time back, then go and fix my email.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> By fix it, I don&#8217;t just mean like wade through the whatever 33,000 that there are now but like unsubscribe from a ton of things, figure out what is the system that I&#8217;m going to use to keep email under control, implement that system and then fix that forever, then I&#8217;ll move on to another thing. Maybe it&#8217;ll be scheduling or I don&#8217;t know but it&#8217;s a really hard way to work because when things are in chaos, which a lot of things around me are chaos right now, you just kind of want to dive into all of it and that&#8217;s a good way to not get much done at all. It&#8217;s been really hard but for the last, probably four months, I&#8217;ve just been focused on, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to implement enough systems in my business that I can pass things off to people and get the results that I want.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, because when you&#8217;re trying to accomplish something, we gain our power from all the things that we don&#8217;t do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, and just trying to get the time to do this one thing. I&#8217;ve been trying to launch a product for two years. It&#8217;s just been one struggle after another so I finally scale it down and said, &#8220;Let me release the first 20% of this.&#8221; I did that and now I&#8217;m trying to finish out. The actual essence of the product is the Working Websites course, which has become my side hustle that I would like to become my main hustle at some point. I was like, &#8220;I&#8217;m just going to launch this thing and that&#8217;s going to force me to create it,&#8221; so now, I&#8217;m creating it and then I will have something that exist, something that I can sell that doesn&#8217;t then take up more of my time, which is the thing that I&#8217;ve been trying to do for two years.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You do have a focus on reclaiming your time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I don&#8217;t see my family as much as I want. I don&#8217;t see my friends as much as I want. I don&#8217;t spend enough time on home stuff. There&#8217;s so many more things that need my time that I don&#8217;t have so the way to get that back is to fix the things in the business that can be automated and repeated and sort of buy back my time that way</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, you can&#8217;t just do the things. You can&#8217;t just answer the emails. You have to go meta and build a better way to answer emails or pair them down.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s in the Work the System book but Sam has a lot of blog posts and things, or maybe it was on a podcast and he talks about how he handles email. In his whole company, their goal is to never have more than 20 or 30 emails in their inbox and they largely succeed at that. I was reading a blog post on the website and I was, &#8220;Man, this text is way too small,&#8221; so I was like, &#8220;Well, I&#8217;m going to read about it,&#8221; because apparently they all read their email in a timely fashion.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Sure enough the next day, I got a reply from Sam and he was like, &#8220;You&#8217;re totally right.&#8221; Because basically the email is like, &#8220;Come on, dude. I know you&#8217;ve got to be in your 60s and your core audience is probably over 40s so what is with this tiny text?&#8221; He said, &#8220;Oh, you&#8217;re absolutely right. I am in my 60s and my tech team are all in the 30s and I&#8217;m sending them up an email right now to work on this.&#8221; Then he was like, &#8220;What&#8217;s your address? I want to send you my books,&#8221; and so I gave it to him and two days later, books showed up. Sure enough, he wrote some business documentation software and if you go in there, there&#8217;s a bunch of sample processes and one of them is how to send a gift to a client.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As soon as I send him my address, he fired that up to someone else and said, &#8220;Send her some books,&#8221; and then it happened and he works two hours a week. He went from working 100 hours a week to two hours a week so I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Clearly, this guy know something that other people don&#8217;t.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That sounds like macroing the hell out of your business.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Pretty much. There&#8217;s another good book that I like called &#8216;Traction.&#8217; The subtitle is &#8216;Get a Grip on Your Business&#8217; and it&#8217;s through the Entrepreneurial Operating System &#8212; EOSWorldwide.com. There&#8217;s actually a guy outside fixing our fence gate right now and they came in and put up the first half of our fence, in the front of our house. They were amazing. They said, &#8220;We&#8217;re going to be out on this day to look at the property.&#8221; They showed up and they said, &#8220;We&#8217;re going to get you a quote,&#8221; and they got us a quote. The day before they came to build the first section of fence, I said, &#8220;What time are you going to be here?&#8221; They said, &#8220;Well, it depends. We have our Wednesday a meeting and it depends how many issues are on the issues list,&#8221; and that&#8217;s it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s a really particular way to say something like that and I said, &#8220;Oh, has your boss read Traction?&#8221; He said, &#8220;Oh, yeah. We&#8217;re an EOS company,&#8221; and I said, &#8220;Everything makes sense now, like why all your stuff is dialed, why you&#8217;re so expensive, why your work is so good.&#8221; You know, it all made sense. It kind of made me want to, the next time we need something done, just go to EOS and be like, &#8220;Do you have anybody who does this?&#8221; because if someone&#8217;s running their business that way, it&#8217;s a pretty good bet that their stuff is dialed and they have systems in place and they&#8217;re doing quality stuff. In fact, there was an issue with the gate but because the way they run their company, they&#8217;re like, &#8220;We&#8217;ll send somebody out to fix it,&#8221; and it&#8217;s a very, very different experience from other contractors we worked with.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I actually read a blog post or I think it was an email that&#8217;s like, &#8220;Why are freelancers so flakey?&#8221; and it&#8217;s largely because they don&#8217;t have systems and they&#8217;re not charging enough so then they&#8217;re like chasing the next job to pay for the work that they&#8217;re doing, that they undercharged you for. When it&#8217;s like, if you just charge enough to really pay attention and do things the way they need to be done, then you can get a better result. That&#8217;s just like a theme that keeps showing up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That sounds like a whole other topic right there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, the Venn diagram of good, fast, cheap. We&#8217;ve run afoul of that in our search for a landscape contractor to do our yard so it&#8217;s become a project.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and I guess it&#8217;s like software. The thing is cheap but turned out to be really expensive.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It does. I&#8217;ve been on both sides of that equation. I&#8217;ve been the one that screwed up and I&#8217;ve been the one to be like, &#8220;What is going on?&#8221; Now, when people come to me and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Can you give me a quote? I want to compare with this other quote.&#8221; I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Yeah, mine will be more expensive.&#8221; Tell me what the result that you want is, like what&#8217;s in your budget is a real thing but if what&#8217;s in your budget can&#8217;t get you the result that you need, then you have to figure something else out because pretending that you can get what you need with a budget that&#8217;s too small is going to get you some half done thing or something that doesn&#8217;t work and then you&#8217;re going to be out of money and still not have the result.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The first time I really understood that was about a year ago when someone came to me and he wanted like e-commerce and bookings and all this stuff. He said, &#8220;My budget is $3500.&#8221; I&#8217;m like, &#8220;We can&#8217;t even keep talking for that,&#8221; and I said, &#8220;Look, this is what it&#8217;s going to take to get the result you said you wanted and if you want to keep talking, just know that,&#8221; so he did and went forward and that&#8217;s the most successful site that I&#8217;ve launched to date.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> He immediately started making money hand over fist when the new site watched because now, instead of spending all his time on the phone with people who are trying to book this shuttle, they&#8217;re just going to the website. There&#8217;s a giant FAQ that answers all their questions, that tells them to go book their hiking permit and then they can book their shuttle and then they show up. That really kind of made that hit home for me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love that it&#8217;s called Entrepreneurial Operating System because that illustrates that in our working systems that have to do with people, I think we&#8217;ve been learning a lot from software.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, because in software you can&#8217;t not work within the system because then, it won&#8217;t work. You&#8217;re forced to figure out, how&#8217;s the computer understand this.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s true. You can&#8217;t just say, &#8220;This person is stupid.&#8221; It&#8217;s a computer. You know what it&#8217;s going to do. It doesn&#8217;t accept your blame.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. It&#8217;s like, &#8220;You&#8217;re not working within the system so I can&#8217;t give you what you want,&#8221; whereas with people, we can screw it up all day long and we might still get occasionally what we want so then we don&#8217;t know that the system needs to be fixed.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. I think as people, we like to blame the system and just wish it were different. You don&#8217;t do that with computers. We either make it different or we work in it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. I was in a Mastermind group recently, where one of the questions was, &#8220;How are you all getting new clients? Because I&#8217;m torturing myself going to these networking meetings and I hate it.&#8221; I said, &#8220;Well, what are you doing with your website?&#8221; and she was like, &#8220;Oh, nothing,&#8221; and I was like, &#8220;Have you thought about that?&#8221; Yeah, but I don&#8217;t have the money to pay someone and I don&#8217;t want to do it myself. I&#8217;m like, &#8220;That&#8217;s it. Those are your only options.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, a magical website elder will not going to come visit you on Christmas Eve.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. That would be amazing, wouldn&#8217;t it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, that would be great.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would be a magical website elder.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hang on. Let me see if that domain is available.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wanted to walk out of the room because option three obviously is do nothing and keep complaining but it doesn&#8217;t get you anywhere that you want to be. As someone who just officially took on the mantle of, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to make a product that helps teach business owners, especially non-technical business owners, how to do websites that actually help their business,&#8221; this is something that I encounter a lot: people who are like, &#8220;I just want to use Wix because it&#8217;s easier,&#8221; and nobody ever says to me, &#8220;Oh, I use Squarespace or Wix because it&#8217;s more effective and I get a ton of clients from it.&#8221; Nobody ever says that to me. It&#8217;s always, &#8220;It&#8217;s easier.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s all about them, as opposed to the results.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, so I&#8217;m getting way better at just filtering those people out right away because you&#8217;re not the person I can help because you don&#8217;t have the money to pay me five or 10 grand to just build this for you and you don&#8217;t know how to do it yourself and I&#8217;m saying, &#8220;I will teach you how to do it yourself but you still have to do it yourself.&#8221; If they&#8217;re the type that are like, &#8220;Well, it&#8217;s hard so I don&#8217;t want to do it.&#8221; It&#8217;s like, &#8220;Your business doesn&#8217;t care. Your customers don&#8217;t really care if it&#8217;s hard.&#8221; Whether something is hard or not, it has nothing to do with whether you should do it. If it&#8217;s hard, that means you probably should do it. That&#8217;s probably the way to success.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And your customers are going through the exact same process, right? They’re looking for a bed and breakfast to stay in and your website doesn&#8217;t make it obvious how to contact you or how to use your services. I&#8217;m going to go find some other bed and breakfast who bothered to spend a little bit more time on their site, you know? It’s the exact same process of like, &#8220;This is hard so I&#8217;m not going to do it.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. Oh, that&#8217;s good. I&#8217;m going to use that. That&#8217;s really good. You have to find the people who are really grateful and like, &#8220;Oh, this is hard and you&#8217;re going to help me?&#8221; Awesome. Let’s go. Those people are fewer and farther in between so it&#8217;s been interesting. I actually looking forward to next year because I have a contract with Prosper Portland, which is basically a business development commission and they created this inclusive business resource network to help underrepresented founders.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The woman who works for this organization came to me and said, &#8220;Everybody is asking for more help with digital marketing,&#8221; and I said, &#8220;Great. I&#8217;ve been trying to make this course for two years. Why don&#8217;t you give me some money and I&#8217;ll finish it.&#8221; We just did that deal and we&#8217;re going to have, at least 10, maybe more of their either providers like mentor businesses and/or the direct clients that they serve who are one of the first people to go through the course next year. That&#8217;s going to be really exciting to actually get feedback from the target audience to say like, &#8220;Did I really capture this? Is this still too complex? Am I leaving things out because I don&#8217;t know what I know?&#8221; I&#8217;m really looking forward to that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s awesome. Congratulations.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It sounds like part of the process of making your customer successful is choosing customers who have a chance of being successful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s a large part of the process and it took me a while to figure that out. Now, someone called it like the velvet rope, like you&#8217;re trying to get into the club. People are trying to get into the club that&#8217;s standing with the velvet rope going, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know. Do you have what it takes?&#8221; Because one of the classic red flags is, &#8220;We&#8217;re going to do our own content to save money.&#8221; In this, you are a copywriter. In fact, it&#8217;s your business. Chances are, you&#8217;re not going to come up with the content that&#8217;s actually going to speak to your audience and convert your website visitors into customers so then, you&#8217;re tanking your results in the interest of &#8216;saving money.&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So you&#8217;re going to save, at most a couple of thousand dollars, whereas with good copy and a really good site, the upward potential of the revenue you could bring in orders of magnitude higher.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. I do a lot of screening for that. I still get a lot of increase that are like, &#8220;Can you set up this theme for me?&#8221; where over this past year, I&#8217;ve been transitioning out of a development-focused company and into marketing and strategy-focused company. I am a developer and I do have developers on my team but you don&#8217;t get them until we know why we&#8217;re doing this and what result we&#8217;re trying to get. That makes the screening process much easier actually because it&#8217;s really apparent, really quickly when people just want you to be like their code monkey and say, &#8220;Put this widget over here,&#8221; and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Yeah, but why? What’s the good we&#8217;re trying to do here?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Your development skills are now a tool, not the product.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. The product is &#8216;let&#8217;s grow your bottom line.&#8217; One of the favorite things I like to do is what I call the &#8216;under haul&#8217; and that&#8217;s when you have a website that is really beautiful and has terrible code underneath or maybe it&#8217;s good code but it&#8217;s super custom so no one can touch it but the developer. Then what you have is a marketing site that costs $100 an hour to edit text because no one can touch it except the developer without breaking it and marketing websites need to be flexible.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;ve gone in quite a few times and this has been like, &#8220;This looks fine. Let’s just make it usable so you can actually edit things without writing PHP or whatever.&#8221; I love doing those. There are so many gains. There&#8217;s not having to wait a week, while you send offer request to go change this testimonial to something else or there&#8217;s speed of implementation. There&#8217;s so many gains by just being able to move quickly and online marketing now is just like you don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s going to work so you have to be able to change things. That&#8217;s a another thing that I think is a very slowly, people are coming to the realization that having a pixel-perfect, custom-coded marketing website is actually not an asset, having something where it&#8217;s like &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, right because what is perfect you don&#8217;t know.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, you baked in and like, you do this entire project, you baked in all of your assumptions or maybe you talked to a customer along the way. Probably not and then you baked in all those assumptions to your website and then you&#8217;re like, &#8220;Nobody&#8217;s buying,&#8221; or nobody&#8217;s converting. Being able to say, &#8220;We&#8217;re going to get our minimum viable product,&#8221; and they&#8217;re going to AB test the crap out of it and say, &#8220;Does this call-to-action work better? Does this header work better? Does this copy work better?&#8221; and being able to test that, that&#8217;s what&#8217;s actually valuable at marketing websites.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and in software in general, I think because when you get into a system that&#8217;s complex enough that you can&#8217;t have it all in your head, which is like all of them now, you also don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s going to work or what&#8217;s going to cause problems. Like you said, when there is a problem, then that&#8217;s a gift of, &#8220;Oh, ha!&#8221; This didn&#8217;t work as the way you thought it does, you have to be able to change it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I just keep talking about this and they figure at some point, I&#8217;m going to become a trendsetter. Not that I&#8217;m the first one talking about this. I actually found a woman who used to work for Microsoft and she has a whole imperfect website like growth engine system and she kind of crystallized all the things that I was thinking about. I was like, &#8220;Look, she went completely crystallized this and made a course to teach people about it,&#8221; so I was like, &#8220;Yeah, that&#8217;s totally on the right track.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Perfection paralysis is a huge barrier. I actually relaunch my KarvelDigital.com site in July and I did it as a challenge to my email subscribers because of having all these conversations of people and it was all boiling down to, &#8220;I really want this result but I don&#8217;t want to do any work,&#8221; so I was like, &#8220;Okay, people. Tell me what are you going to do in the next two weeks. I&#8217;m going to relaunch my site,&#8221; which is something I&#8217;ve been talking about since the beginning of the year.&#8221; I just did it really quick and dirty and it totally wasn&#8217;t perfect but it was way better than what I had before, then I&#8217;ve just been improving on it slowly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We were talking about systems a little bit earlier and I was curious if you&#8217;ve been able to help any of your clients implement systems to help their businesses run more smoothly and what kind of results that&#8217;s had for them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The site I talked about earlier with the shuttles, just them having the website kind of forced them into a system &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because they said they were going to do a thing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because they said they were doing to do a thing. Well, before people would call, everything was over the phone so people would have to call and they would ask questions &#8212; a lot of the same questions &#8212; and then they would say, &#8220;Reserve my spot,&#8221; but then they don&#8217;t actually pay until they show up and pay cash, then it&#8217;s like, maybe they show up, maybe they don&#8217;t. Just the fact of having a website now that has a booking system means this is how you have to book. All the questions, they&#8217;re all answered on a website and if new questions come in, then you can just add them to the website so you save a ton of time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And it sounds like you get better customers or you only talk to the serious ones, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, with the shuttle thing, this is a trail in Northern California so they actually get a lot of Silicon Valley people who are tired of staring screens and like, &#8220;I want to get back to nature,&#8221; so the online booking thing isn&#8217;t a barrier. It&#8217;s a feature not a bug. The wood-sy who were like, &#8220;What are computers?&#8221; You&#8217;re getting like, &#8220;The computer people who are like, &#8220;Oh, my God. I need to get to the woods.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8220;But I don&#8217;t want to talk to anybody on the phone.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. I have a client that I do just for marketing. We have a marketing retainer so part of that is just trying to install more systems like they&#8217;re going to start using one password for sharing all their secure passwords and stuff. I went in just this weekend and we went over on how are they using ActiveCampaign, both for prospecting and for customer retention and newsletter stuff. We just went through and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Why are you doing it this way.&#8221; I like to do this and save some time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> What I&#8217;m slowly moving toward is within the tech stack that I use, helping people use those things to be more efficient. Like ActiveCampaign, it allows you to do a lot of email automation, which means you can send people emails based on a page that they would visit on your website. If they visit a product page, then you can send them an email a day or two later saying like, &#8220;If you&#8217;re interested in blah-blah-blah, here&#8217;s a coupon.&#8221; Helping people implement marketing systems and also just use, I like to say the power of robots to save themselves time. Basically, any time I see a client doing something that computers could do it instead, I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Why don&#8217;t we let computers do that?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, because we started out talking about systems that you&#8217;re building that are programming people and you did say it was like hard finding people but that was super messy. If you can build the system into the computer, that can be a lot less messy sometimes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It is. It&#8217;s just getting the people to agree what the system should be and then the computers are like, &#8220;Cool. Tell me what to do.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And it&#8217;s way easier to scale.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s way easier to scale. It&#8217;s always a mess at some level because as soon as you bring a person into a situation, there&#8217;s potential for mess.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, but when they bring you in, you&#8217;re playing the role of the external consultant and you have a chance to help them decide to use a computer a lot more effectively than they might, if they were just on their own, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. I&#8217;m looking forward to doing more of that because I&#8217;ve been in this transition from being like, &#8220;I&#8217;ll keep your WordPress up to date,&#8221; to, &#8220;Let’s streamline your business.&#8221; It&#8217;s been a struggle, really to figure out how to market myself because there&#8217;s so many different layers &#8212; the marketing layer, of course &#8212; but I think the reason I talk about systems so much is that when you go in to help a client, if everything in their business is chaos, then you can&#8217;t suddenly be like, &#8220;Computers will help you.&#8221; You have to bring order and figure out what direction are you going first, then computers can help you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A good example is I have a client who does delivery of their product. They&#8217;re actually to drive their products to their different customers. They came to me and they were like, &#8220;How can we let clients put a note in their order saying when they want it.&#8221; I said, &#8220;No, you don&#8217;t want to do that.&#8221; You don&#8217;t want to give your clients control over your delivery schedule because, then you&#8217;re efficiency is out the window. You want to say, &#8220;These are the days we deliver so if you order by this day, you&#8217;ll get your product by this day,&#8221; because that&#8217;s a system that you can follow that streamlines your business.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Sometimes, they might need something on a certain day but if you have the power to systemize and say, &#8220;This is how we do it,&#8221; and then find the customers who buy into that, that is a far more efficient and profitable way to run your business. It&#8217;s having those conversations where they&#8217;ll tell me, &#8220;We&#8217;re doing it this way and I&#8217;ll say, &#8220;Wait. Let’s just make a process for this and that will be how it happens,&#8221; but it&#8217;s really hard. The more people you have involved, the harder it is to establish those and stick to them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We talked a lot about the importance of change. If you don&#8217;t have a system, then it&#8217;s really hard to change the system and make it better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>True because how do you remember how you did the last three or four times.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. If you don&#8217;t have a system, your system think really hard about everything all the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, exactly. A lot of people that I talked to who are solopreneurs, they&#8217;re freelancers or it&#8217;s just them and I start talking about this stuff and they say, &#8220;It&#8217;s just me,&#8221; and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Great,&#8221; but you&#8217;re actually &#8216;present you&#8217; and &#8216;future you&#8217; and I guarantee the present you is going to do something and future you is going to be like, &#8220;What was I thinking? How did I do that?&#8221; Even when it was just me, like the act of writing things down, I have a ton of things documented now. I have use a tool called systemHUB to store all my processes for my business. I go and look at those all the time because I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to do this thing and let me make sure I don&#8217;t miss a step,&#8221; and then I&#8217;m not spending the energy thinking about it and just looking at the next step and doing it. In that, it saves me a ton of time, even if it&#8217;s just past-me talking to present-me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What a mental energy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wanted to ask you, now that you&#8217;ve built some repeatable processes, how do you iterate and change those and make sure they don&#8217;t ossify?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because I&#8217;m looking at them while I&#8217;m doing them, if I hit a point where I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Why is this like this? This could be better,&#8221; then I can change it instantly. If it&#8217;s someone else like virtual assistant or a developer, it&#8217;s the same thing. If they&#8217;re doing a task and they are like, &#8220;I think this could be better this way,&#8221; they can literally comment on that system and I can get and go, &#8220;Oh, yeah. That&#8217;s cool. Let’s change it.&#8221; The rigidity of the system is balanced by the willingness and the ability to change it instantly and make it better. Then that change for the better, you keep that forever because you wrote it into the system.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, this reminds me of something I saw on Twitter just this morning and I sent to myself to look at it later. It&#8217;s a Git repository called &#8216;Git Flight Rules,&#8217; which is apparently borrowing from a thing in aviation where there&#8217;s extremely detailed standard operating procedures for how to deal with a particular thing. This is a bunch of flight rules around things that happened in Git that you want to do like, &#8220;I wrote the wrong thing at the commit messages,&#8221; as one of the entries in here or, &#8220;I accidentally did a hard reset and I want my changes back.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is it like a list of how to deal with those things?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, because Git has reversibility but it&#8217;s not obvious.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, it&#8217;s not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nothing in Git is obvious.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s been a while since I lived in Git, on the daily, too so if I had to go and do something, I&#8217;m like, &#8220;What?&#8221; A good example of this is I did a webinar recently. This was something like &#8216;past-me should have written down.&#8217; I forgot that Keynote and WebinarJam don&#8217;t play well together. When I hit go on my slides, the entire screen for the webinar went black. When it happened, I was like, &#8220;Oh, yeah. I have a big memory of this happening before and that&#8217;s why I did Google Slides the time before this.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oops.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But past-me didn&#8217;t write that down so present-me got to have five minutes of blank screen before my friend came in and was like, &#8220;Your slides are blank.&#8221; That&#8217;s a perfect example of like, &#8220;We need to capture these things so that they don&#8217;t recur.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I, for a long time, had a checklist of things to do. When I sat down to get ready to record the podcast, it&#8217;s like, &#8220;Plug in your microphone,&#8221; and I didn&#8217;t follow the checklist this morning and sure enough, I forgot to change my muting application so that when I thought I was doing push-to-talk, I was actually doing push-to-mute and no one could hear me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Perfect example. The humans are always the weakest link in the system like, &#8220;Oh, yeah. I have a checklist for that. If only I read it.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah but yet, we also tend to fall back on, &#8220;The human did it wrong. It&#8217;s a training issue,&#8221; where really, if we get our system set up right especially in software, then the human is prompted to do the right thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If you read the Work the System book, Sam&#8217;s business is a call center. It&#8217;s basically a private 911. Imagine trying to systemize that like the way that people answer the phone and take messages. Mandy know something about this but they have all these systems in place and they&#8217;ve managed to quantify what makes a good phone call, like what makes a good phone interaction such so they can measure it &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is it like something other than how quickly did you get them off the phone?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I don&#8217;t know the details of it. He doesn&#8217;t go into it but they&#8217;ve basically managed to quantify it to the degree that they can measure the speed, the effectiveness, the lack of mistakes. I think in one of the podcast or one of the blog post he said there was a call rep who had basically gone something like 17,000 calls without a mistake. That&#8217;s amazing. If you can do that for a call center, you can basically do it for everything and they have a whole consulting business where they help people implement this. I&#8217;ve heard them talk about doing it for hair salons. They had a woman with a hair salon and she trained all her people in her method so that she could open multiple locations. When people who are like, &#8220;Oh, I can&#8217;t do that because my thing is special,&#8221; I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Okay, if you say so.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8220;Keep doing your thing forever and ever and ever.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah but it&#8217;s tough. It&#8217;s slow-going. It takes a little bit before you start to see the value of it. If you don&#8217;t intrinsically see the value of it, then the only way to do it is to start doing it and prove to yourself that it works and that can take a while and I think that&#8217;s why people, maybe they start and they don&#8217;t keep going. I don&#8217;t know. I feel like I don&#8217;t have a choice because I do want to get my life back at some point. This has to happen. In my ideal world, I would love for my client service business to just run completely without me except for marketing and sales.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The parts where you personally do add the most value?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. Then in my other business, I would love to just spend time helping business owners figure out the online marketing thing. I would love to get to the people who are like, &#8220;I&#8217;m just going to use Wix because it&#8217;s easy,&#8221; and be like, &#8220;Actually, let me show you how you can do this other thing. It&#8217;s not as hard as you thought and will actually get you better results.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Commercial time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yay! We’re going to take a quick moment to talk to you about giving us money because that&#8217;s what you need to do. Seriously though, if you would like to support us, if you like the work that we do and think that we&#8217;re talking about interesting and important things and you happen to have some extra money that you can throw at us, please do. You can support us at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the premier benefits, I think of doing that is that if you donate any amount and seriously, this can be like a buck, if you donate any amount, you get access to our Slack community, which is full of over 200 awesome people who have really interesting conversations about all kinds of stuff and it&#8217;s definitely one of the friendliest online communities I&#8217;ve ever been a part of. It&#8217;s one of my favorite places to hang out. I&#8217;m always excited to see the little new messages icon on that particular Slack. Feel free to support us: Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. Thanks. Now, back to the show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Kronda, what&#8217;s your superpower and how did you acquire it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, I think stubbornness is definitely one of my superpowers, which I think is necessary as a business owner because there&#8217;s so much that you have to endure in order to get to the point of having a successful business. I think that&#8217;s one of them. I think systemization and documentation, which we&#8217;ve talked a lot about because I actually enjoy that stuff because I understand the value of it. I understand how much better the future is going to be for me or whoever I&#8217;m doing it for and that&#8217;s what makes me enjoy it. I think those stuff are one of my superpowers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also, staying focused on what is the core purpose of things. Whenever one of my clients comes to me and says, &#8220;I need you to do this,&#8221; then I&#8217;m always going to say, &#8220;Why. What&#8217;s the outcome that you&#8217;re striving towards,&#8221; because it kind of like going to the doctor and saying like, &#8220;I need stomach surgery,&#8221; and the doctor will be like, &#8220;Slow your roll there. Let’s run some tests and tell me your symptoms and let&#8217;s figure out what&#8217;s really going on.&#8221; That&#8217;s what I like to do for clients and the tech things that they ask me for is to figure out what&#8217;s really going on and what&#8217;s the actual goal because maybe you don&#8217;t need what you think you need. Maybe you need more than you think you need. Maybe we could do something that&#8217;s way cheaper than what you thought you were going to have to pay. I think those are some of my superpowers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How did you get so stubborn?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Genetics, probably. Long line of stubborn women. I think that&#8217;s probably most of it and let&#8217;s hope that I keep my memory when I get old because my grandmother is 93 and can&#8217;t remember anything but still stubborn.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s not a good combination, is it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s fun times.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>All right. We&#8217;ve reached a point in the show where we get to do reflections, which is where we look back at something that really stood out for us during the call or something that we would like to remind our listeners of, something that we could look into or something that you learn that was really interesting. Who would like to start?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Me! Kronda, while you were talking, especially early in the show about how you look at one thing that you&#8217;re doing and you figure out how to fix it forever, I totally do that but as a developer, I&#8217;m doing that in code about code. Like the other day, I was like I need to be a change. I don&#8217;t know how many build files and I don&#8217;t know how many of our 220 repositories and I am not going to go look at every one. Some other times, what I&#8217;m going to want to do, change it to a bunch of build files again. I work at Atomist and this is what we build as tools to make this kind of automation easier so I wrote a program to look through all the build files and tell me which ones were still get tag, which is now going to fall on Travis.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I wrote a program to change those to send us an event and our other automation makes the tags in one place, instead of a thousand build files&#8230; Not a thousand but a hundred. Anyway, even as developers like us, we&#8217;re writing automation for other people, we can also think at a meta level and automate the parts of our jobs so that then we can spend more thinking about the interesting part of code like how to achieve the results that we want and it works everywhere. It does take an extra level of caring and thought. You have to be willing to think harder than you have to think to do your work, to think about how you do your work and how you cannot have to do that work ever again.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a really good point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah so you have to have the extra capacity but once you spend it, you get a lot more of that extra mental capacity back later.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. You can use your little pieces of slack that you used to think extra hard to increase the amount of free time you have later and then you can hang out with your friends.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think you just encapsulated my entire life mission there with other [inaudible] basically. A business owner comes in and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;I need a website,&#8221; and that&#8217;s all they&#8217;re thinking about and then I start talking about like, &#8220;Why? Who are your customers?&#8221; They don&#8217;t want to do that. That&#8217;s the hard work. That&#8217;s the thinking, that if you did it, it would give you, in this case not necessarily extra slack but extra customers or extra time like the thinking and people are too busy killing fires or they&#8217;re in a hurry to do so that was amazing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and killing fires feels productive. That&#8217;s why I was surprised when you said, the people find this boring. It&#8217;s not boring. It&#8217;s just hard.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. I guess to some people that&#8217;s the same thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes because some people have a higher need for cognition than others.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How so?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Need for cognition. It&#8217;s a personality characteristic and it&#8217;s how much you want to think about things, think about why, think about puzzles.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, interesting. I&#8217;ve never heard that one before.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Isn&#8217;t that a cool phrase? That’s my phrase of the week. It&#8217;s on Wikipedia.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, I better go and look it up then.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nice. I&#8217;ll go next. I think one of the things that is a recurring theme for me that we talked about is things that are easy versus things that are effective and that&#8217;s a recurring theme in a lot of the stuff that we talked about, a lot of the struggles that I have with business owners. Usually not with my client because if they&#8217;ve reached the stage of being my client, they&#8217;re probably not a person who wants to take the easy way all the time. But in potential clients and people who come to me and ask me for help, a lot of them are just interested in what&#8217;s the easiest thing and that&#8217;s often not going to be the thing that gets you the result that you want.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Simon Sinek who wrote the book &#8216;Start With Why&#8217; says that people don&#8217;t buy what you do they buy why you do it. You want to sell the people who believe what you believe and you want to hire people who believe what you believe so the mindset I have when I&#8217;m talking to potential clients or potential employees or potential partners is do we have a compatible view about the worth of doing hard things. What you talked about Jessica was really slowing down the speed up, instead of just going through and going like, &#8220;Let me go look at these 200 files.&#8221; You&#8217;re like, &#8220;Wait. Let me back up and think about how I could fix this forever,&#8221; and that&#8217;s a rare skill. It&#8217;s probably less rare among developers but it is a rare skill and personality type to find the people who understand the value of doing that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m getting a lot of quotes. There&#8217;s going to be a bunch of tweets from this episode.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Earlier on in the call, I was thinking about a talk that I saw actually last night at the Portland Ruby user group. It was actually not a technical talk. It was about executive dysfunction. Dana Scheider gave a really interesting presentation about what executive dysfunction is and talked about some strategies that you can use to mitigate it. One of the things that she talked about was this idea of making decision rules.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One example from my own life is I was a vegetarian for quite a few years and I found it much easier to go through a menu at a restaurant because having a decision rule of &#8216;don&#8217;t eat anything with meat in it&#8217; narrowed the menu down to three things that I could then choose between and I was actually always ready to order as soon as I sat down and saw the menu.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>By executive dysfunction, you mean like your brain, because at first I thought this was going to be like how to fix your boss.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, I mean, there&#8217;s a part of your brain in the frontal lobe that there&#8217;s a whole set of things that the frontal lobe of your brain does that are collectively referred to as executive function. There are things about like planning and sequencing and making sure you&#8217;re paying attention to the right thing and thinking about time and so on. When those things don&#8217;t work, you really have a really hard time functioning in this world. Having a decision rule, makes it so that it&#8217;s like having a mini-system that&#8217;s like one thing &#8212; I will eat A, B or C for breakfast, which means that you don&#8217;t have to burn the cognitive fuel to figure out what from the infinite possibility of food items I&#8217;m going to eat this morning. That&#8217;s just seems like something useful that we can learn from neurodivergent folks. I feel like there&#8217;s other ways that we can look out for that sort of thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KRONDA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s great, though. I actually had a client and she teaches people with executive function deficits and how to manage their time. I worked for her for two years and that was interesting because I&#8217;ll be like, &#8220;This is what we&#8217;re doing this month,&#8221; then three days later, they&#8217;ll be like, &#8220;Oh, my God. We need this right now.&#8221; Yeah, that was interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, that&#8217;s our show and we&#8217;ll be back at you as soon as we possibly can. Thanks everybody.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b><i>[Outro Music]</i></b></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mandy cut that last part. It was too desperate.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span></i></p>
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]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Kronda Adair: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/kronda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@kronda</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://kronda.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">kronda.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://karveldigital.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Karvel Digital</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:26</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – SYSTEMS! Implementing Repeatable Processes Via Automation</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/160832253X/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=160832253X&amp;linkId=f57a3d32a89bacda9cd41b76756a0de2"><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less by Sam Carpenter</span></a></p>
<p><b>09:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Strategies for Implementation</span></p>
<p><b>12:18 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Reclaiming Your Time and Cheap is Always Expensive</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.workthesystem.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Work the System</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (Online)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1936661837/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=1936661837&amp;linkId=9ff8a84f2eba0bc21a1d6739ee254949"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.eosworldwide.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Entrepreneurial Operating System</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (EOS) </span></p>
<p><img class=" wp-image-1023 aligncenter" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/GOOD-FAST-CHEAP.jpg" alt="" width="384" height="310" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/GOOD-FAST-CHEAP.jpg 575w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/GOOD-FAST-CHEAP-300x242.jpg 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/GOOD-FAST-CHEAP-372x300.jpg 372w" sizes="(max-width: 384px) 100vw, 384px" /></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Solopreneurship: &#8220;It&#8217;s never just you. There&#8217;s present-you and future-you&#8221; <a href="https://twitter.com/kronda?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@kronda</a> on <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/928323310416486400?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 8, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>23:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Choosing Successful Customers and Avoiding Perfection Paralysis</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">If you don&#8217;t have a system, your system is, think really hard about it every time.<a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@geeksam</a> on <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@greaterthancode</a> with <a href="https://twitter.com/kronda?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@kronda</a><br />
me: or worse, don&#8217;t</p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://tw]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Kronda Adair: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/kronda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@kronda</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://kronda.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">kronda.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://karveldigital.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Karvel Digital</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:26</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – SYSTEMS! Implementing Repeatable Processes Via Automation</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/160832253X/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=160832253X&amp;linkId=f57a3d32a89bacda9cd41b76756a0de2"><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Work the System: The Simple Mechanics of Making More and Working Less by Sam Carpenter</span></a></p>
<p><b>09:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Strategies for Implementation</span></p>
<p><b>12:18 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Reclaiming Your Time and Cheap is Always Expensive</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.workthesystem.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Work the System</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (Online)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1936661837/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=1936661837&amp;linkId=9ff8a84f2eba0bc21a1d6739ee254949"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.eosworldwide.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Entrepreneurial Operating System</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (EOS) </span></p>
<p><img class=" wp-image-1023 aligncenter" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/GOOD-FAST-CHEAP.jpg" alt="" width="384" height="310" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/GOOD-FAST-CHEAP.jpg 575w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/GOOD-FAST-CHEAP-300x242.jpg 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/GOOD-FAST-CHEAP-372x300.jpg 372w" sizes="(max-width: 384px) 100vw, 384px" /></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Solopreneurship: &#8220;It&#8217;s never just you. There&#8217;s present-you and future-you&#8221; <a href="https://twitter.com/kronda?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@kronda</a> on <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/928323310416486400?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">November 8, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>23:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Choosing Successful Customers and Avoiding Perfection Paralysis</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">If you don&#8217;t have a system, your system is, think really hard about it every time.<a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@geeksam</a> on <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@greaterthancode</a> with <a href="https://twitter.com/kronda?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@kronda</a><br />
me: or worse, don&#8217;t</p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://tw]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Kronda.jpg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Kronda.jpg"></googleplay:image>
										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/1022/056-systematize-your-hustle-with-kronda-adair.mp3" length="50235131" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>52:19</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>055: Change Ourselves a Little, Many Times with Keith Bennett</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/055-change-ourselves-a-little-many-times-with-keith-bennett/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 15 Nov 2017 05:00:33 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=1010</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Keith Bennett talks about conflict resolution, radical helpfulness and kindness, and being okay with being different.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Keith Bennett talks about conflict resolution, radical helpfulness and kindness, and being okay with being different.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/paladique"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jasmine Greenaway</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Keith Bennett: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/keithrbennett"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@keithrbennett</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://about.me/keithrbennett"><span style="font-weight: 400;">about.me/keithrbennett</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://bbs-software.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Bennett Business Solutions</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Metamours United For Frequent Dialogue” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img class="alignnone wp-image-1018" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MUFFD-2-1024x1024.jpg" alt="" width="180" height="180" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MUFFD-2-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MUFFD-2-150x150.jpg 150w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MUFFD-2-300x300.jpg 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MUFFD-2-768x768.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 180px) 100vw, 180px" /><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-1016" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MUFFD.jpg" alt="" width="1" height="1" /></p>
<p><b>01:47</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Keith’s Background and Superpower</span></p>
<p><b>10:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Conflict Resolution</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/jug4qxduj15u84i/Conflict%20Resolution%20Open%20Space%20Session%20from%20DevOpsDays%20DC%202017.mp3?dl=0"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Open Spaces session on Conflict Resolution this summer at DevOpsDays D.C.</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (and the precursor to this conversation)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143118447/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0143118447&amp;linkId=693c6377e3aba2669f78354de86f0543"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Difficult Conversations: How To Discuss What Matters Most</span></a></p>
<p><b>12:01 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Opinions on Mediators/Mediation</span></p>
<p><b>14:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Approaching Conflict</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2017/05/police_responding_to_ne_portla.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">News Story Re: Portland Murders</span></a></p>
<p><b>17:31 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Radical Helpfulness/Kindness</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://medium.com/@keithrbennett/kaizen-and-radical-helpfulness-a207077cd7e7"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Keith Bennett: Kaizen and Radical Helpfulness</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.dowellwebtools.com/tools/lp/Bo/psyched/16/Smoke-Filled-Room"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Smoke Filled Room</span></a></p>
<p><b>20:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Okay with Being Different and Speaking Up</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553374443/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0553374443&amp;linkId=93d748861b4e04886f5d4d56bab0bebc"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Triumph Over Fear: A Book of Help and Hope for People with Anxiety, Panic Attacks and Phobias</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/2017/07/05/episode-038-category-theory-for-normal-humans/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Congressive/Ingressive Chat with Dr. Eugenia Cheng</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Join Our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">Support us via </b><a style="background-color: #ffffff; font-size: 1.8rem;" href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">!</b></p>
<p><b>31:17 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Fire Alarms and Radical Helpfulness (Cont’d)</span></p>
<p><b>35:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Knowing When to Step Back or to Step Forward</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Astrid:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> The way to change ourselves a lot is to change ourselves a little, many times.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Decide that you’re okay with being different and training yourself to be bold.</span></p>
<p><b>Jasmine:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Be mindful of yourself and your actions.</span></p>
<p><b>Jessica:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> There’s a lot of conscious thought and choice in both being helpful and resolving conflict.</span></p>
<p><b>Keith:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Working together to create a safer and happier world.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning and welcome to Episode 55 of &#8216;Metamours United For Frequent Dialogue &#8212; MUFFD.&#8217; I am happy to be here today with Sam Livingston-Gray.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Jessica and I&#8217;m pretty sure this is still Greater Than Code but I love that also. I&#8217;m also really thrilled to introduce my friend and co-panelist, Astrid Countee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks, Sam. I think we need our own really cool acronyms so that it&#8217;ll be easier for us to [inaudible] introductions but I would like to welcome our new panelist, Jasmine Greenaway. Take it away, Jasmine.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello. I am Jasmine. I&#8217;m super happy to be here. I am based in New York City in nice, beautiful Brooklyn where the lattes and kale is abundant &#8212; and the kombucha, can&#8217;t forget that kombucha &#8212; and I&#8217;m a Cloud Developer Advocate at Microsoft.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And our guest today is Keith Bennett. Keith is a long time software developer who started his software development career writing an in-house accounting package for a construction company on an Apple II in Applesoft BASIC. That takes me back. He&#8217;s worked with several languages since and has been working mostly with Ruby for the last few years. He&#8217;s lived on four continents and now spends most of his time split between Chiang Mai, Thailand and Reston, Virginia, a suburb of Washington DC. His other interests include karaoke, current events, foreign languages, massage, technical community and becoming a better human being. You can find him on Twitter, GitHub and LinkedIn as KeithRBennett &#8212; two N&#8217;s, two T&#8217;s. Welcome to the show, Keith.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. I&#8217;m glad to be here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Keith, we often like to start the show by asking you for your origin story. What is your superpower and how did you get it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If I could think of one superpower that I have and I don&#8217;t know that I have any but one thing that I did think when I thought about this question was I&#8217;m pretty good at explaining things to people and understanding what they mean. Sometimes, I&#8217;ll be in a conversation and I&#8217;ll notice that the two people talking are just not understanding each other at all and I&#8217;ll step in and say, &#8220;Did you mean blah-blah-blah?&#8221; and just expressing that in a different way, seemed to enlighten the group and help people understand each other better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Keith, this is a trait that you&#8217;ve always had or is this something that you actually worked on over time and got good at?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m not sure. I think it improved over the years. I&#8217;m a pretty introspective person and trying to understand my thoughts, my actions and their effect on other people and that includes the other direction &#8212; thinking about the thoughts and actions of others and how they affect me. I guess just focusing on that helps.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You seemed to be in some doubt and in my book, that definitely qualifies as a superpower.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Sam.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I find, sometimes just being able to notice when two people are using the same word to mean two different things, just noticing and identifying that one thing can make a huge difference in their conversation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. A shared vocabulary is so important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and when you think you share a vocabulary and you don&#8217;t is the worst. It&#8217;s like the word &#8216;persistence&#8217; in functional versus OO development or property. We use this totally differently and it confuses the snot out of people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a lot of stuff in your bio. I would love to hear more about your origin story and how all those little pieces came in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I grew up in New York City, graduated high school when I was 16, went to college for a year, got bored, went to Europe, drove around in a motorcycle for six months, lived in Sweden above the Arctic Circle for free, couldn&#8217;t find a job so I studied the Swedish language so I speak a little bit, joined a very unconventional religious group for nine years of my early adulthood, left it, live in the Central African Republic for three months of that time, got married, had a child, studied accounting in school. As I was working as a bookkeeper and accountant, I started getting interested in computers because we got a computer at our office that was a turnkey hardware and software combined system for client accounting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I found that there were a couple of basic manuals in the drawer that I could actually get to do things that it wasn&#8217;t already programmed to do and it was really exciting because as a bookkeeper/accountant, you have a calculator and the only thing that you really have to work with is a single register. There&#8217;s no instructions they can give. You can just store one value. To have this incredible machine that had so many possible storage areas and an infinitely flexible behavior was super exciting to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Although I continued to study accounting part time at night so that I could just have a degree, I realized that I was way more interested and enthusiastic about software development than I was about in accounting so I never became an accountant. I had the help of a mentor/friend who helped me learn C language in the beginning but after that, it was totally self-taught. I didn&#8217;t have any formal education in computer science or programming, which in a way is unfortunate but in other way is not because I have a feeling I would have lost interest if I had. I got a D in my first computer course. It was about mainframes and it really wasn&#8217;t a very interesting course and it wasn&#8217;t like it is now, anyway.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, the nice thing about when you started is that you came in at a time when it was possible to understand everything about the machine you were working on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, almost. I downloaded the assembly language but didn&#8217;t get too far but it was certainly a much more limited scope than it is now. Much, much more, I agree. I lived in the Washington DC area shortly after I started my career so some of my jobs were in governments, some were in commercials. Most of them were in places that were kind of rigid. It&#8217;s totally different from the startup culture today and the more flexible culture of today. To be honest, there are a lot of jobs that I had where I felt like I was just one cog in a huge machine and had a very narrow responsibility.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I didn&#8217;t really learn that much. I wasn&#8217;t really happy and in addition, I had some really good managers and I had some really bad managers and over the years, I just realized how incredibly connected my human experience was to my happiness in the workplace. How important it was to have people that were understanding and flexible and inquisitive and energetic? I started to see more and more how things were so much an issue of human interaction and not so much about technical things so I decided to think about that more and talk about that more and that&#8217;s when I started writing about it. I am very interested in how we can improve the human condition and I want to try to do my part to help.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s wonderful. Keith, I noticed something you said in the beginning about your origin story. You said you live in the Arctic Circle for a bit. Can you talk a little bit about that? That&#8217;s really fascinating.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was 18. I went to Europe. I bought a motorcycle. I started riding and I got tired of industrial cities and I asked people, &#8220;Where should I go?&#8221; It&#8217;s different from where I&#8217;ve been. One person said, &#8220;Go up to Lapland,&#8221; and I say, &#8220;Where&#8217;s Lapland?&#8221; Oh, it&#8217;s the northern part of Sweden and Finland and Norway. I looked into it and I took a ferry from Denmark to Finland and rode up the way to Finland, cross the border and arrived in the town called [inaudible], which is above the Arctic Circle. I was greeted at a gas station by another motorcyclist who started talking to me and he said, &#8220;Do you want to meet my club?&#8221; I said, &#8220;Sure.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I followed him out of town and it was about six kilometers and I was wondering where am I going? Is it going to be a motorcycle gang? Is my life in danger and everything? We ride up into this club and there&#8217;s like seven to eight bikes out there and they were the nicest people. I decided to stay in that town where I stayed for about three months. They let me sleep in their motorcycle club house. I didn&#8217;t have a place to stay. One of them, his father was a parliament member and he took me under his wing and introduced me to people there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It was really a very interesting experience, [inaudible] without any skills at all. Although I wanted to find work, I couldn&#8217;t so I spent all day just studying Swedish. This friend, Johnny has a sister helped to teach me Swedish and I continue to study a bit after I returned home. It was August when I arrived and by November, it was already about 30 degrees below zero. The Northern Lights were gorgeous but it was too cold for me and it was too cold to ride a motorbike.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Was that in Fahrenheit or in Celsius?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think they kind of converged at about that value.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If Celsius, it&#8217;s -44, I believe. Any time you&#8217;re in the negatives on either scale, I&#8217;m like, &#8220;We&#8217;re done.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And that&#8217;s why I live in Thailand during the winter whenever I can.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was wondering what the balance was for Thailand.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s partly a climate thing but it&#8217;s also I&#8217;m tired of the stressful life in America. There&#8217;s so much conflict here and so much stress. I just want to go somewhere else and relax. I stay in Chiang Mai a lot of the time. It&#8217;s a wonderful place.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Why come back?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because I have a daughter and I want to stay connected with her. She&#8217;s grown up. There&#8217;s that and also, I found that I really enjoy coming home and reconnecting with friends. I just went to bootcamp last weekend and that was an amazing experience and one that I hope to repeat every year. There are things to appreciate about being an American too. I love this country and I love other countries as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Keith, I think you said the word conflict. You said the one reason you go to Thailand is because there&#8217;s less conflict there. I believe you do some work to reduce the conflict that we have here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I try to butt in whenever I can and whenever I think I can be helpful. It was in conference so I just proposed the subject conflict resolution. I got up in front of everybody and I said, &#8220;I want to talk about conflict resolution. I don&#8217;t really have any solutions but I want to hear yours.&#8221; We got a group of really good people who shared some interesting experiences and got some good ideas from that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What are some of the suggestions you&#8217;ve got? What did you learn?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of them, which I echoed was to read the book &#8216;Difficult Conversations.&#8217; I found that kind of slow and difficult to read at times but it has some incredible ideas about understanding the other person&#8217;s point of view and resolving the situation. One of them was by, rather than assuming that a problem is due to one person or the other being totally at a fault, understand that usually, it&#8217;s more nuanced than that and each party has some responsibility in the problem. I gave an example of a time when that happened to friend of mine.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Another thing was to listen first. We always want to be right and provide a solution and be the hero and everything but a lot of times, we just need to listen and understand what the other person is saying. Sometimes, they just need to feel listened to so we have to suppress ourselves and our, &#8220;It&#8217;s not about me. It&#8217;s about you. It&#8217;s about everyone.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like that phrase &#8212; it&#8217;s not about me. I use that a lot when there is any conflict and I start to feel defensive at almost everything, another person says or how they react to me is about their situation, much more than it is about me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Keith, I have a question. How do you feel about mediators? I asked that because mediator&#8217;s purpose is to be the neutral party between two numbers of people who are trying to work something out. I&#8217;m curious, do you think mediation is ever harmful or like the ways it can be harmful and helpful?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>First of all, let me say that I do not at all consider myself a scholar or an expert on conflict resolution but I&#8217;ll be happy to share my personal opinion. I think mediation is extremely helpful as long as both or all parties are open to it. If they&#8217;re not, then it&#8217;s kind of a waste of time, I think. But if so, mediators are skilled at understanding one person&#8217;s point of view and sometimes expressing it in a way that is understandable to the other and also in initiating or suggesting a compromise, which may not have thought about otherwise.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How do you feel when mediators are trying to stay in that narrow road in that middle lane and one party is mentioning they feel offended by that, that this mediator is saying, &#8220;I&#8217;m trying to stay neutral into this,&#8221; and the other person or party might say, &#8220;That&#8217;s wrong. Why are you not taking a side?&#8221; Maybe it&#8217;s a moral thing or maybe it&#8217;s a big priority to one person but might not be to the other. How do you feel about that? What are your credence on that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve had personal experiences in mediation where this happened to me and it&#8217;s extremely frustrating. I don&#8217;t know the answer. I guess we just have to think of the two sub-optimal paths, which one is the better one and hope that when it all resolves out in the net, that it&#8217;s better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I know. I&#8217;m sorry for asking you such a hard question. That&#8217;s a question I&#8217;ve been actually thinking about for a while now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It would be really interesting to get mediators on the show and talk about their experiences in mediating people. That would be wonderful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Keith, do you have a framework for conflict resolution that you use or you just go in there and wing it according to what seems right at the moment? How do you approach this?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, I&#8217;m not really a scholar or anything about this. I haven&#8217;t read a ton of books or anything. I do just kind of wing it. Sometimes, you have to make a decision not to enter the situation at all, if there&#8217;s a threat of physical danger for example. I think about the two men who lost their lives helping the two Muslim girls in Portland and they&#8217;re my heroes. There are not too many of us that are willing to risk our lives to do the right thing. It&#8217;s a personal decision.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Sometimes the question is &#8216;if&#8217; and not &#8216;how.&#8217; As far as how, I just try to do the right thing. Sometimes [inaudible] and sometimes I don&#8217;t. The other day, I wanted to go to a co-working place. I went to a great place I&#8217;d like to go to in Chantilly, Virginia but it was all full so I had to go somewhere else. I drove to about 10 minutes to another coffee shop, got in there and all of the tables were filled except one. That table was between myself and a man two tables down from me. He had his backpack on the bench just almost where that middle person would have been sitting. I got really angry. I thought this guy should know better and I thought about, &#8220;Well, what am I going to do here? I&#8217;m going to say something or not?&#8221; If I say something, is my anger going to show and will it be counterproductive or will it have a happy ending when the person says, &#8220;Oh, yeah. I&#8217;m sorry. You&#8217;re right.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Eventually, I decided to say something about it and I said, &#8220;Excuse me. Is that your bag?&#8221; and he said, &#8220;Yeah.&#8221; I said, &#8220;Would you mind moving it to the chair across from you so that if somebody is coming here, they don&#8217;t think that the table is taken.&#8221; He got very angry &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Really?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; And he started being sarcastic and nasty. I tried to dive under my emotions and say the &#8216;calm&#8217; thing in response to him. There were some interchanges and eventually, I just decided that I&#8217;ve done all that I can do here without escalating it to an unacceptable level so I&#8217;m going to stop now and he left the bag there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There are a lot of obstacles to initiating an action like that. One of them is the possibility that you&#8217;ll fail anyway and another is that you&#8217;ll be verbally abused or at least disrespected. Another is that you&#8217;d be physically abused and there are others as well. Sometimes, we&#8217;re just shy to do something which other people don&#8217;t already do. We don&#8217;t want to be different. I&#8217;ve decided that I don&#8217;t mind being different and if there&#8217;s something I can do to help people around me and it&#8217;s not going to hurt me to do it, I&#8217;m going to try to do it even if it&#8217;s weird or embarrassing or whatever because we only have one life on this Earth, why not spend it trying to help each other. When we help each other, we&#8217;re helping ourselves. It&#8217;s kind of a cliché but it&#8217;s really true that when I help somebody, I feel really good and I enjoy it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When I wrote this blog article about radical helpfulness and another term for that could be radical kindness, there is so much conflict now these days in our country and all over, really. I feel like a lot of it is because we&#8217;ve become so distant from each other. We hang around in our own virtual and ideological worlds. The one thing that we can do is perform acts of kindness totally agnostics to our beliefs. I saw a great news article many months ago. There was a pro- and anti-Trump demonstration and one of the anti-Trump demonstrator is an adult. I forget exactly what he did but I think he said something really nasty to a young boy, maybe eight years old and the boy started crying.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the anti-Trump demonstrators, a woman went up to the boy and comforted him. I thought, what a beautiful story. This is what we should be doing more. This is what we should be talking about. If we can make those connections, then maybe we have a shot at reducing the amount of violence, negativity, hate, conflict, selfishness that plagues our society, that plagues humanity. Now more than ever, we don&#8217;t have time to be bickering. Human race has existential problems that we need to be addressing. We need a thousand Manhattan Projects on how to deal with climate change. There are so many things, so many problems that we have. We don&#8217;t have time to be messing around this little stuff. We have to start thinking about our future &#8212; future of our children. It&#8217;s really important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Something you said early on in there really strikes a chord with me about just being willing to take that first step and that puts me in mind of a psychology study, which you can find by Googling &#8216;psychology&#8217; and &#8216;the smoke-filled room.&#8217; This is an experiment where they had people come in and the experimental subject was asked to fill out a questionnaire. There were some number of confederates in the room as well, who were also pretending to fill out a questionnaire.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The real experiment was they started piping smoke into the room through other room’s vents. The experiment was to see what the person would do. What they found was that a lot of the people in this experiment would sit there and they would see the smoke and then they would look around to see what everybody else was doing and the confederates were instructed to stay calm and just keep filling out their surveys. People would take a remarkably long time to actually respond to the smoke, to the extent that if there had been an actual fire, they probably would have been dead. That really speaks to me about what you were saying about the willingness to just take that first step. That can be, as you say radical.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely and I find that a very good antidote for that is karaoke. It sounds ridiculous but actually it&#8217;s really true because when I first started doing karaoke about 20 years ago, I felt very shy, I didn&#8217;t feel comfortable doing something that&#8217;s going outside of myself. We really have to overcome our shyness in that respect because it&#8217;s really a fear. It&#8217;s really an insecurity like how could I do something that other people are doing and it&#8217;s inappropriate and it&#8217;s not constructive.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Keith, to go back to what you said about how you had to decide that you&#8217;re okay with being different, I think that that decision is something that&#8217;s hard for a lot of people. Many people even consider that that might be something that they need to think about because what you&#8217;re talking about with making certain decisions and choosing to say something or not say something, also means that you have to have some sort of self-awareness. It seems like to one of the earlier points that we spend so much time in our virtual worlds that we don&#8217;t really spend that much time thinking about who we are or what we want, what kind of impression we want to make on others. Do you have any advice for how somebody who maybe notices that they would like to feel a little more intentional before it could get started?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You mean besides the karaoke?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Besides karaoke.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s just practice. A few years ago, I had a fear of flying. Whenever I would be in a plane and I heard some noises or I feel some vibration, I would be frightened and I would think, &#8220;What does this mean? What going on?&#8221; I read a book called &#8216;Triumph Over Fear.&#8217; It was a great book and eventually, I resolved my fear of flying by taking a couple of flying lessons and feeling what it was like to dive and to feel 2 gees and that kind of thing and understanding that the sensation I was feeling on the plane were nothing compared with what would happen if there were a serious problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But the reason I&#8217;m mentioning this is that the approach that she use in the book, Triumph Over Fear was that she would take people of very gradually through their phobias. I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;ll be too inappropriate to call it a phobia when somebody is afraid to reach out. I believe, it was long time ago that I read the book but I believe the example was of a lady who was afraid of high floors and tall buildings. She brought the woman to a building and she said, &#8220;How far can you go before you start feeling uncomfortable?&#8221; She said, &#8220;Oh, maybe 10 feet in front of the elevator.&#8221; She said, &#8220;Okay, let&#8217;s walk 10 feet from the elevator,&#8221; and then she said, &#8220;You think you could take one more step?&#8221; She took one more step, then maybe that was it for the day and they went home. They kept on doing this. After a few sessions, she was already on the 10th floor.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> My point in saying this is that we can hack ourselves, we can change ourselves and the way to change ourselves a lot, I believe is to change ourselves a little many times. We can ask ourselves in a situation, &#8220;How far am I willing to go before I start feeling uncomfortable?&#8221; and then ask yourself, &#8220;What can I do in addition to that? How much further can I go in addition to that without feeling super-uncomfortable?&#8221; and doing that. Once we start exercising that muscle more and more, we can make more progress than we would otherwise. A lot of times we cripple ourselves by just thinking about where it is you want to go and we look at how far that is and we think, &#8220;Oh, man. I&#8217;m never going to get there so I&#8217;m going to try,&#8221; and that&#8217;s unfortunate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can so identify with you on the fear flying. My strategy was very similar as yours. I did not learn how to fly but I read a bunch of books on flying. I read a blog post about this pilot who basically has his blog about folks who are afraid of flying and he goes through the whole entire process. He&#8217;s like, &#8220;When you take off, you&#8217;re going to hear the landing gear drop. It might sound a little funny. It sounds funny from plane to plane. Every plane sounds different but these are the normal things or the things that you&#8217;re probably going to hear,&#8221; because that was a big thing for me. It&#8217;s just the sounds. For me, working through that and trying to face those things, I kind of read about it and be like, &#8220;Okay, I can do this. I can do this,&#8221; and I also started very, very small, very few short trips and then worked my way up. That definitely resonates with me. It&#8217;s little by little.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s great.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Keith, the discussion about fear of being different reminds me of a conversation we had in this podcast with Eugenia Cheng, where she defined the words congressive and ingressive, where congressive is behavior and needs that are about helping everyone &#8212; we want to be part of the group and advance the group. Ingressive is it&#8217;s about me &#8212; I want to advance myself. As humans, we naturally have a lot of congressive urges and we get rewards from things that help everyone. I think this whole part of not wanting to be different from the group is part of our congressiveness.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Personally, I use that word congressive inhibition, which I made up, which is that impulse that holds us back from standing out or doing something that might annoy other people. That fear of being different in some ways is part of us wanting to do things to help everyone but it can hold us back too much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, a lot of it is just trying to make and form judgment about where that line is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, you&#8217;re right. It&#8217;s about learning that because that part where you don&#8217;t want to stand out, that is part of you wanting to help the world. That&#8217;s not something bad about you but there&#8217;s a balance where you can help a little more by being different in some situations.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I agree. That question about, &#8220;Is this going to be annoying or helpful?&#8221; is an important one but I think only for a subset of behaviors because there are some behaviors that are indisputably beneficial and there is no really gray area. I have mentioned in an article about one time when I was at a hotel in Toronto and there was a fire alarm and we were all told to leave the building. We were out there for 20 minutes and I saw this family who had apparently been swimming and they were freezing. I just walked up to one of the hotel staff and I said, &#8220;That family over there, they look really cold. Could somebody get them some towels or something?&#8221; so he did and in that case, there really wasn&#8217;t any kind of downside to acting but I&#8217;ve had to condition myself to do that, to be the one to go up and say something.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Just a couple of days ago, I was at my gym and they were playing on the TV a political commentary show, which was not really news, it was commentary. It was about Donald Trump and I won&#8217;t even mention which side it was on. It was actually on the side that I support and I said to the man there, &#8220;I think a lot of people would feel bad seeing this on TV. Can we put it on something more neutral?&#8221; He said, &#8220;Nobody&#8217;s ever complained about it before and I get that a lot because I am more vocal than anybody I know.&#8221; What I should have said was, &#8220;Someone just did.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, there&#8217;s often that unspoken thought that everyone has and no one wants to be the one to say because you do you risk that rejection, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I asked myself, &#8220;What&#8217;s the worst that can happen?&#8221; and really, usually the worst that can happen is somebody says, &#8220;No, don&#8217;t do that,&#8221; and then I say, &#8220;Okay.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was at a seminar on Kanban and had lunch. It took about 15 or 20 minutes for everybody to get fed. Later, the leader of the session said, &#8220;I noticed that at lunch time, it took a very long time for people to be fed. The table was up against the wall so there was only one line of people that could have gotten through. If you have moved the table a few feet over, you would have had two lines and it would have taken half the time.&#8221; I thought to myself, that&#8217;s really true. If I had thought of that, would I have said anything or if I would&#8217;ve said anything, why would I have not said anything? There are so many reasons &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, there are a lot of reasons and those reasons are usually like, &#8220;Maybe, there&#8217;s a reason that the tables up against the wall.&#8221; There’s a lot of reasons for things that we can&#8217;t just see but what&#8217;s the cost of asking, of suggesting? There really is that personal risk of projection. I think some of us are more sensitive to that than others. Personally, I&#8217;m really not so my theory is, &#8220;I&#8217;ll ask because it&#8217;ll cost me less if I&#8217;m wrong than it might someone else.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I understand the feeling of not wanting to say something but I also grew up in a family with a grandmother who was that person who said something. There were very many times, where we would go to the store and then they would bring up her stuff and it was not the price that it said. A lot of people would be like, &#8220;It&#8217;s a few cents. It&#8217;s not a big deal.&#8221; My grandmother is like, &#8220;No, that&#8217;s not what it is.&#8221; She would stop the whole line. She didn&#8217;t care because to her, it was, &#8220;Why should I have to pay for your mistake?&#8221; She thought that was important enough because she felt like, &#8220;If I don&#8217;t say anything, then other people are going to have to pay for this too and that&#8217;s crazy.&#8221; That&#8217;s her attitude about a lot of that. More so, the idea of how can you help the group, for her it means, I speak up, as opposed to I don&#8217;t because I don&#8217;t want to ruffle feathers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nice. That behavior of speaking up is actually congressive.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. There was a trip we took where we were all on this bus together going somewhere. We were going between states and this woman had these little confetti things she was popping because they believe it was 4th of July, which was annoying and she was close to us. My grandmother stood up and said, &#8220;Excuse me,&#8221; and I don&#8217;t remember all the words because I was cowering in my chair but she said basically like, &#8220;What you&#8217;re doing is very loud and rude and you&#8217;re getting confetti in other people and I would very much appreciate it if you stop because it&#8217;s not necessary,&#8221; and the woman was like, &#8220;Well, nobody said anything,&#8221; but then after my grandmother sat down, the entire bus started clapping.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They all felt this way but they were so afraid to say anything and my grandmother was saying, &#8220;The bus driver must have said something because that&#8217;s the person with some authority but if they&#8217;re not going to speak up, then I&#8217;m going to speak up because this is crazy and we shouldn&#8217;t have to go through this because this woman doesn&#8217;t have manners.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. All of this is reminding me of a conversation we had yesterday in our Slack channel. By the way, if you&#8217;re listening to this and you&#8217;re not in our Slack channel, you can get into there by going to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode and donating any amount. We have some really interesting conversations in there but yesterday we were talking about fire alarms because Jessica posted something in there about fire alarms and their function as a tool to make some of these decisions a little bit easier. Jess, you want to talk about that a little?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There was that thing where we talked about it earlier, we did experiment where people didn&#8217;t get up &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Uhm-mm, the smoke-filled room.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right and it turns out that if you turn on a fire alarm, then they get up and they go out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s like the permission thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think you dropped a tweet in the guest questions channel about how fire alarms aren&#8217;t useful because they tell you there&#8217;s fire. They&#8217;re useful because they tell you it&#8217;s socially acceptable to react.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right and then Jacob pointed out that also when the smoke detector goes off, no one panics because a smoke detector is a socially acceptable and calm way to announce a fire, as opposed to running around screaming. Yet, a great comparison to linting, like pointing out that you&#8217;ve forgotten a semicolon at the end of this line might be constructive but it&#8217;s annoying as hell so we have the linter do it. The fire alarms are kind of like that too so that we can build automated machines to do that interruption, that pointing out activity for us when it&#8217;s socially painful to have a person point out that you put a space after your stupid curly brace.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wonder if there are ways that we can use our processes, build these points into our workflows, where we can have checkpoints and make sure that everything is going smoothly and make it socially acceptable to say, &#8220;I noticed this thing.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My friend Emma, to her job currently, to notice failed builds and pester the developers who&#8217;s built failed after she determines that it wasn&#8217;t just a transit in failure and this is hard for her. We&#8217;re currently working on an automation for this using Atomist &#8212; plugged for my work &#8212; but there&#8217;s reasons I work there and one of them is because she&#8217;s building an automation to look at the build log, determine why it failed and then ping the developer. When a bot does it, there&#8217;s not that social cost. Keith, you called this radical helpfulness?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes and it&#8217;s important that it be radical because you want to go well beyond our normal level of healthfulness and even our comfort level.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So it&#8217;s radical because it&#8217;s uncomfortable. I like that because the name gives us permission to be uncomfortable in order to be helpful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s something that you talked about way back at the beginning and it&#8217;s when you said and this is why I laughed at that at the time, &#8220;I try to butt in whenever I can, whenever I think I can be helpful.&#8221; But then you immediately followed that up with one of the things you can do to be helpful is listen and that it&#8217;s not about you. In this radical helpfulness, in fact if you feel really good about it like, &#8220;I&#8217;m so badass. I am going to move this table,&#8221; then it becomes about you and there&#8217;s a decent chance you&#8217;re not being helpful at all. Unlike if you walk into someone&#8217;s conversation and maybe they don&#8217;t want you there. That&#8217;s a question. You mentioned, you heard two people who are not communicating, how do you ask them whether they want your help at all?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess it depends on the context. I mentioned in a blog article and also in the conflict resolution meeting that we had, I had a situation where a couple of my coworkers were arguing. It was a very heated argument and I just walked up to them and I said, &#8220;Would a third party be helpful here?&#8221; because I realized that [inaudible] turning on me. I didn&#8217;t want to be the problem. I want to be the solution so it&#8217;s a delicate balance. I&#8217;ve learned from hard experience that sometimes I&#8217;m wrong so I try to always keep in mind that I might be wrong here so I must not be arrogant about what I think is the right thing to do or what I think the solution is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And if someone doesn&#8217;t like your help, you got to step back.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah. That wouldn&#8217;t be helpful if not to step back.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Keith, I&#8217;m curious about the things like the markers that you see when it&#8217;s time for you to take a step back. One of the things I think about is body language and I guess, it&#8217;s probably the main thing that I can think of right now but what are your markers?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Body language is a huge thing. Of course, asking up front is probably the safest thing to do. Sometimes, that&#8217;s not an option and just got to make adjustment. It&#8217;s a calculation, the perceived probability of success and failure and the perceived risk of danger and all these things has got to make a calculation at the strobe of the moment and I hope that you&#8217;ve made the right decision.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I have had the experience of proposing what I thought was the no-brainer solution and it turned out there was something deeper that I hadn&#8217;t thought about. That happened in code all the time too. I look at some code and I think, &#8220;That&#8217;s silly. Why did they do it that way?&#8221; and then it turns out that they had a really good reason so I really need to be very respectful of others and not jump to conclusions and not think that I&#8217;m infallible because I&#8217;m not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. There&#8217;s a lot of ugly code out there that is beautiful you just don&#8217;t know why.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One situation that I find it very hard to do that sometimes is when you are in remote environment. Lately, in the past few years, a lot of companies are embracing this remote, I don&#8217;t want to say culture but remote setting where folks didn&#8217;t have a chance to sit down and be in their comfort zone at home to do their job. I think about when you&#8217;re in a video chat or sometimes, when the audio is off, I think about how well do I know my team, to know when I need to either step back or input something. It can be very challenging especially when you can&#8217;t see everybody and sometimes, a lot of the communication is just through chatting in the chat room.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s a big issue. That&#8217;s why it&#8217;s so great when remote teams can get together in person sometime periodically.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I agree.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think in the end, we just have to give ourselves permission to make mistakes and just make sure they were doing things out of the right intention and make sure that they were being respectful of other people. But there are times that I&#8217;d rather take a risk than not, even if I&#8217;m not sure. It&#8217;s really a judgment call and we have to give ourselves permission to make mistakes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and when someone tells me, &#8220;No, because&#8230;&#8221; or even just, &#8220;No,&#8221; I say thank you because that&#8217;s a piece of information I did not have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If I were on the receiving end of the, &#8220;No,&#8221; I would be really curious to know why. Why ‘no’? Is it disrespectful to ask somebody why?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess it depends on the context. Like with my kids, there&#8217;s a few times when I just say no. That&#8217;s because it&#8217;s like dangerous or we don&#8217;t have time to explain it or something like that. Other times, I do think it&#8217;s rude to say no and I owed them an explanation. Sometimes the answer is, &#8220;No and you don&#8217;t want to know why.&#8221; They don&#8217;t want to know about grown up things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I get that with my daughter a lot too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was some really good advice. I like how you said that we need the right intention and respect for other people because the right intention is not enough. We also need information and other people have that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Our context as individuals are so limited.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s time for reflections. This is where each of the panelists gets to bring up a piece of the podcast that they found particularly insightful or bring something else in to think about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Keith, as part of my reflection is that your life sounds like a movie so I need to do more.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have more time than you have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, still. I mean what you have done by 20, I&#8217;m still on my bucket list. You said that the way to change ourselves a lot is to change ourselves a little many times, which is I think a great amazing quote because I feel like oftentimes, I have goals and I can see the path but getting there feels very overwhelming. I think it&#8217;s the same when you&#8217;re really talking about working on yourself, which can be sometimes harder because nobody can see what you can see. I love what you&#8217;re really saying here is just do something really, really small but just do it so many times that eventually, you&#8217;ll get there without even really thinking about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I also wrote down that quote about the way to change ourselves a lot is to change ourselves a little many times. I really liked that. One of the other things that struck out for me was this idea that you should decide that you&#8217;re okay with being different and I like that you call that out as an actual step that we need to take because I&#8217;ve known a few people who just were different and that&#8217;s just how they were but I feel like there are a lot more of us who need to actually be explicit about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I also really liked your suggestions about doing karaoke or taking flying lessons. Those were more interesting things that I hadn&#8217;t really thought about in terms of ways of training yourself too, in one case, get over your fear of flying and in the other case, I think of it as just to train yourself to be bold. This is really useful. Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JASMINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For me, I think that same quote also resonated with me and also, made me look within myself to really think about how my character and how I just connect with other people. It was a really great reminder just to be mindful of myself and my actions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One thing that I noticed in this episode, like you said Jasmine, it&#8217;s about being mindful. There&#8217;s a lot of conscious thought in all of these ways of being helpful in resolving conflict. There&#8217;s a lot of conscious listening and thinking and then making deliberate choices of what to do. The karaoke is a very deliberate choice to how to deal with the fear of flying. Change ourselves a little many times, each of those is conscious thought and choice in order to form the habits that we&#8217;re trying to become. You know what? If you&#8217;re doing that, good job because that&#8217;s a lot of effort. It&#8217;s not easy and it&#8217;s not comfortable and that&#8217;s okay.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I find it very heartening that all of you are so introspective and caring about wanting to live a good life, the right life, helping other people. My hope is that there are many, many other people like you out there and we can all work together to create a safer and happier world.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Group hug!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>KEITH:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You cannot see my arms but they&#8217;re out in front of me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>All right. Thank you for joining us, for uniting for frequent dialogue. See you on Slack and on the next episode of Greater Than Code!</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span></i></p>
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<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/paladique"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jasmine Greenaway</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Keith Bennett: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/keithrbennett"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@keithrbennett</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://about.me/keithrbennett"><span style="font-weight: 400;">about.me/keithrbennett</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://bbs-software.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Bennett Business Solutions</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Metamours United For Frequent Dialogue” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img class="alignnone wp-image-1018" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MUFFD-2-1024x1024.jpg" alt="" width="180" height="180" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MUFFD-2-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MUFFD-2-150x150.jpg 150w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MUFFD-2-300x300.jpg 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MUFFD-2-768x768.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 180px) 100vw, 180px" /><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-1016" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MUFFD.jpg" alt="" width="1" height="1" /></p>
<p><b>01:47</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Keith’s Background and Superpower</span></p>
<p><b>10:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Conflict Resolution</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/jug4qxduj15u84i/Conflict%20Resolution%20Open%20Space%20Session%20from%20DevOpsDays%20DC%202017.mp3?dl=0"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Open Spaces session on Conflict Resolution this summer at DevOpsDays D.C.</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (and the precursor to this conversation)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143118447/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0143118447&amp;linkId=693c6377e3aba2669f78354de86f0543"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Difficult Conversations: How To Discuss What Matters Most</span></a></p>
<p><b>12:01 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Opinions on Mediators/Mediation</span></p>
<p><b>14:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Approaching Conflict</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2017/05/police_responding_to_ne_portla.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">News Story Re: Portland Murders</span></a></p>
<p><b>17:31 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Radical Helpfulness/Kindness</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://medium.com/@keithrbennett/kaizen-and-radical-helpfulness-a207077cd7e7"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Keith Bennett: Kaizen and Radical Helpfulness</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.dowellwebtools.com/tools/lp/Bo/psyched/16/Smoke-Filled-Room"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Smoke Filled Room</span></a></p>
<p><b>20:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Okay with Being Different and Speaking Up</span></p>
<p style="text-align: ]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/paladique"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jasmine Greenaway</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Keith Bennett: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/keithrbennett"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@keithrbennett</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://about.me/keithrbennett"><span style="font-weight: 400;">about.me/keithrbennett</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://bbs-software.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Bennett Business Solutions</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Metamours United For Frequent Dialogue” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img class="alignnone wp-image-1018" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MUFFD-2-1024x1024.jpg" alt="" width="180" height="180" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MUFFD-2-1024x1024.jpg 1024w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MUFFD-2-150x150.jpg 150w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MUFFD-2-300x300.jpg 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MUFFD-2-768x768.jpg 768w" sizes="(max-width: 180px) 100vw, 180px" /><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-1016" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/MUFFD.jpg" alt="" width="1" height="1" /></p>
<p><b>01:47</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Keith’s Background and Superpower</span></p>
<p><b>10:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Conflict Resolution</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.dropbox.com/s/jug4qxduj15u84i/Conflict%20Resolution%20Open%20Space%20Session%20from%20DevOpsDays%20DC%202017.mp3?dl=0"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Open Spaces session on Conflict Resolution this summer at DevOpsDays D.C.</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (and the precursor to this conversation)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143118447/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0143118447&amp;linkId=693c6377e3aba2669f78354de86f0543"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Difficult Conversations: How To Discuss What Matters Most</span></a></p>
<p><b>12:01 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Opinions on Mediators/Mediation</span></p>
<p><b>14:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Approaching Conflict</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.oregonlive.com/portland/index.ssf/2017/05/police_responding_to_ne_portla.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">News Story Re: Portland Murders</span></a></p>
<p><b>17:31 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Radical Helpfulness/Kindness</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://medium.com/@keithrbennett/kaizen-and-radical-helpfulness-a207077cd7e7"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Keith Bennett: Kaizen and Radical Helpfulness</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.dowellwebtools.com/tools/lp/Bo/psyched/16/Smoke-Filled-Room"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Smoke Filled Room</span></a></p>
<p><b>20:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Okay with Being Different and Speaking Up</span></p>
<p style="text-align: ]]></googleplay:description>
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					<itunes:duration>44:06</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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					<title>054: Code Hospitality with Nadia Odunayo</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/054-code-hospitality-with-nadia-odunayo/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 08 Nov 2017 05:00:30 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=1001</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Nadia Odunayo talks about the idea of "code hospitality": What you can do to be a good host, asking questions rather than passing judgement, and using READMEs to give context.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Nadia Odunayo talks about the idea of code hospitality: What you can do to be a good host, asking questions rather than passing judgement, and using READMEs to give context.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jstoebel"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jacob Stoebel</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nadia Odunayo: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/nodunayo"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@nodunayo</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.nadiaodunayo.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">nadiaodunayo.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://ignition.works/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ignition Works</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><a href="http://rubybookclub.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ruby Book Club</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:19</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Nadia’s Superpower</span></p>
<p><b>02:01 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Code Hospitality and Being a Good Host</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUuAp6c1ylM"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nadia Odunayo: The Guest: A Guide To Code Hospitality @ GORUCO 2016</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Daniel Dennett’s </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_pump"><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Intuition Pump”</span></a></p>
<p><b>10:22 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– People and Habits and Having Expertise in a Particular Realm</span></p>
<p><b>17:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Asking Questions/Waiting for Explanation Rather Than Passing Judgement</span></p>
<p><b>22:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Codebases Are Constantly Changing: Use the README to Give Context</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://gist.github.com/nodunayo/c919477906aab6c1af6065ff8e868d3e">Code Hospitality Guide App</a></p>
<p><b>27:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Making Diagrams Whilst Coding/Pairing</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapoport%27s_rule"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rapoport&#8217;s Rule</span></a></p>
<p><b>32:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Thinking About the “Why”</span></p>
<p><b>36:44 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Giving and Receiving Feedback in a Nonviolent Way</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b>and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
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<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p><b>39:09 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Host Responsibilities for Hospitality</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Jamey:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Breaking down the power dynamic of learning.</span></p>
<p><b>Jacob:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Unspoken rules and normalized behavior based on location and telling stories to make people feel more at home.</span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Recognizing emotional labor.</span></p>
<p><b>Nadia:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> The mindset and safe spaces.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://brightonruby.com/2017/this-code-sucks-a-story-about-non-violent-communication-nadia-odunayo/?"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nadia Odunayo: This Code Sucks — A Story About Nonviolent Programming</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi everyone and welcome to Episode 54 of Greater Than Code. I&#8217;m Jamey Hampton and I&#8217;m very excited to introduce a guest panelist, Jacob Stoebel, from our Slack community. This is one of the benefits of being part of our Slack community, you might get asked to be a guest panelist. Thank you for being on, Jacob.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you very much. I am joined by Rein Henrichs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, thank you Jacob. I am super excited because I get to introduce, Nadia Odunayo.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, not bad.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Not bad working on that name. It&#8217;s a really interesting name. Nadia runs Ignition Works, a double act, who are currently focused on helping enterprise teams run and maintain cloud platforms. Previously, she was a software engineer at Pivotal and she originally learned the code at Makers Academy. She loves to speak at conferences and help organize them. In her spare time, she runs the Ruby Book Club Podcast and does as many commercial dance classes as she can. That&#8217;s a pretty full ticket. You&#8217;re doing a lot of stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, all fun stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you so much for being on the podcast with us, Nadia.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you for having me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A lot of times, we like to start out by asking our guests, &#8220;What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess my superpower is my smile because I&#8217;m always smiling. People always comment on it and it means that on the rare occasions I&#8217;m not smiling, people always quick to asks, &#8220;What&#8217;s wrong?&#8221; I think my smile is special because it always calms situations and makes people feel warm. I guess I just acquired it. Naturally, I&#8217;ve always been smiling. I think I&#8217;ve been smiling since I was born.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s so wonderful. I love that you didn&#8217;t even have to practice it. It just happened.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You see, I can&#8217;t stop now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wish we&#8217;re a video podcast so everyone could see. Nadia, I&#8217;m really excited to have you on the show today because I know we&#8217;re going to be talking about the idea of code hospitality, which I&#8217;m really interested in. It was a concept that I wasn&#8217;t familiar with before. Can you give us to start the cliff notes on it, then we can get into it more after?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. The reason why you&#8217;re probably not familiar with it is because I created it last year myself. You wouldn&#8217;t have heard about it anywhere, unless you were watching the talk for it. Code hospitality was born when I was working with my business partner on a Rails project and I was really struggling with whatever we happen to be working on at that time. I just felt like I was hitting a brick wall and I was beating myself up a lot about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> To put it in perspective, Theo, the guy that I work with, he has got 10 years of experience in Rails. At the time, I had two to three years of experience so there was a big experience gap. He could see that I was beating myself up and he said, &#8220;It&#8217;s like Rails is my city and I&#8217;ve lived here all of my life,&#8221; and what he was trying to say &#8212; and it did work, it did calm me down &#8212; was that, &#8220;It makes sense that I&#8217;m getting this and you’re not because I live here. I&#8217;m so used to the streets and the way this works. I know this like the back of my hand, whereas it&#8217;s an unfamiliar place to you so it&#8217;s fine that you&#8217;re struggling.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When he said that, that got me thinking about this idea of seeing our codebases and the tools that we use as places where we live. If I thought about it like, Theo is this person who&#8217;s lived in the City of Rails for a long time and I&#8217;ve just arrived, I haven&#8217;t just arrived but just to put it in perspective, I&#8217;ve just arrived and I want to get to know this place too so it was, when you&#8217;re a new person visiting the city and perhaps you&#8217;ve got someone who has lived there for a long time, what&#8217;s the best way for you to quickly start to find your way around, for you to learn about the quirks of the place but also for you to feel at home.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There were two roles that came to mind: the role of the host, the person who has lived there for a long time, what can they do to help make you feel welcome and to put you on your own two feet and then the role of the guest as in what can you be proactive in doing and what should you expect or not expect to happen if you are in an unfamiliar place. That&#8217;s just the quick high-level overview of what the code hospitality concept is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If a codebase as a city, does that mean there can be codebases that are unfriendly or might seem unfriendly or that might seem in your face or they could have cultures that are off-putting to a newcomer?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s funny because when I first heard the proposal for the talk, it focused a lot more on the code itself and the codebase itself and how that code was written and whether it was welcoming or not. But when I started writing the talk, I found the ideas that I wanted to talk about were more around the people working on the codebase and how they interacted. Partly also, I found that was quite hard to stipulate what is welcoming and what is not welcoming because everyone has different views and ideas on what welcoming or good code is and I didn&#8217;t want to go there. Also because I think it is more important to focus on how the people are interacting around the codebase.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But sure, I think there are some practices that are unwelcoming and in fact, one of the things that I talked about in the talk are READMEs as an orientation tool and how I think a lot of READMEs today are, I wouldn&#8217;t say misguided. Maybe they could be doing a better job of guiding a contributor to a codebase beyond just the initial set up, for example. There are practices and things that I talked about that touch on the codebase so I do think that there are some things in the codebase that could be done to make it more welcoming or less welcoming but I do think that the important thing to focus on is the interactions between the people working on the codebase.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love just the metaphor of the codebase as a place because it lets you bring to bear all of your experience with traveling or with having guests in your home and your understanding of what makes that a pleasant experience or not and it just lets you transport all of that knowledge and reuse it when you look at what makes this codebase a pleasant experience to learn or what makes a person a good host to a new developer on the codebase. When I think about what do I do when I want to be a good host, I feel like I can apply a lot of the principles behind that directly, not even having fully experienced your talk but just thinking it through in my brain. I think that&#8217;s what makes it such a powerful analogy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s great that you should say that because that&#8217;s pretty much how I start my talk. I start my talk with this story about how I leased my spare room on Airbnb or something like that and this woman gets in touch and says that she&#8217;s thinking of coming to live in London and do I have any time to help her to show her around. I tell this little story at the beginning of how I tidy up my flat, I go and pick her up at the airport, I plan things for her to do initially but I also make sure there&#8217;s space for her to do her own thing. Then at the end, we have a meal and it&#8217;s almost like, &#8220;How was that for you? What did you like? What didn&#8217;t you like?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then I also tell a couple of anecdotes at the talk when she&#8217;s trying to find a particular place that she went to before and I took her there but I didn&#8217;t give her any tools to help her remember how to get back there. Little anecdotes like that at the talk, which I then tied back to, &#8220;What does this mean when we&#8217;re coding with somebody or trying to introduce somebody to a codebase?&#8221; Things like if you&#8217;re pairing with someone and you&#8217;re just going ahead and doing things how you normally do it, then they&#8217;re not really going to learn and know how to do it themselves the next times. Not much of the story of when the character of my story, Alex is trying to find somewhere that I&#8217;ve really taken her.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then I also asked, at the beginning of my talk, the people to put up their hands if they&#8217;ve been a guest, if they&#8217;ve been a host, think of what makes a good guest, what makes a bad guest. Sometimes I asked people in the audience, &#8220;What did you do last time before you received a guest?&#8221; I start to prime people to think in terms of the things that you spoke about just now and then that gets them in the right mindset, when we start talking about the codebase, they start making those connections themselves.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love when you can find analogies that are so fittingly like this one that they explain so much just on themselves. Daniel Dennett uses the term &#8216;Intuition Pump&#8217; to talk about things that when you think about them, they help you build your intuition just by thinking through and understanding that thing. In this case, just thinking more about how I would apply being a good host to onboarding new engineers onto my team and things like that, something I&#8217;m working on right now, is really interesting for me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What&#8217;s interesting is when I was giving the talk at different conferences, different people would come up to me afterwards and apply the analogy to a particular problem they had or a particular thing that happened. For example, I had someone come up to me and say, &#8220;I&#8217;m trying to explain this concept to somebody,&#8221; and before I was just trying to say it how I would do it but I realized that&#8217;s not very helpful now so I&#8217;m going to extend it this way so I&#8217;m equipping them to be able to do it themselves.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I did have one more moving encounter after one of my talks, where I had this man came up to me, he looked quite sad and he said, &#8220;You know, we just recently hired a junior developer and they recently left because it wasn&#8217;t a good fit but listening to your talk, I realized that I did a lot wrong at the manager and I wasn&#8217;t a proper host and really the problem was more on my side than on their side.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> On one hand I was really glad that that person has come to a realization but also quite sad to think that what if he hadn&#8217;t come to my talk and going forward, if there were more junior developers in that situations. I guess the positive is that that person realized but it was also quite moving that they looked genuinely sad and as if it they had a realization of, &#8220;I&#8217;ve been thinking about it incorrectly.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s really interesting. I live in a town that&#8217;s very different from where I grew up right now. It&#8217;s a small rural town in the south in the United States. I feel like I&#8217;ve more or less become a person who lives here, not the person who visits. When I first moved here, I was very much a visitor and I was sort of thinking very consciously about why people do things this or at that way or why they drive certain ways, why, why, why, why, why and I think for the most part of it is I sort of stop thinking about why that is and it&#8217;s making me think like when a family visits or when friends from out of town come and visit, me and my wife are talking to them about these are some of the quirks of our town, we find ourselves sort of re-investigating why those particular eccentricities that we normally don&#8217;t think about on a daily basis. I feel like having guests to your codebase can have the same positive effects.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, so you touched on an idea that I originally had when I was mapping out this talk but that didn&#8217;t make it into the talk and that&#8217;s the whole piece around you said, why people drive in a certain way or take a certain route or things like that. When I was first thinking about the idea of code hospitality, one of the key things was people getting to habits. They get into their habits and they do things in a certain way. Sometimes it&#8217;s because they don&#8217;t even think about it. They just go and used to doing it. They just get up at this time. They take the train just because or sometimes, people do certain things because they&#8217;re optimizing for something that&#8217;s important to them so it could be cost, it could be fresh air, it could be whatever.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There were two sides for that. One as a host, when you&#8217;re getting ready to welcome another person, you can take time yourself to think about, &#8220;Now, what do I do things like this?&#8221; because for example, one of the ideas I had was the person coming to stay with you, messages you and says, &#8220;How do I get from the airport to your place?&#8221; Now, your instinct might be to just say the way that you always get from the airport to your place. You might just get a taxi, for example. But the real question is what is the guest&#8217;s parameters? What they need? Is it that they want to get there as quickly as possible? Do they have a budget?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Thinking about codebases, when it comes to writing a test in a certain way or delivering a feature, you take certain steps and particularly when you&#8217;re an experienced developer, you start questioning it. But when you&#8217;re working with a less experienced developer and you have to start explaining things, now it can come down to, &#8220;I don&#8217;t really know why I do it like that,&#8221; or, &#8220;I don&#8217;t like this because I don&#8217;t have this pain before and this is a way to avoid it.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But if you do uncover the reason why you do something, one, the other person you&#8217;re working with, particularly if you have a particular reason, they might be able to show you a way that&#8217;s better so you might say, &#8220;Oh, I do this because it&#8217;s cheaper,&#8221; or because it&#8217;s a safe way to maintain quality. The other person might say, &#8220;Oh, have you thought about this?&#8221; The stuff is within your parameters but it&#8217;s a new way. Alternatively, if there is no real reason and it&#8217;s just habit, then once you recognize that, you&#8217;re probably more open minded to try things differently anyway because you realize, &#8220;It has been done in that way for 10 years and no one&#8217;s really told me otherwise. Of course, I&#8217;ll try something else.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think it&#8217;s very valuable starting to question, &#8220;Do I do this out of habit? Or do I do this because there&#8217;s a real pain or there&#8217;s a real need and I want to protect for that?&#8221; and being of either way, can help you explain it to others, explain it to yourself, particularly be open to finding new opportunities when you work with different people. One thing I want to mention, though is I just use the comparison between a more experienced developer and a less experienced developer. Something I said at the beginning of my talk is, although the examples I&#8217;m using, because I&#8217;m talking about myself and Theo or they&#8217;d map to a senior developer versus a more junior one, but I&#8217;ll say that the difference between a guest and a host is not equal to junior versus senior because it&#8217;s more about expertise in a particular realm and that realm could be anything as broad as a whole codebase or to the team you&#8217;re working on, down to something particular line of code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In some versions of the talk, I give a particular example where I was working with an iOS developer who&#8217;d been doing iOS work for five years but they&#8217;d never done test driven development. He had five years more experience than me in the iOS side or the Objective-C side but he&#8217;d never done TDD and I&#8217;d had two years of experience in that, for example. When we were paring, he was the host, when it came to writing the code and I was the guest but in the same session, I was the host when it was like, &#8220;Here&#8217;s how we think about test driven development,&#8221; and he was the guest so I try and pitch it that. It&#8217;s a malleable thing and it says more of a frame of mind that you&#8217;ll always be a guest and a host at the same time, most of the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really, really like that because I think it can be really easy to get very caught up in the junior versus senior. This is actually helpful for me right now because I work at a very small startup and we recently hired a new CTO. I was the only developer at our company that had expertise in the codebase but then we hired someone that&#8217;s much more senior to me, to come in and be my superior. I felt very uncomfortable teaching him about code because he has more experience in this and he&#8217;s a senior level person and he knows all these things but he was coming to me with all these questions because it was about things that I was familiar with.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I also really like what you said about reconsidering why we&#8217;re doing things in a certain way because when he would ask me, &#8220;Why is it like this here?&#8221; I felt very uncomfortable being like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know. It just is.&#8221; Because I felt like he was going to be like, &#8220;But why? Explain your decisions to me,&#8221; and some of this was from before I even started at the company and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know, because someone did it that way,&#8221; and I felt like he was going to come in and be like, &#8220;Well, you don&#8217;t know anything about what you&#8217;re doing at all.&#8221; It wasn&#8217;t like that. It was more of like, &#8220;Let&#8217;s discuss this,&#8221; and I think putting that frame around like &#8216;this is a good time to discuss these things&#8217; is very helpful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s another thing I mentioned in my talk. When you said this idea of you were concerned that this new person would come in and start saying, &#8220;Why have you done this? Why have you done that?&#8221; At this talk, I talked to either the host or the guest and for the guests, I make this point of when you go into someone&#8217;s house you don&#8217;t go around saying, &#8220;This is messy. Why did you put this there? Why did you put that there?&#8221; You&#8217;re often quite polite and I say it&#8217;s almost the same thing in a codebase, which is be patient and wait to hear why things are in a certain way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you see a lack of tests or maybe a messy bit of code, ask questions about it but don&#8217;t cast a judgement immediately like, &#8220;Why you didn&#8217;t go test it?&#8221; or, &#8220;This is awful. You don&#8217;t know what you&#8217;re doing,&#8221; because in the same way that you would go into someone else&#8217;s house and say that, it’s a [inaudible] thing, this context in history that you don&#8217;t know. It could be that indeed was an oversight or was negligence and it&#8217;s a bad way and you&#8217;re going to help them see a better way but just like how you wouldn&#8217;t just start commenting on someone&#8217;s things&#8230; Well, I think you shouldn&#8217;t do the same thing in a codebase but I think people do feel that it&#8217;s easier to [inaudible] a new codebase and start grumbling about the code and say, &#8220;This is not to my standards.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This is why it&#8217;s particularly important that the whole guest/host thing is not mapped to junior/senior because you can be a much more senior developer going into a codebase that you&#8217;ve never seen before so you&#8217;re the guest. But you think, &#8220;This is not the standard,&#8221; or, &#8220;This is all wrong,&#8221; but really, you need to take time with the team and hear the story. When you go to someone&#8217;s house and you see stuff all of the floor, wait to hear the story about why the stuff all of the floor. Was there some works done and there wasn&#8217;t time to finish it and the person had to go and do something else but they&#8217;re aware of it. Hear the story as well, so be patient as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It would probably be harder to learn about the place when your mindset is looking for things to go&#8230; I mean, using the analogy of host and guest and not host and cop or host and invader. It&#8217;s like, you&#8217;re trying to learn more and then eventually, you can live there and eventually, you can say, &#8220;Now, that I&#8217;m your roommate and not a guest, the clothes on the floor are messing up my ability to live here.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. I like the thing what you said: a host and a cop, like an inspector for example. You&#8217;re not an inspector going to say, &#8220;Yep, check, check, check. This is all good.&#8221; You&#8217;re trying to move in as well so it&#8217;s a compromise and it does relationship building and it takes time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think there might also be a call for empathy here because if I went into someone&#8217;s house and it was a mess and they said, &#8220;There was some sort of natural disaster that costs our house to be a mess,&#8221; I would be like, &#8220;I&#8217;m so sorry. That&#8217;s so horrible. How can I help you fix it?&#8221; Whereas if I went into a codebase and I thought it was crap or whatever, you might be more likely to be like, &#8220;Why is this like this?&#8221; Even the reason is there were problems and there were issues and we&#8217;ve had a natural disaster, in a way or things out of her control, maybe it&#8217;s a call for empathy to be like, &#8220;Oh, I&#8217;m sorry that your codebase has gotten messy because of these things out of your control. How can we fix it?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This interview is a good sign. I think I had a little bit of bright ideas tied up because my main conclusion is that when we do code hospitality, it enables us to empathize and I talked about how it&#8217;s really difficult to work out what empathy means and what it is and how you practice it. If we have a framework that we can use that&#8217;s very common to all of us, it&#8217;s very rare that we are never in a situation, even if it&#8217;s very temporarily, like if we enter a new building or a meeting that we haven&#8217;t been a guest or host, then even when you&#8217;re the guest, you understand what it means to be a host and you can put yourself in the other person&#8217;s shoes and understand where they might be coming from.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Like you said this idea of natural disaster, there are so many things happening around a codebase that could lead to a poor codebase. It could be people leaving all of a sudden, difficulties in team communication, all that sort of stuff so that&#8217;s why you need to understand and empathize with those sorts of issues. If you&#8217;re a host and you think about, &#8220;Oh, yeah. What would it be like to be a CTO or a developer on this team when three people have left in the last two weeks?&#8221; or when they&#8217;re suddenly bought by another company and there&#8217;s a lot of flux or they have so many remote developers and they&#8217;re all in different time zones. If you start to think about those things, then you can say, &#8220;Oh, I understand how we got here.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cities have histories that are living in there, on their streets and buildings. I guess codebases can too. When people are visiting wherever I happen to be living, I love sharing those stories that are embedded inside the physical place, like there was a fire here 10 years ago in this neighborhood and it&#8217;s never been the same since. You can say the same thing as just like you say, what&#8217;s the story behind the lack of tests. Is there a trauma behind that? Is there a story of people that are overworked or burned out? There can be some real human stories attached to certain parts of the codebase.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Definitely and one of the bits of the talk where I talked about orientation and I talked about the README, I talked about that is a good place to explain the history or context or the narrative, if you can or if there is something around the current state of the codebase, how it got to be where it is or anything that would help someone who&#8217;s coming in just to set the scene in their head. I use it, particularly I say, even for open source projects where everyone is remote essentially, really it&#8217;s like you&#8217;re going into an office but they could have be a lot of history on an open source project that understand, this is how this project came to be, this is why the states come like this, this is the history of the maintainers. The story behind it, then that can help someone come in and understand, even if it&#8217;s a specific feature they&#8217;re going to deliver, they can have the scene set in their head of this is all the history, whether it&#8217;s a political one or a social one or maybe there&#8217;s nothing but that can help them start to feel at home in that repository, for example.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The more you think about it, the more it just strikes me as such a fitting analogy. Code is written by people. Code is a manifestation of the culture of the people that wrote it, the problems that they have, the constraints that they have. Cities are the same thing. Cities are manifestation of the cultures that built the buildings and the geography and the access to resource and all of these constraints, all these parameters that cost the city to be the way it is but the city is also evolving and changing all the time: old buildings get removed, new buildings get built and a codebase is the same too. One of things I love about the city analogy is it captures this idea of change as being normal and necessary.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, definitely. The fact is just like a home, every day that you live in it and you walk around, things are changing. It&#8217;s the same as codebase. It&#8217;s constantly changing. That&#8217;s why I think it&#8217;s quite important that one provide the tools to help people get set up but also know where to go next so that&#8217;s why I talked about READMEs often get you to, &#8220;Now, you have it running locally,&#8221; but they don&#8217;t mean to guide you in terms of this is what this home is about, this is the history here. But also, that&#8217;s why it&#8217;s important when as a host, to not only help you guest out initially but also give them the tools or the set up that they can help themselves because you can&#8217;t be holding their hand forever.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> While I&#8217;m a big proponent of pairing all the time or pairing whenever you can, even within a pairing situation, the other person needs to feel confident and know that they could do this by themselves, if needs be. I talked about the fish versus fishing. An old colleague of mine, he said to me, &#8220;You know, that phrase, &#8216;Give a person a fish, feed them for a day, teach them to fish, feed them for a year or a lifetime.&#8217; Well, I think that phrase is bullshit because if the person is starving while you&#8217;re teaching them to fish, they&#8217;re going to die.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I love this and I thought, &#8220;I could put this in my talk,&#8221; because it is important to find that balance between giving someone some fish or maybe some vegetables if they don&#8217;t eat fish, and teaching them how to fend for themselves. If someone new comes into your company or joins your team, you should assume, not that they&#8217;re starving but assume that they need a bit of sustenance and support just to get them going, then they can focus on starting to ramp up and be independent by themselves, I think it is important you find that balance because, like you said Rein, things are always evolving so if you suddenly throw someone in the deep end, it&#8217;s likely that they might not be able to keep up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also if you do that, they might not also know that it&#8217;s okay to ask questions and say that, &#8220;No, I&#8217;m not fine,&#8221; because they think, &#8220;I just got to keep up.&#8221; Before you know it, it might be too late like that story I told you earlier about the person who said the junior developer that didn&#8217;t work out and they were gone very quickly. That could be the case of someone thrown into the deep end and they weren&#8217;t given enough support. But then, because things are always changing, you can&#8217;t rely on always having someone with you so you also need to be at the same time equipping this person to be able to deal with that change and handle it by themselves. That concept of being primed for continual change is very important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe instead of teaching someone to fish, just fishing with them?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, probably &#8212; pair fishing. Then if one day you don&#8217;t turn up, the person realizes, &#8220;Oh, I know what to do because I&#8217;ve been doing this by myself with my pair for a while.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love that too because with fishing, I think a big benefit of pair fishing or just be that it&#8217;s more enjoyable to fish for someone else, than to do it by yourself. Maybe, that could be the same with code as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, another one I think is that it&#8217;s actually really hard to tell someone how to fish versus showing someone how to fish.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think it is more effective to show somebody, not to tell them because even through the act of telling them, that adds another layer of communication like a potential miscommunication. I think it&#8217;s a combination of showing and then also communicating what you&#8217;re doing. One of the things in the talk that I mentioned is to say [inaudible] diagrams whilst you&#8217;re coding because it&#8217;s one thing to show somebody something but when you&#8217;re approaching a problem together, you probably have different mental models of the starting point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> To get this point across, imagine that the next story in your backlog is as a user, I want to get into the Tower of London. The Tower of London has start [inaudible] in London, over on the Thames and I say, &#8220;You&#8217;re looking at it and you see this,&#8221; and I showed this aerial view of the Tower of London. Then I say, &#8220;But the person you&#8217;re working with is seeing this,&#8221; and I show this view straight on to the door so on the ground looking at the doors. I say, &#8220;Obviously, both of your respective heads, you&#8217;re going to have a completely different solution to how you get into the Tower of London.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I say that it&#8217;s the same when coding. You might pick up user story and again, particularly someone who lived there for a long time and you just joined, you probably have a different starting point in your head just from understanding, &#8220;I know that the codebase behaves like this, it has this quirk or we typically tend to approach this kind of feature like this,&#8221; and the other person probably bringing a perspective from different codebases or how they used to do things. I say something that&#8217;s useful that it&#8217;s just always before diving into the code, talk about it, get out, even if it&#8217;s just boxes and lines or whatever sort of thing works for you. I talked about how when I was working with Theo on a particular problem, we weren&#8217;t going anywhere but there was this perception of, &#8220;This is easy,&#8221; and I was thinking, &#8220;No, this is hard.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Theo said, &#8220;Draw how you think these objects are interacting,&#8221; and I drew this jumbled up diagram, which showed that I had this jumbled up concept of how the object were behaving or interacting and that&#8217;s why I found it difficult but we drew a more streamlined diagram together, I can&#8217;t remember what they called. It&#8217;s the kind of diagram that Sandi Metz has a lot of them and her POODR book with the boxes and then shows how the messages being sent. Is there a particular name for this? Is it role activity? No, I can&#8217;t remember.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Anyway, I drew a different style of diagram with Theo that was a much more straightforward diagram. As soon as we do that diagram, it was immediately like, &#8220;Ah, I know what test we need to write now. Okay, I know about implementation,&#8221; and it was just so powerful, just drawing that diagram and to think if we draw in a half an hour early, that would have been half an hour of, &#8220;Don&#8217;t know where I&#8217;m going,&#8221; that we just wouldn&#8217;t have had.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the things I talked about in the talk is pair but whilst pairing, have scraps of paper around just you can jot things down, check you on the same page and one of the other things I say is that it&#8217;s important that, even if you&#8217;re the host &#8212; you&#8217;re the person who is more experiences &#8212; you don&#8217;t assume that it&#8217;s the other person that&#8217;s lost and that they need to get to where you are. Instead you&#8217;re both at different places, how do you get to the same place that then stop going because if you always assume that it&#8217;s the other person that&#8217;s lost and you&#8217;re in the right place, then we get back to all of those things that we spoke earlier around your habits and you just do things the way you do and open to different ideas. There might be a better way to do things. It&#8217;s also not a helpful learning setup if it&#8217;s like teacher/student. It&#8217;s very important that it&#8217;s guest/host as opposed to teacher/student and, &#8220;I&#8217;m right and I&#8217;m going to tell you how you&#8217;re going to pass the test or find the right answer,&#8221; because that can also just not be a helpful or empowering learning set up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am reminded a little bit of and this was also mentioned in Daniel Dennett’s book Intuition Pump, Rapoport&#8217;s Rules for holding an argument in a kind way. The first is that you should attempt to re-express your targets position so clearly, vividly and fairly that your target says, &#8220;Thanks. I wish I thought of putting it that way.&#8221; What I&#8217;ve actually found a lot in working through problems or conflicts is that a lot of the times, if you can see the issue from the same perspective or if you can share the same perspective, the issue actually just goes away and the issue actually was a mismatched set of understandings or perspectives.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or sometimes, it&#8217;s like we agree and we just choose to tell the story of how we see it differently but when we get right down to it. We prefer to argue about how to get to a place in the city, rather than just about where to go. It&#8217;s like someone will find, &#8220;Oh, it doesn&#8217;t actually matter which way we take.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like when an argument ends with, &#8220;No, actually, we agree,&#8221; we agree the whole time. It&#8217;s good. It can be frustrating because you&#8217;ll like, &#8220;We just wasted time arguing for no reason,&#8221; but I usually feel like, &#8220;No, it&#8217;s good. We are on the same page.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would say that the activity of getting on the same page is probably the most valuable thing you could have done in that time so it was time well spent.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and it always feels really relieving afterwards. You&#8217;re like, &#8220;Oh, okay. I feel good now.&#8221; Even if you&#8217;re like, &#8220;What did it take so long if we were on the same page?&#8221; But this things always happen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This gets back a little bit when you have a guest come into a codebase to be polite and to be understanding of the situation and how it arose and not just assume that don&#8217;t mistake your lack of context for all of your ideas have to be right because you can&#8217;t see why they could be wrong. One tactical thing that I try to do is I try to always say, &#8220;What if?&#8221; instead of, &#8220;You should do this.&#8221; I always just say, &#8220;What if we change this to be like that?&#8221; because that gives them an opportunity to say, &#8220;It&#8217;s like this because of this that you didn&#8217;t know about.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. When you say &#8216;what if,&#8217; is that a place where you know the answer but you are trying to use it as a learning tool or you go &#8211;?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s usually when I want to suggest a thing that I think would be an improvement but I don&#8217;t know if I&#8217;m right or not because I don&#8217;t have all the context to know why that could actually not work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think that&#8217;s a great tool that anyone could use actually. Another thing I found, actually when working with most experienced developers is that if you say, &#8220;Let&#8217;s do,&#8221; I&#8217;m not for one trying to shut you down or whatever. The other developer might say, &#8220;No, because&#8230;&#8221; and they&#8217;re not trying to just prevent you from doing things but if they foresee, &#8220;Ah, that&#8217;s not going work because I&#8217;ve had experience of this before. I didn&#8217;t know you&#8217;re going to come into that pain.&#8221; I think that&#8217;s a disadvantage because often, less experienced developers need the chance to fail to understand why things have failed, in order to help them to learn and make better decisions in the future.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> However, when you phrase it like, &#8220;What if we did,&#8221; perhaps in some cases, we&#8217;ll force the other person to think about why. If they haven&#8217;t got a good reason, then they&#8217;re more likely, I think to say, &#8220;Actually, let&#8217;s try to see why.&#8221; Even if they say, &#8220;I have a hunch that it won&#8217;t work,&#8221; but they&#8217;ll say, &#8220;Let&#8217;s try because I&#8217;m not sure.&#8221; I like that tool of &#8216;what if&#8217; other than, &#8220;Let&#8217;s do this,&#8221; but I think that makes it easy to say, &#8220;Oh, no. I don&#8217;t think that will work.&#8221; But if you go, &#8216;what if&#8217; and then why, I think other developers, especially those open-mind to learning will want to see for themselves, &#8220;Why not?&#8221; if indeed they can come up with a good answer. But if they can, then that&#8217;s also a better learning tool as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah generally, I get one of two things out of it. I either get more understanding of the thing and why my idea what more or we try it and it either works or it doesn&#8217;t work. But I will say that on the flip side, I think that the host has a responsibility to value and encourage the new perspectives that a guest has, because a lot of times when you&#8217;re living in a situation, you can&#8217;t see it with fresh eyes, you can&#8217;t adopt a beginner&#8217;s mind, you can gain a lot by being open to suggestions from a guest, even if they&#8217;re not phrased in the most polite way and to try to work through what can be superficial communication issues, to get at the actual insight that they might have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and that&#8217;s why, I think the analogy is really important on both sides because it&#8217;s not just, &#8220;I&#8217;m a guest so it&#8217;s fine. I&#8217;m unfamiliar. It makes sense that I don&#8217;t stand this.&#8221; It&#8217;s also, &#8220;I&#8217;m a host so I have to be a bit careful, a bit more reserved just because this person is vulnerable and uncertain so they may say things or do things, which don&#8217;t typically fit what I&#8217;m used to but that&#8217;s not because they&#8217;re wrong. That&#8217;s just because they know differently.&#8221; If thinking about it, they come from a different culture or a different way of living or a different environment so it&#8217;s not wrong. It&#8217;s just different. I think that&#8217;s very important, this idea of right versus wrong/different and maybe, I could learn from different as well as teaching my way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Actually, at least for me, it&#8217;s really difficult in the host role and the guest says, &#8220;That looks bad. You should do with this other way instead.&#8221; Even if they&#8217;re right, I find myself less likely to agree with them and it takes a lot of self-assessment on my part and self-regulation to be able to say, &#8220;You know what? Despite how that came off, I should actually think about whether there&#8217;s something there or not,&#8221; and maybe talk with them about how we could exchange this information in a nicer way in the future.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, definitely and that gets into another part of my talk, which is a little about feedback. The talk is split into three parts. The first part is about setting tone. It&#8217;s all around the, &#8220;This is not teacher/student, senior/junior. You might want to do some cleaning, think about how you&#8217;re going to show someone around, find that balance,&#8221; and then there&#8217;s the whole bit about pairing and delivering values. That&#8217;s the whole sketch the diagrams and workout where you&#8217;re both at and then get on the same page.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then the third part is about feedback because I say that things are inevitably going to go wrong we&#8217;re not 100% so you need to be able to talk about that on the both sides. But I also say that even if things have gone amazingly well, you should talk about it and say, &#8220;Why things have gone well?&#8221; because that can just help more of the same in future. That&#8217;s when I touched on the whole nonviolent communication style of talking: How would you talk about feelings? How do you talk about what you need? How do you make requests to other people?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When you said, that&#8217;s a perfect example of you&#8217;re the host and the burden is on you in the moment to not flip out or to not just discount because you didn&#8217;t like how it was said but you also need to have the space to give that feedback because there&#8217;s a lot of burden on you to just keep excusing things because you&#8217;re like, &#8220;I&#8217;m the host. They&#8217;re the guest. I should excuse them,&#8221; that&#8217;s not going to end well because they&#8217;ll be a lot of tension and one day, you might let go or one day, you might just ignore because you&#8217;re fed up or you might shut the person down and that could get even worse so I talked about on how it&#8217;s very important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Even on a daily basis, just to have a quick check in on how is today for you, what should we change next time. That &#8216;what should we change next time,&#8217; I felt frustrated when you said specific word here so it&#8217;s not just casting a judgement or generalization because I need support or confidence or trust or whatever it is that you need. Next time, perhaps you could face it this way so that hasn&#8217;t go, &#8220;I see why that came across this way.&#8221; I talked about a better framework for giving and receiving feedback in a nonviolent way that will help these one-on-one interactions, pairing sessions, guest/host relationships get stronger each day.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You said there were some things that you couldn&#8217;t make fit in your talk. Was there anything else that you really wanted to talk about in the talk that didn&#8217;t make it in?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When I was thinking about more on the code way, there was a time when &#8212; this is a very specific. Do you all use Rails?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Typically, there&#8217;s a standard way of writing an endpoint and we had to deliver a certain video format. We need to do a video format in m3u8 and I didn&#8217;t realize you could just do &#8216;.m3u8&#8217; to change the endpoint. I&#8217;d written this note about how that was like if you go to a city and everyone&#8217;s dressing the same, it&#8217;s the one-time you went to the town center and you see everyone wearing like purple dresses so you assume, &#8220;I had wear purple dress.&#8221; You don&#8217;t know because you haven&#8217;t been there for a long time. Actually, you don&#8217;t have to wear a purple dress. You could wear red trousers. I talk about how&#8217;s the hosts responsibility to always think about what you&#8217;ll seeing and to highlight those cases like what&#8217;s acceptable and what&#8217;s not acceptable. Do you see what I mean? Because other people have all gotten into habit.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s really cool. I really appreciate it when visiting somewhere and a host tells me, &#8220;This is where the tourists go,&#8221; or, &#8220;When people are here for just a day, this is what they do. But what we like to do for fun on a day-to-day&#8230;&#8221; you know, for people who like live here, &#8220;we can do all these other things.&#8221; It&#8217;s like, &#8220;We don&#8217;t all just go to the Statue of Liberty every single day.&#8221; This is everything that&#8217;s available to you in the city.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, similar to that kind of thing and I guess taking someone somewhere, I talked about three different ways that you could do if someone says, &#8220;I want to get somewhere,&#8221; you can either just take them there and go back. You could give them a map and say, &#8220;Here you go. Go,&#8221; or you could do something in between where you go with them but you point out things in a way and when you&#8217;re coding, if you&#8217;re pairing someone, you can just do so then they would really learn or you could just let them do it by themselves and the other things was like, &#8220;Do they need the balance?&#8221; Or you can pair with them but suggest different things along the way and explain why. I don&#8217;t talk about it because it&#8217;s not made into my talk but still, how that&#8217;s probably a better&#8230; Oh, I do actually talked about that in my talk.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One thing I wanted to ask you about are what are some specific things that hosts can do to make their codebases more welcoming? We talked a little bit about READMEs. What are the things that you can add to a README or how can you structure a README? When I think about making a guest in a city more hospitable, I think about maps and travel guides and things like that. What are the things in the codebase that are equivalent or offer the same value?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I actually made a little example code hospitable README. I think it&#8217;s a gist. I don&#8217;t know if I can find the link. Can you add that to the show notes? But in my talk, I have a little video clicking through [inaudible] this code hospitable README. I do start with installation, users contributing, the kind of normal things that you see in a codebase because it&#8217;s useful. It&#8217;s like opening, &#8220;Here are the keys to get into the front door.&#8221; Then I have four more sections. One is history. It&#8217;s the story, where did this idea come from, how did we get there, where we are now. Then I talked about approaches: What are the philosophies or the patents within this codebases? Is there a certain pattern you used to write your tests or is there a certain overall approach?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I give a specific example of the philosophy because in the Active Record README, there is a philosophy section and it talks about how it is actually an implementation of object-relational mapping and here&#8217;s a link to a blog post by Martin Fowler and here are some of the general principles. It&#8217;s like, &#8220;We have this thing called &#8216;conventional reconfiguration,&#8217; or something else called the metadatabase.&#8221; That&#8217;s just the high level, &#8220;This is how we generally approach things in this codebase,&#8221; and I thought that was really useful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then I have a reading material section, which might be external things like the Active Record README that lead to the Martin Fowler blog post or it might be internal things that you or someone else in a team has written about anything that&#8217;s relevant to the codebase. Then I have the section called walkthrough. This is meant to be the equivalent of a guided walking tour and I thought it was the case of walking through a particular feature so I thought you could start with, &#8220;Here was the feature,&#8221; and maybe it&#8217;s a commit by commits sort of, &#8220;Here&#8217;s the first test that we wrote. Here&#8217;s how we then implemented it.&#8221; It&#8217;s just a short thing so that someone could say, &#8220;Now when I go to the [inaudible], I see this feature,&#8221; or, &#8220;When I look in the issue tracker, I see this issue.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I can see how someone who has lived here for a while and did it and that can get me started by how I should approach it. I think that&#8217;s particularly important even with open source, maybe you&#8217;re contributing a feature to an open source codebase for the first time and you want your work to be accepted and merged in. It&#8217;s a good way to understand, &#8220;Here&#8217;s how people typically do it.&#8221; We got to be careful that we don&#8217;t end up saying, &#8220;This is how we do it here and you do it like this or good bye.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But it should be in the frame of mind of, &#8220;If you&#8217;re stuck or if you&#8217;re not sure, here&#8217;s how we&#8217;ve done it.&#8221; But I would hope that open source maintainers and even within your day-to-day job, people are always open to new approaches. It&#8217;s very important that you keep that side of things as well. It&#8217;s not just, didn&#8217;t even need the guide. We don&#8217;t do things like that here. At least not without a good explanation of why not. I&#8217;ve made all of this up, by the way. At the end of the talk, I do say that this is something that I&#8217;ve made up. The main thing is the frame of mind of the guest/host but you should take that and apply that to however you do things, if you need to make things better as opposed to, &#8220;This is how you do code hospitality.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like the reason that you&#8217;ve been so successful with this and been able to build up so much material around how to think about code hospitality is because it&#8217;s such a good metaphor. I really think it is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You love it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I do. I like it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really love it too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love everything that gets me to think about my relationships with other people in a different way and to sort of reexamine how I interact with people based on power dynamics or things like that. Host/guest is a form of power dynamic, in a way. I&#8217;m always on the market for cool metaphors analogies in that space and I think this is one of them so I&#8217;m really happy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yay! Thank you. I&#8217;m glad you all like it. Actually, that&#8217;s one of the scary things. I got really excited by the idea initially when I first thought about it with Theo and then I sketched out so many ideas and then I wrote a proposal. Then when it got accepted and I was [inaudible] of the talk, it felt really silly to me. I thought everyone&#8217;s going to bit say, &#8220;What is this silly analogy? It doesn&#8217;t really mapped well.&#8221; Or, &#8220;This is just really obvious. Why you even mentioning this?&#8221; I was really worried about it. It was actually after the first talk I did that the reception was great and then I did a few more and each time, people really could relate to it and that was really good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But every time if someone else says, &#8220;Oh, I love this analogy. It makes sense,&#8221; it makes me really happy because I remember when I went through that whole fear period of, &#8220;Ah, this is really silly. No one is going to get it. Everyone is going to think this is really obvious or just not worth exploring.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s a super rich analogy. It really just invites you to think about so many things inside of a contained story.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think this is about the time in our show where we all take a couple of minutes to reflect on something that we talked about that really resonated with us. I think I&#8217;ll go first. For me, I really liked the way that we talked about learning over the course of the show. I started thinking about it right at the beginning, actually when Nadia, you told a story about someone who had learned a little bit of a harsh lesson a little too late with this junior developer that left and how he reassessed how he had handled that situation because I had someone come to me after I talk I had once and said, &#8220;I found your talk really challenging to listen to,&#8221; and I was like, &#8220;Oh, I don&#8217;t know if that&#8217;s a good thing to hear from someone,&#8221; and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;No,&#8221; I think that&#8217;s a really good sign that learning was occurring during it because it was challenging.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I already was in this mindset thinking about that person that you mentioned and having a challenging learning experience. But it also was on my mind a lot as we talked about the guest/host relationship. I really like this idea that when one person is training another person at work in tech or whatever they&#8217;re doing, both of those people should be learning and both of those people are getting something out of it. To me, that really breaks down the power dynamic in ways that are really helpful. I have trouble, sometimes going into power dynamic relationships because I&#8217;m nervous. On either side, like here&#8217;s someone who has a power dynamic over me and I&#8217;m nervous about how I&#8217;m going to make an impression, what they&#8217;re going to think of me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also, if I&#8217;m going into a situation where I have a power dynamic over this person, do I deserve to be here? Maybe impostor syndrome stuff, am I going to actually be able to teach them anything? This idea that it doesn&#8217;t matter which way that dynamic is going, either way both people should be learning, I think is a really healthy way to look at it. I think that&#8217;s going to change the way I try to go into those situations in those dynamics.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess I have two threads that I wrote down. I was thinking about how there is a sort of reputation that New Yorkers are really rude. I&#8217;m not from New York but that was always something that troubled me a little bit when I would visit. Then someone who had been living there for a little bit told me, &#8220;You know, what it really is, is that most New Yorkers, unless they&#8217;re incredibly privileged, they&#8217;re surrounded by people all the time. There&#8217;s just so many people. They probably have roommates, the streets are really crowded, every time they get into an elevator, there&#8217;s a bunch of people they don&#8217;t know. What it is this person said was, there&#8217;s this kind of unspoken rule that has developed, which we&#8217;re really going to just sort of keep to ourselves because the setting is important. That&#8217;s how we&#8217;re all going to get through our day. We&#8217;re going to survive by just not being in everyone&#8217;s business all the time as [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When someone told me that, everything just clicked for me. It&#8217;s like, &#8220;This isn&#8217;t some kind of act of aggression. This is just how we survived.&#8221; The fact that when that was made explicit, it really helps me feel a little bit more welcome in New York City whenever I visit now. The other thought I had, which Nadia just said was, I can just hand someone a subway map and say, &#8220;Here you go. This is how you get to everywhere you need to go,&#8221; and objectively speaking, I could get to where I need to go.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But really the objective isn&#8217;t to just get from Point A to Point B. As a visitor of a city, I would really love to know the story, I would really love to feel like this is my home, even if I&#8217;m only visiting for a weekend. When someone is able to walk me through a codebase and sort of tell me the story of what this codebase is, tell me its history, I&#8217;m going to feel a lot more at home when I&#8217;m going to start working on it. Hopefully, I can feel like a resident of that codebase eventually.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Great. Your point about New York got me thinking about London. I think it&#8217;s exactly the same. There&#8217;s this unspoken rule of we&#8217;re busy, there&#8217;s so much stuff going on, you just don&#8217;t talk to people, especially on the Tube. It&#8217;s like this unspoken rule of, &#8220;We just don&#8217;t talk to one another and it&#8217;s not that Londoners are unfriendly. We just don&#8217;t do it.&#8221; Your story about New York reminded me of that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, head on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was thinking about, Jacob what you just talked about New York and then I was thinking about sometimes when you invite people over for board games or something and then it starts getting a little late so you say you&#8217;re tired to get them to leave but you&#8217;re not really tired. What it is, is you are tired, you&#8217;re just not physically tired. It&#8217;s an emotional labor to be a host or a guest. I think it&#8217;s important to acknowledge that and to be realistic about the amount of emotional labor you&#8217;re willing to put into it. If it&#8217;s something you can do great and if it&#8217;s not something you can do, it may be worse for you to try it and be grumpy or feel bad afterwards.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, definitely. I definitely relate to the, &#8220;I&#8217;m tired now. I&#8217;m going to go to bed,&#8221; and maybe I&#8217;m not. Maybe I&#8217;m going to read a book for another few hours or watch something but you are tired, just not in the way that you&#8217;re communicating to other people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I guess the main thing to takeaway and I hope people takeaway from this is this idea of the mindset and those safe spaces. When I say the mindset, I think coming off of Jamey&#8217;s reflections and thinking about how do we advance learning, it&#8217;s so key that those more experienced in the industry or those who are experts or managing don&#8217;t see themselves as a teacher but rather, &#8220;I just happen to be more experienced. I&#8217;ve just been here longer but it doesn&#8217;t mean I&#8217;m a teacher and I&#8217;m going to quiz the other person or give them challenges to help him get better.&#8221; It&#8217;s more of, &#8220;We&#8217;re going to do this together and I&#8217;m not right.&#8221; One of my favorite points in the talk is the whole assume you&#8217;re both lost and you&#8217;re trying to find each other than, &#8220;I&#8217;m in the right place. They need to get to me.&#8221; I think that&#8217;s a really valuable takeaway.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The other thing is that, I think all of the code hospitality stuff and I&#8217;ve even gone on and done another talk now about nonviolent communication, the thing at the nub of it is vulnerability and making safe spaces for people to be vulnerable because if you don&#8217;t feel safe to be vulnerable, you therefore don&#8217;t feel free to speak your mind and talk about your feelings. You therefore hold onto things, therefore their attentions, therefore your team can&#8217;t be as productive, therefore likely to lead to messy, difficult to work on codebases. The foundation is it&#8217;s safe for me to be vulnerable. It&#8217;s safe for me to say I don&#8217;t know. It&#8217;s safe for me to ask questions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think with the host, it&#8217;s meaningful that the host takes on a bit more responsibility to set the scene and to make it a safe space. One, by stating that this is a safe space, ask me any questions, don&#8217;t be afraid to make mistakes, don&#8217;t be afraid to fail but two, by leading by example, uncover your own flaws, talk about your own uncertainties, things that you don&#8217;t know.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I always found it really valuable when I went to coding bootcamp and then started working at Pivotal and everyone was way better than me, of course. It was always great when the person I was working with said, &#8220;You know, I don&#8217;t really know what&#8217;s going on here.&#8221; Just exposing their own vulnerabilities and I thought, &#8220;Okay, me too but you&#8217;ve been doing this five more years than me and you still don&#8217;t know. Okay, I feel great.&#8221; The key takeaways for me are a call to all of the senior developers out there working with junior developers, the junior developer is not wrong. They&#8217;re just in a different place and to make it safe to be vulnerable and be vulnerable yourself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love that. We do company demos weekly and last week, one of my demos was a commit that fixed a bug that I had just written, where I wrote the wrong variable name and the variable name that I wrote was actually the name of a method that caused an infinite recursive loop but the two variable names were off by three characters so my commit message was, &#8220;I literally can&#8217;t believe I did this,&#8221; and I just demoed that commit for the company. What I was trying to get out was like, &#8220;Look, it&#8217;s okay if you make mistakes. You don&#8217;t have to feel awful about it. Everyone&#8217;s going to make mistakes.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s great. It&#8217;s reminding me of every time there&#8217;s a failure, they stand up and clap or cheer about it. I don&#8217;t know where that came from but that sort of thing, it makes failing fun and funny but also a learning experience.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That reminds me of Karl Popper&#8217;s approach to change, which is basically that you don&#8217;t have to make the right decision all the time. You just have to be able to recover from bad decisions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>NADIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I love that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s how evolution works. Most of the decisions that evolution makes are terrible but a few of them are good. Well, Nadia this has been awesome. I&#8217;m so glad you came on the show and thank you for talking to us. Also Jacob, thank you for joining us as our special guest panelist. This has been great. Thanks everyone.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jstoebel"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jacob Stoebel</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nadia Odunayo: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/nodunayo"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@nodunayo</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.nadiaodunayo.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">nadiaodunayo.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://ignition.works/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ignition Works</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><a href="http://rubybookclub.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ruby Book Club</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:19</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Nadia’s Superpower</span></p>
<p><b>02:01 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Code Hospitality and Being a Good Host</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUuAp6c1ylM"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nadia Odunayo: The Guest: A Guide To Code Hospitality @ GORUCO 2016</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Daniel Dennett’s </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_pump"><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Intuition Pump”</span></a></p>
<p><b>10:22 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– People and Habits and Having Expertise in a Particular Realm</span></p>
<p><b>17:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Asking Questions/Waiting for Explanation Rather Than Passing Judgement</span></p>
<p><b>22:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Codebases Are Constantly Changing: Use the README to Give Context</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://gist.github.com/nodunayo/c919477906aab6c1af6065ff8e868d3e">Code Hospitality Guide App</a></p>
<p><b>27:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Making Diagrams Whilst Coding/Pairing</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapoport%27s_rule"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rapoport&#8217;s Rule</span></a></p>
<p><b>32:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Thinking About the “Why”</span></p>
<p><b>36:44 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Giving and Receiving Feedback in a Nonviolent Way</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b>and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p><b>39:09 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Host Responsibilities for Hospitality</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Jamey:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Breaking down the power dynamic of learning.</span></p>
<p><b>Jacob:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Unspoken rules and normalized behavior based on location and telling stories to make people feel more at home.</span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Recognizing emotional labor.</span></p>
<p><b>Nadia:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> The mindset and safe spaces.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://brightonruby.com/2017/this-code-sucks-a-story-about-non-violent-communication-nadia-odunayo/?]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jstoebel"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jacob Stoebel</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nadia Odunayo: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/nodunayo"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@nodunayo</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.nadiaodunayo.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">nadiaodunayo.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://ignition.works/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ignition Works</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span><a href="http://rubybookclub.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ruby Book Club</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:19</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Nadia’s Superpower</span></p>
<p><b>02:01 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Code Hospitality and Being a Good Host</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUuAp6c1ylM"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nadia Odunayo: The Guest: A Guide To Code Hospitality @ GORUCO 2016</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Daniel Dennett’s </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_pump"><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Intuition Pump”</span></a></p>
<p><b>10:22 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– People and Habits and Having Expertise in a Particular Realm</span></p>
<p><b>17:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Asking Questions/Waiting for Explanation Rather Than Passing Judgement</span></p>
<p><b>22:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Codebases Are Constantly Changing: Use the README to Give Context</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://gist.github.com/nodunayo/c919477906aab6c1af6065ff8e868d3e">Code Hospitality Guide App</a></p>
<p><b>27:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Making Diagrams Whilst Coding/Pairing</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapoport%27s_rule"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rapoport&#8217;s Rule</span></a></p>
<p><b>32:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Thinking About the “Why”</span></p>
<p><b>36:44 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Giving and Receiving Feedback in a Nonviolent Way</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b>and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p><b>39:09 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Host Responsibilities for Hospitality</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Jamey:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Breaking down the power dynamic of learning.</span></p>
<p><b>Jacob:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Unspoken rules and normalized behavior based on location and telling stories to make people feel more at home.</span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Recognizing emotional labor.</span></p>
<p><b>Nadia:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> The mindset and safe spaces.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://brightonruby.com/2017/this-code-sucks-a-story-about-non-violent-communication-nadia-odunayo/?]]></googleplay:description>
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					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
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					<itunes:duration>57:44</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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					<title>053: BOOK CLUB! The Responsible Communication Style Guide</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/053-book-club-the-responsible-communication-style-guide/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 01 Nov 2017 05:00:36 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=966</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[We kick off our first Book Club episode with Thursday Bram and Audrey Eschright of The Responsible Communication Style Guide!]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[We kick off our first Book Club episode with Thursday Bram and Audrey Eschright of The Responsible Communication Style Guide!]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>This episode is sponsored by </b><a href="http://upsd.io/2wmwtFp"><b>Upside</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upsd.io/2wmwtFp"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-785" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png" alt="" width="1000" height="128" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png 1024w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-300x38.png 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-768x98.png 768w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-600x77.png 600w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo.png 1382w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Bundle your flights and hotel. Save money. Earn gift cards.</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>___</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="http://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ameschright"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Audrey Eschright</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">: </span><a href="https://recompilermag.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Recompiler</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="http://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-013-audrey-eschright/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greater Than Code Episode #013: Religion in Tech with Audrey Eschright</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://opensourcebridge.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Open Source Bridge</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/thursdayb"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Thursday Bram</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">: </span><a href="https://www.thursdaybram.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">thursdaybram.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:33</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Superpowers and Acquisition</span></p>
<p><b>02:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Reflective Listening</span></p>
<p><b>05:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://rcstyleguide.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Responsible Communication Style Guide</span></a></p>
<p><b>11:54 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Asking Content-Related Questions</span></p>
<p><b>15:10 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Who is the target audience for this book? </span></p>
<p><b>17:45 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Evolution of Writing the Book</span></p>
<p><b>19:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People-first_language"><span style="font-weight: 400;">People-first Language</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://kronda.com/five-stages-of-unlearning-racism/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Kronda Adair: Five Stages of Unlearning Racism</span></a></p>
<p><b>23:40 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What if you get it wrong?</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">1. Try to do good.<br />
2. Fuck it up.<br />
3. Apologize<br />
4. Try not to make the same mistake again.</p>
<p>That’s the job.</p>
<p>— Kronda (@kronda) <a href="https://twitter.com/kronda/status/546727506850496512?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 21, 2014</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-967" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/apology.jpeg" alt="" width="225" height="225" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/apology.jpeg 225w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/apology-150x150.jpeg 150w" sizes="(max-width: 225px) 100vw, 225px" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p><b>29:40 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Fearing Shame</span></p>
<p><b>34:22 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Political Correctness and Language Evolution</span></p>
<p><b>44:11 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Use with Caution” Words</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Astrid:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> The less that something is happening the way I want it to, probably the less that I know.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Learning something from a joke!</span></p>
<p><b>Jamey:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> People who don’t want to learn new things are boring. Also, not being self-reflective.</span></p>
<p><b>Audrey:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> It’s amazing to pay people for their work.</span></p>
<p><b>Thursday:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Pride for the contributors of this project.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/961164339/the-recompiler-year-3"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Recompiler: Year 3 Kickstarter</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b><i> [This episode is brought to you by Upside, one of DC&#8217;s fastest growing tech startups. Upside is looking for innovative engineers who want to disrupt the norm and they&#8217;re always hiring. Check out Upside.com/Team to learn more.]</i></b></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello everyone and welcome to Greater Than Code. I am Astrid Countee and I&#8217;m here with my great friend, Jamey Hampton.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks, Astrid. I&#8217;m also here with my friend and co-panelist, Sam Livingston-Gray.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and thank you. We also have two guests today. Jamey, why don&#8217;t you go ahead and introduce the first one?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;d be happy to. Today, we have on the show, Thursday Bram. Thursday writes, speaks and organizes communities around technology, business and culture. She was the editor of &#8216;The Responsible Communication Style Guide&#8217; and you can find Thursday online at ThursdayBram.com.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And our other guest today is actually returning to the show from Episode 13. Audrey Eschright is a writer, community organizer and software developer based in Portland, Oregon where it&#8217;s lovely and rainy now. Yay!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yay!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>She&#8217;s the editor and publisher of &#8216;The Recompiler&#8217; and previously, she founded Calagator, an open source community calendaring service and co-founded Open Source Bridge, which is a great annual conference for open source citizens. Welcome to the show Thursday and Audrey.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank for having us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A question that we really like to start off a lot of our shows with is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can tackle that first. My superpower is that I will go and talk to just about anyone and I don&#8217;t feel shy most of the time, which I think is a pretty great superpower. I just was always like this. I was a very nosy child so I didn&#8217;t really acquire it. I wasn&#8217;t bitten by a radioactive shy person or anything.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;re parents are just like, &#8220;Oh, that&#8217;s Thursday.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Pretty much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a very powerful superpower, I think.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I was expecting Thursday to say that her superpower was plenty for every single contingency because that&#8217;s something I really value about her and I think that&#8217;s something that we have in common. But also, I would say that one of mine is getting through very difficult conversations and that&#8217;s something that I&#8217;ve just learned from a lot of personal experience and reflection and having to get through some difficult situations. I just find the kindest way to do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh now, I want to ask you for tips on that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know. I&#8217;m just thinking on that too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How do you do it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a [inaudible] called reflective listening. Even if you go into a really difficult and stressful situation where you really want something and you really need something, you have to do it from that other person&#8217;s perspective. You have to really understand what they&#8217;re coming to that conversation with. If you don&#8217;t know that, you need to ask for that. I try to go into a conversation that I think is going to be very hard by thinking about what I need, what I want from it and what I think I know about that other person and their expectations and then I ask.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If I say, &#8220;I really need &#8211;&#8221; like a common household thing, &#8220;&#8211; you to do the laundry today,&#8221; and the [inaudible] reason has been a very contentious thing. We go into the problem of laundry isn&#8217;t getting done and I think I don&#8217;t have time to do the laundry, that&#8217;s why I&#8217;m not getting it done. I don&#8217;t actually know why you&#8217;re not doing the laundry but I can ask you like, &#8220;Do you think it&#8217;s my time to do the laundry? Do we agree on this? I don&#8217;t even remember.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> You know, I can go in with a lot of questions and intend to just really listen to what the other person tells me. Maybe it turns out that they&#8217;re allergic to laundry soap. I have had a household problems that were just really unexpected for me like that. I might find out that actually, you just forgot about it and you need to write it on the calendar or on the wall. There&#8217;s just lots of ways that I might misread or misunderstand the situation but it turns out that we have a lot of common ground. Even if we don&#8217;t have common ground, I need to say, &#8220;The laundry has to get done. One of us has to do it. Somebody has to deal with this so we have to find some way that we can work together on that or we&#8217;re not roommates anymore.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So you don&#8217;t just go on and guns blazing like, &#8220;You didn&#8217;t do the laundry and you&#8217;re a terrible person.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No. Especially with chores, people do feel like they&#8217;re a terrible person. If you reinforce that, nobody gets what they want. Everyone feels bad.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It feels like you are defusing potential bombs by just asking a question, as opposed to assuming why they&#8217;re not doing it or if they have a problem or something like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and the less something is happening the way I wanted to, probably the less that I know about what&#8217;s going on there. For me, that&#8217;s just really a sign that I need to ask questions and be very gentle about it and listen to what I hear and not force my expectations onto the situation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That sounds like a very responsible way of communicating.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There might be a theme in our efforts.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Today, we&#8217;re doing a very special book club episode of Greater Than Code and we&#8217;ve been excited about it for a while. We&#8217;re going to talk about &#8216;The Responsible Communication Style Guide,&#8217; which Sam is just holding up a beautiful paper copy of. I only have the digital copy, unfortunately. That was put out by The Recompiler recently. Thursday was the editor so we have both of you on to talk about it and I&#8217;m really excited.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Where did the idea come from to make a book about this?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wanted this book for about the last decade. I&#8217;ve been a writer of various kinds for years and I have made a lot of mistakes over the many years I&#8217;ve been writing. It&#8217;s never necessarily an intentional mistake but it&#8217;s really hard to necessarily know what you&#8217;re doing without a reference guide. It&#8217;s hard to keep this much information in your head. Having the actual style guide that I wanted, that&#8217;s where this really started for me. I told Audrey about the idea and Audrey has been fantastic to work with.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. I was really excited when you proposed this to me because I know that working with on The Recompiler, we have a lot of these questions all of the time, even though people do write from their own backgrounds and they really share their perspectives. We still need to be able to talk about each other&#8217;s identities and as the book says, be very responsible about that and there was just questions I didn&#8217;t know how to answer [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I also knew that I hadn&#8217;t seen a reference like this anywhere and we did a little bit of research on that. We just realized that there were so many separate reference guides and there isn&#8217;t a lot out there that puts it all together. The intersectional perspective is really important to us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For our listeners who may not be familiar with the book so far, what&#8217;s the short description? Why would they want to read this book?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The short description is that it&#8217;s a style guide. It&#8217;s a reference book for anybody who&#8217;s communicating about identity. There&#8217;s two kind of chunks to it. One chunk is basically just a list of terms of how to define them, how to use them, how to make sure that you are not using them incorrectly. Then there are a set of articles that talk about the process of writing inclusively. Some of them are a little more specific. One is about writing inclusive documentation, one is about the concept of people first writing, which comes up in a lot of communities but not all communities used it so it&#8217;s got some clarification on which communities use it and how to ask if you&#8217;re talking to somebody from one of those communities.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then you&#8217;ve added in a couple of appendices that are just things that we have to look up on a regular basis, anyhow so they might as well be sitting on our desk or in that eBook that&#8217;s always open as well. One of the appendices is a list of major holidays and observances. If you&#8217;re trying to figure out when to plan a particular thing, you can look it up in the book and check that you aren&#8217;t claiming a conference during Yom Kippur, which is a thing that continues to happen that I personally find really frustrating.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Holy Week, too. It&#8217;s really weird to have parties on Good Friday.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s not just focused on Jewish and Christian identities but we try to take a really intersectional approach with it. We&#8217;ve brought in holidays from a variety of different cultures as well as observances. Right now is National Hispanic Heritage Month, even though it&#8217;s not like any of the other months like Black History Month is the month of February. Hispanic Heritage Month is October 15th to November 15th. Keeping that in my head was nontrivial.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things that I really enjoyed about this aspect of inclusiveness on the book is for example, just to stick with some of their religion section stuff, as we finished it up we realized that we didn&#8217;t know enough about Islam, that we need it to get somebody who could read it and give us more information. We did more research to realize that we have to make sure we had all the details right. We discussed [inaudible] and how to fit that in there in a way that it really made sense and just how to describe all of these things that, whether or not we had personal experience with, we knew that they were real parts of people&#8217;s lives.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s a really good opportunity to talk about some of the ways that we put this together. Going into it, we didn&#8217;t want to try to be experts in something that we&#8217;re clearly not experts in. While we provided the framework, we brought in a ton of experts. We have our different section editors but we also have our sensitivity readers. We have this amazing group of people who helped us make sure that we were offering something that was actually intersectional, that was actually useful from a variety of different perspectives and that really reflected the communities that we were trying to describe in their own words and in ways that they wanted to be described.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I could tell how much labor of love went into that when I was reading it. Obviously, I&#8217;m also not an expert on every single thing that was in the book, either so I was kind of trusting all of you. But I feel like I&#8217;m kind of an expert in the transgender community and how we like to say things and what kind of phrasing we like to use and what kind of language we like to use so reading those actions and seeing how right everything was, it made me feel like I had a lot of faith in the other sections to the ones that I didn&#8217;t know about. It gave me a lot of confidence that even the pieces that I didn&#8217;t know and that I was learning, that I was learning the right things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How did you go about asking people these questions to make sure that your content was correct, like the people who would be more aware of things that you were less aware? What was the way that you went about asking those questions?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think one of the reasons we decided to do a Kickstarter is because I didn&#8217;t want to ask those questions without being able to pay people for their time. That&#8217;s really important to me that a lot of the people that we asked to work on this project are subject matter experts and that means that they&#8217;re activists, they&#8217;re freelancers, they&#8217;re writers and creators or people who might not have the time who work on a project like this for free. Being able to say, &#8220;Not only do I love your work but I have cash money that I could pay you for additional work,&#8221; wasn’t really important. I don&#8217;t think that this is the work the people should be asked to do for free, especially since there are some resources out there, though not quite the resource that we wanted to build. Being able to attach money was definitely the first step.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The second step was we both had a list of people that we thought would be good for this project but we did open call for articles. We want to reach out beyond our networks a little bit. I think that actually doing the Kickstarter helps with that a little bit too because it put the project in front of people and then people were like, &#8220;This is the thing that is looking for help, that we can contribute to.&#8221; I think that&#8217;s how it kind of started off. I had a list going in of some of the editors that I really wanted to recruit, people who had already written about this in a really great way and then being able to ask our community through things like sensitivity reading was also really crucial. Being able to ask people who had a really wide variety of backgrounds was really important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The thing that I would add to that too is that there were times when we just needed to check a couple of details. I tried to be really specific about what I was asking people to do that it&#8217;s not like, &#8220;Read this whole chapter and tell me what you think.&#8221; I tried to ask really specific questions like, &#8220;We&#8217;ve got this definition in here. Does that match how you think of this thing? Does that match what you know about it? Are we missing something that we need to make sure to include?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m so glad that you were able to pay people for their work on this. I know it&#8217;s so common that people get asked to perform unpaid emotional labor and it&#8217;s really encouraging to hear that you are not contributing to that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We live under capitalism but we do not have to make it worst.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would say that it makes a project like this book easier and harder. It&#8217;s easier that we paid people. We could really show that we respected them in their time. It&#8217;s harder because we had to raise $20,000. It&#8217;s not like I resent that in the slightest but it still work to get out there and raise money for a project like this, knowing that we&#8217;re not going to be automatically on the top of anybody&#8217;s list. We&#8217;re going to have to really make a good argument for why this book matters.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Who is the audience that you hope will read this book and use it the most?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For me, it&#8217;s people who write those sign up pages for different services. I think that there&#8217;s so many ways that we ask for user information on just basic web apps that really don&#8217;t work for a lot of identities and really aren&#8217;t very respectful. Having been a developer in some conversations, where I was really trying to advocate for what seemed to be like a good practice and maybe, I didn&#8217;t have all the perspectives to reference. I just really like that there&#8217;s a reference that maybe people can be using in their work to say, &#8220;Actually, we should do gender this way.&#8221; Or, &#8220;We should ask for names this way,&#8221; instead of just going with what works for the five people who are directly on the project.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was my favorite article in the book also and I was going to mention that. I think that we don&#8217;t even think about what information we&#8217;re asking from users a lot of the time. We just go like, &#8220;What do you need?&#8221; because what normally gets asked: your name, your email, your gender, the location. I feel like there&#8217;s no thought put into like, &#8220;Do we need to know these things? Are we going to use these things for something useful? Are we going to use these things for something that people actively don&#8217;t want us to use these things for?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It makes people very skeptical, I think about signing up for some services. I know that at this point of the service, ask for my gender and there&#8217;s two options like, I&#8217;m just not for user service. I just don&#8217;t need, almost always unless it&#8217;s something like medical that I actually do need. I lived my whole life without your service and I will continue living in without it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That article actually came about because of a specific request from one of our writers. Dash Buck wrote the article on interviewing people about their identity if they&#8217;ve transitioned their names, their pronouns and all of that. But as Dash and I were going through that article, we noticed that there were some specific things that we needed to address in terms of form so we added onto the book to make sure that we cover that. But that&#8217;s honestly, we won&#8217;t have done that if we hadn&#8217;t gone to this subject matter experts, if we hadn&#8217;t been able to bring in these people with different perspectives. I&#8217;m just so amazed by the people that we&#8217;ve gotten to work with. That might be why I keep referring to them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That brings me to another question, actually to what you just said. How much of this final product of this book was about what you expected to write at the beginning and how much of that evolved over the course of working on it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;d say that the framework is pretty much what we imagined, with our sections about identity, our articles, our appendices. We definitely started out with just the five sections and added another sectional section partway through as we realized it was going to be a better organization schema. But the specific items, the specific articles, the specific language that are in the book, I tried to go into it without a lot of expectations because I really wanted to make sure that it was our subject matter experts who were setting the guidelines for their section, because they know the sections better than the I do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I agree. I thought our framework work really well but there were a lot of details that I just wouldn&#8217;t thought about until people started to write some piece of it. Then sometimes, that also made it easier to say, &#8220;If we have this, then we have to have that,&#8221; realizing that different topics went together and that if we could explain one piece of the issue, then we need to make sure that the rest of it was in there too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Similarly, there are a couple of things that I expected to have in the book that because of the scope, we decided to pull. For instance, we have a religion section but we didn&#8217;t get into an in-depth discussion of how&#8217;s [inaudible] which is definitely important information but because of the scope of this book, it didn&#8217;t fit. We think of this as a living project. We are planning to do a supplement that will cover those topics but we did have to adjust as we were doing this.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sort of interesting things that happened to me as I read this book was, you have the section about people first language, which is the idea that instead of saying a handicapped person, you would say a person with a disability and handicapped is problematic for other reasons that you can get into if you read the book. But what I found really interesting was that I&#8217;d run across the idea of people first language and I thought, &#8220;That seems like a good general rule,&#8221; and I hadn&#8217;t really thought about it much beyond that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then you have this article that talks about all of the reasons that people first language might not work and all the communities that don&#8217;t necessarily use it or appreciate it. I had this really fun experience of watching myself encounter this cognitive dissonance of like, &#8220;I thought this was a useful and good thing,&#8221; so that was really fun. Then that reminded me of this article by Kronda Adair. She calls it the &#8216;Five Stages of Unlearning Racism,&#8217; where at stage two she says, the opposite of racism is color blindness. The parallel to me there is that I wanted to use people first language for everything because it was a simple rule that I could understand.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Pretending to be colorblind means you end up treating everybody the same and just as I had been trying to unlearn that and to be able to treat people differently based on how they wanted to be approached, I realized that I also needed to adjust the way I thought about my language. That was really interesting. Thank you for that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It gets into some very interesting topics of identity. Are we just a person with gender or are we a gendered person? Maybe it relate to a different parts of your life. I inherit this first through autism advocacy. It&#8217;s a very different thing to say that you&#8217;re a person with autism versus an autistic person. It really speaks to your experience, whether it&#8217;s just an innate part of your experience or it&#8217;s the changeable part of your experience. There are just a lot of different ways that somebody may choose to bring that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I like the discussion in the book around deaf culture as well because my mom was an interpreter when I was a kid so I know just a tiny bit about deaf culture so I was able to use that knowledge that I had as a hook into being able to extrapolate into different populations. It was really neat, too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think what you&#8217;re saying is very personal decision, like the idea of how someone wants to be referred to. It&#8217;s hard to make a generalization about it because it&#8217;s so personal to everyone but if you come into the situation informed about the different ways that different people might prefer, then I feel like you have a better groundwork to ask someone and understand where they&#8217;re coming from and then be able to follow up and refer to them in a way that they&#8217;ve just told you they feel more comfortable with, if that makes sense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And it goes back to what I was saying at the beginning about asking questions and listening. This is so much better communication. It&#8217;s just learning what questions you can or should ask and learning to really listen to the answer, not to bias it or influence it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love that &#8216;learning which questions you should ask.&#8217; That&#8217;s exactly it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think the only hard and fast rule we learned through this process is that you have to ask people questions and you have to listen to their answers and take them as valid, which I would love if they will just do X, Y and Z and you will always write correctly about people but people are these interesting people that keep evolving and even asking somebody today is not enough and asking people consistently and over the course of your interactions with them and double-checking. The only hard and fast rule we&#8217;ve got is talk to people and listen to what they say.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What if you get it wrong?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, I&#8217;ve gotten it so wrong.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We didn&#8217;t put a check about apologies. Maybe apologies will be on these supplements.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. First off, I apologize and acknowledge that you&#8217;ve done something wrong because that&#8217;s something that people do need to see to understand what&#8217;s going on. Not just the person who you&#8217;ve inaccurately described. Everybody else needs to get the updated information as well, which it doesn&#8217;t feel great but it&#8217;s a necessary step sometimes to make a public apology. But an apology is never enough. You have to actually learn from that situation and improve.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Going back to Kronda Adair for a moment, she gave me basically the best instructions I have ever had on how to live my life &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s like, &#8220;Try to do good, fuck it up, apologize, do better,&#8221; something like that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s it. The doing better part is very, very important to make sure the people get it right. Kronda has it, as her pinch tweet: Step one is trying to do good, step two is fuck it up, step three is apologize, set four is try to not make the same mistake again, and yeah, that&#8217;s how I try to approach every time I screw up because once again, people are people so I expect to screw up again in my life. I just try not to make the same mistakes again.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And if you do mess up, you apologize and you keep squashing people in that way, nobody will trust you anymore. I&#8217;ve seen people do that and I don&#8217;t think they understand just how little trust people have in them afterwards and not just about that topic but about anything they say. If you can&#8217;t trust that somebody actually is listening to you and doing what they say they&#8217;re going to, how do you trust anything else they tell about what&#8217;s going on, what they&#8217;re doing, what they think of you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thursday, I like what you said about acknowledging that you messed up because I feel like when you&#8217;re apologizing, people assume that there is this implication that you&#8217;re admitting that you mess up but there&#8217;s this like, &#8220;Sorry, I did something bad. Sorry that I messed up,&#8221; versus, &#8220;I&#8217;m sorry that you were offended by what I said,&#8221; which isn&#8217;t a real apology.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I hate getting those apologies and I worked very hard never to give them. Being told that somebody is, &#8220;Sorry, that I&#8217;m offended,&#8221; just makes me more offended.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. It&#8217;s like, &#8220;I&#8217;m sorry there&#8217;s something wrong with you,&#8221; is how that comes across.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly and if somebody is apologizing, if somebody it&#8217;s making the effort to apologize, they know that they did something wrong, whether or not they&#8217;re admitting it. Let&#8217;s just admit it. Let&#8217;s treat people like humans and move on to the next thing that we&#8217;re going to screw up and apologize for.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is something that I end up covering in code conduct training a lot that you need to understand that you cause harm. Even if it&#8217;s fairly a minor thing, well, it might be a minor harm but you still cause harm. If you can&#8217;t acknowledge that, then you&#8217;re not really apologizing. I think sometimes it&#8217;s okay to not understand that harm, to not really be able to just personally mirror what&#8217;s going on there. You can still say, &#8220;I can see that I&#8217;ve harmed you. I can see that I&#8217;ve hurt you and I don&#8217;t want to do that so I&#8217;m very sorry. I&#8217;m going to try to be aware then and not do that again.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and on the topic of apologies, I feel like this is turning into the &#8216;Kronda Adair&#8217;s so awesome show,&#8217; but a while back, she shared this thing called &#8216;The Four Part Apology,&#8217; which is this template for apologizing and I think a really impactful and a helpful way. The template goes, Part 1 is, &#8220;I&#8217;m sorry for &#8211;&#8221; where you’ve deemed the behavior. Part 2 is, &#8220;This is wrong because &#8211;&#8221; where you acknowledge the nature of the harm that was caused. Part 3 is, &#8220;In the future, I will &#8211;&#8221; where you talk about what you&#8217;re going to do to change and Part 4 is, &#8220;Will you forgive me?&#8221; I&#8217;m not sure quite how I feel about Part 4. You can always hope for forgiveness but Parts 1 through 3 are spot on. I found this really useful in my own life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like the, &#8220;Will you forgive me?&#8221; because I think it&#8217;s good to hear that someone to actually asking, as opposed to trying to tell you how you should be responding to them in that&#8217;s circumstance.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I guess maybe part of my discomfort with that is not growing up in a framework of forgiveness, which I think people who grew up in a culture of faith may have more tools to deal with.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s a good question as long as you realize the answer might be, &#8220;No, I don&#8217;t forgive you.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and maybe no.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And, &#8220;Maybe, not right now and I don&#8217;t know when. Don&#8217;t ask me.&#8221; It&#8217;s interesting because it does open up a way for richer communication. You&#8217;re suggesting that it might be possible but I agree that it can feel really force and be like, &#8220;Will you, so that we can just move on from this?&#8221; Maybe I&#8217;m not ready to move on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m also super cool with this being the crud of fan episode, just FYI. If that can be the name of it even, I would up for it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Subtitle: &#8216;Also, Kronda Adair is great.&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;ll put it on t-shirt. I was going to say, I feel like we should talk about shame too, as a part of this. I think shame, for not being able to do right things, sometimes it keeps us from trying to do better, especially with really complicated aspects of identity because we can tell that it&#8217;s a very personal thing. I think sometimes, in theory in shame, shame is this external thing that&#8217;s put on us, can keep people from actually just stepping up and doing the work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Just is it, is kind of vulnerable. It is hard to know that you might make mistakes, that you might hurt people by trying to communicate with them. I don&#8217;t think that it&#8217;s got an easy answer and easy way to deal with that. They get something to be really aware of that that&#8217;s part of our culture and our way of thinking about this and what we might feel coming into it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think your whole book is an answer to that in a way because, I think it&#8217;s related to shame this fear of trying is like a fear of failing. If you have more resources to be like, &#8220;I read this,&#8221; and I feel like, &#8220;I have a background and I know where I&#8217;m coming from,&#8221; that can empower people to be able to try. I think that the fear is related to not even knowing where to start. I think this book is a really, really good place to start. Thank you for making it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would also continue with that thought. I come from a journalism background and harm is not something we necessarily talk about in journalism classes when we&#8217;re in the newsroom, when we&#8217;re working on a project. In my background, there were certain things that were considered unacceptable because they would open the paper you work at to libel laws. We got lots of training about libel laws but we didn&#8217;t get a lot of training about interviewing beyond how to get the right information that the paper needed.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We did get a lot of training on how to talk to people, how to understand the context of their experiences. We got some basic guidance on, &#8220;Don&#8217;t say this because this is a problem,&#8221; but we didn&#8217;t get any explanation of what to use instead. For instance, there were a lot of things that we get from AP style that say, &#8220;You&#8217;re going to talk about race in this way,&#8221; to which I am from Oklahoma. I interned at the Tulsa World, which is a very interesting paper but there are some people who have been on staff there since 19-I don&#8217;t know-08 or something and telling them, &#8220;No, the AP style says we&#8217;re talking about race in this way,&#8221; immediately leaves into discussion of, &#8220;Oh, you just want me to be politically correct. I&#8217;m going to write the way I write and editor can deal with it later if it&#8217;s really a problem,&#8221; which was unkind to the editor in question because the editor in question was a young woman who didn&#8217;t want to deal with that crap anyhow.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There are improvements since when I went through journalism school but it&#8217;s not necessarily something that a lot of newsrooms are focusing on even today. Everybody grabs their copy of the AP style guide and says, &#8220;That&#8217;s good enough,&#8221; and the AP style guide comes from a very set perspective and we come from a different set perspective.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think we were really looking at that leading edge of it. We put in under index, which was something that I just can&#8217;t seem to find a lot of places when I was starting to see people use it. I think that AP comes from, not in a political way but a conservative approach. They&#8217;re not going to push something in there until they think that&#8217;s it&#8217;s fairly widely accepted. I also think that there&#8217;s just such a big difference between doing something because you know it&#8217;s the kindest way to interact with them and doing something because otherwise, they get sued. It puts the blame and the responsibility in completely different directions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s two completely different level.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a good point but I would still, rather someone treat me good because they&#8217;re afraid that they&#8217;ll get sued than just treat me bad.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For sure. In some tech companies, that maybe all you really can hold on to. That&#8217;s just like a low bar. It&#8217;s a really low bar to pass.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>With the political correctness, I often feel like a lot of the conversation is about what people assume is wildly accepted versus the truth about things. Sometimes, when you&#8217;re trying to represent something truthfully, then you&#8217;re being labeled as being politically correct because it&#8217;s not the same language that&#8217;s being used to talk about whatever it is more ubiquitously but it doesn&#8217;t necessarily make it more widely accepted. I think that&#8217;s something we&#8217;ve kind of just assumed because this is how it&#8217;s always been so obviously, it&#8217;s accepted. But I think that the accepting part is very assuming and I don&#8217;t think it always applies.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> To try to use an example I would say, if you think that most people in America live in a large city, then when you talk about things related to city life like traffic or housing issues or streets, then you would make differences if you were talking about somebody who lived in a rural area. You would actually say, &#8220;They live in a rural area and this is what this area looks like,&#8221; because you would assume that most people don&#8217;t know what that is so you&#8217;re trying to talk about it in a way that you think is describing. Then maybe others might say, &#8220;Why are you even talking about like that? Just say the name of the place and whatever.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But if you don&#8217;t actually know the truth about where people live or what their experiences are, then you&#8217;re still making assumptions. I think half the political correctness conversation is an assumption about, why do we have to use all these labels. Everybody knows what we&#8217;re talking about. It&#8217;s just this small group of people that are having a problem so why should we change our behavior for the small group of people. I think it&#8217;s probably more true that we don&#8217;t know enough about people in general, to even know if it&#8217;s a small group of people that if we&#8217;re using different terminology, how do you know that&#8217;s not widely accepted.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If just because you haven&#8217;t been using it, it doesn&#8217;t mean that it&#8217;s not actually being used. It could be you or your paper or whatever your outlet, whatever your communication place is, that is not using this terminology but that doesn&#8217;t make it untrue or not even widely accepted. I feel like in some ways, we can&#8217;t even have the &#8216;is this politically correct?&#8217; conversation until we even know the truth about what is going on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That really resonates with me. I would also add that without that truth, without that understanding, without that contexts, nobody is able to communicate effectively anyhow. Without that understanding, without building more of that relationship between who&#8217;s doing the talking and who&#8217;s doing the listening, whether that&#8217;s journalist talking to their audience or even just one-on-one, I think that it&#8217;s really easy to forget honestly that other people are not exactly the same and that&#8217;s a thing that I hope that we&#8217;re working on. I hope that this is a useful tool for.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I would also maybe add that this is kind of a discussion in linguistics in some way as well. This assumption that English as a language doesn&#8217;t change and we don&#8217;t need new labels to describe new things is completely unaware of the history of language, especially English. English has this reputation as that language that will rifle through all other languages pockets and steal whatever isn&#8217;t nailed down, which is why English is often adopted for technical discussion. It&#8217;s often adopted for scientific discussions because we have historically had no shame about using new words and new labels and new terminology.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> While I think the discussion of political correctness might be motivated by more than just a lack of understanding on how language works because once again, [inaudible]. I think that the way that English is evolving right now, the way that we&#8217;re adding new terms, we&#8217;re thinking about new concepts is honestly kind of cool and a really interesting evolution of language that&#8217;s worth looking at.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s also an emotional labor issue, who has to do the work of being aware of other people. Certainly, if you&#8217;re on the other side of the political correctness that somebody is expressing it, what it means is that you have to learn how to be overly considerate of white people&#8217;s feelings. Overly cautious instead of accepting that you do equal work, that you should be doing equal work here to understand and help people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really like what you’re saying about the way language evolves because I think a lot of times when I get into a conversation about language on these topics, it&#8217;s because someone&#8217;s telling me, &#8220;That&#8217;s not a real word. That is not grammatically correct. You just made that up,&#8221; and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I didn&#8217;t just make it up. Somebody else made it up but that&#8217;s how our words became words.&#8221; Somebody made them up at some point. That&#8217;s true.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think it comes down to this dichotomy where it&#8217;s either I&#8217;m going to be really rigid and strict about the English language or I&#8217;m going to respect how other people feel. At the end of the day, if I have to pick one of those, it&#8217;s very obvious which one I&#8217;m going to choose. I&#8217;m not sure why so many people get hung up on that step.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think maybe one of the reasons is because they&#8217;re looking for a rule and they feel like, &#8220;If I know this rule and then now, I use it and you&#8217;re telling me it&#8217;s wrong, now I have to learn a new rule. Then what if somebody else tells me that&#8217;s wrong and they have to know a new rule.&#8221; I think it&#8217;s actually way easier if you allow people to tell you how they want to be treated and you just treat them that way. That can be a universal rule, as opposed to trying to say, &#8220;This is what they said. I don&#8217;t want to change anymore. I&#8217;m tired of having to change a lot,&#8221; because that&#8217;s the opposition argument, which is, &#8220;It&#8217;s too much to change. I can&#8217;t do this. I can&#8217;t keep up with this.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> You just need to pick a box and stay there, which is already insulting to people who don&#8217;t feel like they fit in the box. But if they comes from this place of, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know anything about this and you&#8217;re telling me there&#8217;s this rule, then when I try to use it and somebody tell me the rules are wrong. I&#8217;m tired of rules. You need to do what I know so I don&#8217;t have to keep doing this.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s why it&#8217;s so refreshing to listen to Thursday and be like, &#8220;Isn&#8217;t it exciting that we&#8217;re changing all these things and it&#8217;s evolving and it&#8217;s so cool to see,&#8221; and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Yes, it&#8217;s amazing. Thank you.&#8221; It is super amazing. I love hearing about different people&#8217;s perspectives and experiences. I also have absolutely heard people explicitly say, what Astrid is [inaudible] that, &#8220;I already had to learn how to talk about women in the 70s. You already held me so why do I have to learn something else about it now.&#8221; It&#8217;s very boring to me to just refuse change so drastically.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> You change. Somebody is seeing that changes. They are not the same person they were in 1970 but we don&#8217;t reflect on our personal change, unless you have a lot of friction with the culture around you. We don&#8217;t reflect on that personal change the way that we notice it on others like, &#8220;I just had to learn your pronouns five years ago and now they&#8217;re different.&#8221; I&#8217;ve seen people do that very directly. I think part of it is they&#8217;re not very self-reflective, either. They&#8217;re not really understanding themselves to be into that. They just think everyone else keeps shifting around them, keeps shaking them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a small overlap with the same communities that say, &#8220;I learned COBOL and I don&#8217;t need to learn another language. I&#8217;m just going to program in COBOL for the rest of my life.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I do have a family member who has done that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m not saying that COBOL doesn&#8217;t have its time and place. I&#8217;m just saying that maybe there are some alternatives that have happened since COBOL that are at least just good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe that time and place is in the past. That was me and I take that back.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Unfortunately, in our banking system &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The past didn&#8217;t go anywhere.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah. There&#8217;s a lot of companies that rely on COBOL-based inventory management still. I know several COBOL programmers who just go from company to company, updating their inventory system just enough but it keeps running and keep shipping things and then they&#8217;re on to the next questionable inventory system. It might be relevant to say that one of the supplements that we&#8217;re talking about doing fairly soon is age because age does have a role, not an all-inclusive role of course but it does have a role in how we talk about some of these things as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A lot of people that we talk about, in terms of political correctness, I&#8217;ve heard referred to as dinosaurs, which no matter how cool dinosaurs are, it might not always be the right word either so age is definitely a thing worth discussing as well around identity.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s just a thing that we erased from our technology, there&#8217;s this very historical perspective that we often bring to programming about not learning what&#8217;s changed and what&#8217;s different. That also rolls into how we think about people. We try to get them very static rules and it doesn&#8217;t always work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Speaking of static rules, another thing I really like about the book was the end. There&#8217;s a section, a list of words that you shouldn&#8217;t use, which was helpful but then after that, there was a section of words that was&#8230; I can&#8217;t remember how it was worded &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Use with caution?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, use with caution. It&#8217;s like, &#8220;These words could be used correctly if you know what you&#8217;re doing with them.&#8221; I really like that because in particular, one of the words in that list is queer and that&#8217;s totally how I feel about the word queer and I&#8217;m all for it. I use it all the time. I think it&#8217;s a great word and I don&#8217;t like when people tell me not to use it but there are things you have to think about before you make the decision to use that word. I like that the book recognized that in different contexts and different things are acceptable and there&#8217;s not necessarily static rules about all these words. I appreciated that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. Our editors definitely were a guiding piece of that because there were several words where we&#8217;re like, &#8220;We can&#8217;t put these on the &#8216;don&#8217;t use list.'&#8221; But there are certain people who without proper training, perhaps shouldn&#8217;t access these terms. It&#8217;s like the adult section of the library, like it&#8217;s fine if you&#8217;re ready for it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, like spirit animal was the most recognizable one on the list for me. It was like, I see people misusing that so often, just as an example.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A lot of it is about how your personal identity is reflected. It&#8217;s very different to say, &#8220;I&#8217;m queer,&#8221; and to have somebody say, &#8220;You damn, queers.&#8221; A lot of these words is just because it&#8217;s so different if I identify that way, versus somebody tries to shame me for being that way. That often is why those words become so charged.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s about reclamation for me. I think reclamation of words is very important. It&#8217;s hard because I don&#8217;t want to force that on other people, if they don&#8217;t want it but I also definitely resent people telling me that I can&#8217;t reclaim words. I&#8217;m like, &#8220;You can watch me.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Watch you with your ever-changing English language.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s our language. We&#8217;ll use it how we need to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is the part of our show that we have reflections and we reflects on the conversation that we had on any insights that came up or calls-to-action for the future. I can go first. My reflection is something that you said, Audrey which I wrote down so that I will not mess it up, &#8220;The less that something is happening the way I want it to, probably the less that I know,&#8221; which I think is a really important thing to move forward thinking about because so often, when something doesn&#8217;t go the way you want, especially in interaction, your first reaction is, &#8220;What is wrong with them,&#8221; which I think is human. I&#8217;m not trying to say that that&#8217;s you&#8217;re automatically a bad person because I know I&#8217;ve done that plenty of times.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But I think to think about it in terms of, there&#8217;s probably something I don&#8217;t know as opposed to there&#8217;s something wrong with whoever they are and why they&#8217;re behaving this way is really helpful in understanding how you can grow and learn from whatever happened and be able to not have the same mistakes happen again because you just don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s going on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For me, one of the more interesting parts of this conversation was when I tried to make a joke and the factual basis of that joke was completely incorrect, I got to learn something. Yay!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Where&#8217;s that apology, Sam.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I also want to reflect on something that Audrey said about people not wanting to learn new things. Basically, the quote was, &#8220;People who don&#8217;t want to learn new things are boring,&#8221; and I totally agree with that but I feel like it&#8217;s really important to say that because so often, I internalize that people don&#8217;t want to learn new things around me and it&#8217;s like, &#8220;Maybe I&#8217;m this burden for expecting everyone to learn all these new things. Maybe I&#8217;m expecting too much of people,&#8221; so it&#8217;s really great to hear like, &#8220;No, it&#8217;s not you. It&#8217;s just boring, if you don&#8217;t want to learn,&#8221; which I totally agree. Once you say it, it&#8217;s just so obvious to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> She also talked about not being self-reflective which resonates with me a lot too. I made a post on Twitter one time and it was like, &#8220;Me to cisgender people: Nice gender. Did your mom pick it out for you?&#8221; And people got really mad about it and they were like, &#8220;What&#8217;s wrong with being cisgender?&#8221; I was like, &#8220;Nothing but your mom did pick it out for you, though. Have you ever reflected on why you feel that way?&#8221; If you sit down and you reflect really hard on your gender and help makes you feel and you&#8217;re like, &#8220;I was born male and I love being male.&#8221; I&#8217;d be like, &#8220;Great. I&#8217;m so happy for you. That sounds really convenient actually but I&#8217;m glad that you thought about it before you made a decision that this is who I am just because somebody told it to me once.&#8221; I think about that a lot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just want to repeat something Thursday has said early in our conversation, which is that it&#8217;s really amazing to pay people for their work. I had to literally write the checks and it felt so good to send all of our editors and our writers a check to say, &#8220;This work was meaningful to us. We&#8217;re really glad that you did it.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. That was definitely one of the most enjoyable parts of this project. It&#8217;s probably the first really enjoyable bit of capitalism I&#8217;ve had in a while too. I&#8217;m just really proud of the work that you were able to do and I&#8217;m really proud of the people, the community who were able to contribute to this. It is something that I&#8217;m really glad that we couldn&#8217;t do well, that we didn&#8217;t have to do well. I just want to say that that&#8217;s one of the best things about this project for me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Before we say goodbye, is there somewhere that people can go to learn more about the book, about The Recompiler, about the two of you that you would like people to know?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>THURSDAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The style guide does have its own website, which is RCStyleGuide.com. We are currently selling the eBook, which is available through RCStyleGuide.com or through RecompilerMag.com. In early 2018, we will be doing another prepping for physical copies of the eBook so keep an eye out for that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Speaking of paying people, October 24th, we&#8217;re doing another Kickstarter for The Recompiler. We&#8217;re going into Year 3 of publication and we have a lot of plans for more issues and another book that we&#8217;re actually getting ready to announce so I would love it if people just keep an eye out for that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you so much for coming on the show. We&#8217;ve had a really great conversation and I look forward to more in the future.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AUDREY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you for having us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks listeners. We will be back at you next week.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><b>___</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="http://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ameschright"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Audrey Eschright</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">: </span><a href="https://recompilermag.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Recompiler</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="http://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-013-audrey-eschright/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greater Than Code Episode #013: Religion in Tech with Audrey Eschright</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://opensourcebridge.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Open Source Bridge</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/thursdayb"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Thursday Bram</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">: </span><a href="https://www.thursdaybram.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">thursdaybram.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:33</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Superpowers and Acquisition</span></p>
<p><b>02:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Reflective Listening</span></p>
<p><b>05:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://rcstyleguide.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Responsible Communication Style Guide</span></a></p>
<p><b>11:54 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Asking Content-Related Questions</span></p>
<p><b>15:10 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Who is the target audience for this book? </span></p>
<p><b>17:45 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Evolution of Writing the Book</span></p>
<p><b>19:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People-first_language"><span style="font-weight: 400;">People-first Language</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://kronda.com/five-stages-of-unlearning-racism/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Kronda Adair: Five Stages of Unlearning Racism</span></a></p>
<p><b>23:40 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What if you get it wrong?</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">1. Try to do good.<br />
2. Fuck it up.<br />
3. Apologize<br />
4. Try not to make the same mistake again.</p>
<p>That’s the job.</p>
<p>— Kronda (@kronda) <a href="https://twitter.com/kronda/status/546727506850496512?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 21, 2014</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script ]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>This episode is sponsored by </b><a href="http://upsd.io/2wmwtFp"><b>Upside</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://upsd.io/2wmwtFp"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-785" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png" alt="" width="1000" height="128" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png 1024w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-300x38.png 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-768x98.png 768w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-600x77.png 600w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo.png 1382w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Bundle your flights and hotel. Save money. Earn gift cards.</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>___</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="http://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ameschright"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Audrey Eschright</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">: </span><a href="https://recompilermag.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Recompiler</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="http://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-013-audrey-eschright/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greater Than Code Episode #013: Religion in Tech with Audrey Eschright</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://opensourcebridge.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Open Source Bridge</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/thursdayb"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Thursday Bram</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">: </span><a href="https://www.thursdaybram.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">thursdaybram.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:33</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Superpowers and Acquisition</span></p>
<p><b>02:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Reflective Listening</span></p>
<p><b>05:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://rcstyleguide.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Responsible Communication Style Guide</span></a></p>
<p><b>11:54 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Asking Content-Related Questions</span></p>
<p><b>15:10 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Who is the target audience for this book? </span></p>
<p><b>17:45 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Evolution of Writing the Book</span></p>
<p><b>19:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People-first_language"><span style="font-weight: 400;">People-first Language</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://kronda.com/five-stages-of-unlearning-racism/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Kronda Adair: Five Stages of Unlearning Racism</span></a></p>
<p><b>23:40 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What if you get it wrong?</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">1. Try to do good.<br />
2. Fuck it up.<br />
3. Apologize<br />
4. Try not to make the same mistake again.</p>
<p>That’s the job.</p>
<p>— Kronda (@kronda) <a href="https://twitter.com/kronda/status/546727506850496512?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">December 21, 2014</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script ]]></googleplay:description>
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					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
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					<itunes:duration>51:57</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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					<title>052: Master’s Degrees, Double Binds, and Data Science with Emily Dresner</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/052-masters-degrees-double-binds-and-data-science-with-emily-dresner/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 25 Oct 2017 05:00:36 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=954</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Emily Dresner joins the show to talk about on why she felt getting a master's degree was worth it, her experiences working at a gaming company, and data science.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Emily Dresner joins the show to talk about on why she felt getting a masters degree was worth it, her experiences working at a gaming company, and data science.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Emily Dresner: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/multiplexer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@multiplexer</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://about.me/multiplexer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">about.me</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://web.upside.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Upside Travel</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:06</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Emily’s Background and Superpower</span></p>
<p><b>02:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Having a Master’s Degree: Was it worth it?</span></p>
<p><b>08:08 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Struggles After Retaining a Master’s</span></p>
<p><b>10:31 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Role Model: Emily’s Mom and Her Story</span></p>
<p><b>12:11 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “The Double Bind” </span></p>
<p><b>14:47 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Experiences Working at a Gaming Company</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise by David Foster Wallace</span></a></p>
<p><b>18:33 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Transitioning to Upside and Building a Healthy Culture</span></p>
<p><b>21:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Engineering Vs Management</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show,<br />
buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Thank you </b><a href="https://twitter.com/risuikari"><b>Risse Rigdon</b></a><b> for your support!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p><b>29:09 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Data Science</span></p>
<p><b>32:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Self-Selecting for Privilege </span></p>
<p><b>36:38 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Data Science and Security/Privacy</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553418831/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0553418831&amp;linkId=c1f1ddfeccb618a067410f6a11670af3"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O&#8217;Neil</span></a></p>
<p><b>46:55 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Having a Background in Actual Science; Conquering Biases</span></p>
<p><b>51:35 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Importance of Mentorship and Internships from the Beginning</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Having a biases towards hiring people like yourself and other hiring biases.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Research cognitive biases.</span></p>
<p><b>Jamey:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Computers aren’t people.</span></p>
<p><b>Emily:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> I really do enjoy teaching.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to Episode 52 of Greater Than Code. I&#8217;m Sam Livingston-Gray and I&#8217;m here to introduce my co-panelists, Jamey Hampton.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks, Sam and I&#8217;d like to introduce our other co-panelists, Coraline Ada Ehmke.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hey, everybody and welcome to Episode 52, as Sam said. We&#8217;ve been on the air for just over a year now, which I&#8217;m super excited about. We have a special guest with us today, Emily Dresner. Emily is the CTO of Upside Travel. Prior to joining Upside, Emily was a product engineering lead for Luminal and web team lead and principal architect on the Elder Scrolls Online at ZeniMax Online Studios. Emily has a Master&#8217;s in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Michigan. She&#8217;s also a certified scrum master and a fanatical Michigan football fan. Welcome, Emily.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi. Thank you so much for having me today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Emily, we always start the podcast with the same question and that is, &#8220;What is your superpower and when and how did you discover it?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My superpower is my ability to know a guy. I have an uncanny ability to network. I always seem to have somebody in my pocket from college or from previous work or from online or through some networking facility that happens to know some weird and obscure fact. I&#8217;ve noticed this actually more and more as tech has gotten more specialized and I need to reach out to friends and get an answer on something very obscure and strange very quickly. That&#8217;s my superpower.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is nothing to sneeze at. Networking is super useful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Were you always that way? Did you develop that skill at some point in your professional career?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>More or less, I don&#8217;t let people just go when I move on. I usually maintain a relationship, especially with my old college friends who have all moved all over the place. A lot of them have PhDs in very specialized fields these days. I keep up with a lot of people on Twitter especially. Not so much with Facebook. Mostly Twitter is my jam but just over time, I know people who happen to know a thing and I usually can reach out to know a guy to get an answer for something.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m pretty good at keeping up with people on Twitter but I talk to two of my college friends maybe once every six months and I barely talk to old coworkers and I don&#8217;t want to have that power.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If you&#8217;re not on Twitter, you don&#8217;t exist to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wait. What do these college friends of which you speak?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have vague memories of people from college but I don&#8217;t think any of them went on to get PhDs. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Speaking of advanced degrees, I noticed that you have a Master&#8217;s in Computer Science and Engineering. I find it&#8217;s rare enough in this field to find people with a bachelor&#8217;s degree and a master’s degree and it seems even more rare in the working field. What&#8217;s that like? Is that a path that you would recommend to others?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A master&#8217;s degree, especially from someplace like Michigan is mostly a signal that you have the commitment that you can follow through with a major project from beginning to end and that you have the capacity to read technical research papers. Those are really the two things that getting a masters sort of gives you. It&#8217;s a funny little story. When I was getting my bachelor&#8217;s in computer engineering from Michigan, I went out to Intel and this is a very long time ago and I had a two-day long interview process with them and the only job that they would offer me was a helpdesk tech. It felt like four years of a hard core engineering education didn&#8217;t seem to really measure up to being a helpdesk tech in Portland, Oregon so it&#8217;s a little bit of an insult.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They sent me an offer letter and I put it through a shredder in the EECS Building at University of Michigan. It was still in its brown envelope. They did call me back exactly 16 times &#8212; I took real notes &#8212; before they stopped calling me for a call back and I actually &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe you have some more to add to their professional network on LinkedIn.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Perhaps. I turned Intel down hard core and I applied to the Michigan Computer Science and Engineering program at Rackham Graduate School up pretty much that day. I got in and I did two additional years and I specialized in distributed operating systems, which funny, back then it was called distributed operating systems and today it&#8217;s called the cloud. Apparently, it&#8217;s just about 15 years ahead of my time. I thought that giant computers were really cool and I wanted to build things that were so big they span to the planet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Getting a master&#8217;s degree gave me some of the deeper algorithmic knowledge to be able to do it but I didn&#8217;t use some of that knowledge so I got until almost 10 years after I got my degree. It was just years ahead of its time. I end up spending a lot of time in security, instead because I was doing operating systems and a lot of security is actually the operating system level. I like fiddly algorithms and crypto was just a lot of fiddly algorithms. That&#8217;s a badge of a thing that I did and I had to pay for, which I did, in cash.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And time and opportunity cost.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And opportunity cost, yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t know how people can do that, honestly. In my teen, in 20s, I was a big fucking mess and I ended up running out of money and dropping out of college so I have respect for people who can finish that at such a young age and know themselves enough to do the work because I definitely was not capable of that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Same here. I went to college twice and dropped out twice before the third time stuck in it. The third time was when I went back at 27 and I was highly motivated after having a bunch of crap jobs to actually do the work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The second part of Sam&#8217;s question, Emily was, is that something that you recommend for other people?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It depends. I think if you are a woman in engineering, I do highly recommend getting the master&#8217;s degree. It helps when you&#8217;re just starting out to pull your resume out from the rest of the pack. It&#8217;s just a little bit of a nudge that says, &#8220;I have this much more training. I think about problems in slightly different and deeper way.&#8221; If you&#8217;re a women or you&#8217;re a person of color, then I actually do recommend that you get the master&#8217;s degree.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I don&#8217;t recommend you get the PhD. Unless you want to go to data science, then I strongly recommend you get a PhD actually. But if you just want to go industry engineering or engineering management, I do recommend a master&#8217;s degree for people who just feels like you need to get your resume onto the top of that stack, to get a second look. It served me really well for&#8230; I don&#8217;t know, almost a decade of just being able to get my name in front of a hiring manager just that little bit much easier, than if I&#8217;m just what I have my bachelor&#8217;s. I was not offered any more helpdesk jobs from Intel after that, let&#8217;s put it that way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>it&#8217;s almost like you&#8217;re saying that women and other underrepresented minorities have to work harder to be seen as just as good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In tech?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But it&#8217;s the meritocracy, Sam. Come on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, if you&#8217;re a woman in engineering, it is not a meritocracy out there, unfortunately and these little things help.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I heard some people tell stories about being told that they were overqualified because they are too advance of an engineer. Is that not something that you&#8217;ve personally experienced?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve never been told that I am too qualified because I had a master&#8217;s degree but I&#8217;ve always hitched to the top. I&#8217;m never interested in those intro positions. I&#8217;m always interested in those senior positions so it was never a topic that came up. There was other topics that came up but &#8216;you were overqualified&#8217; has never been one of them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Was everything easy for you after you got that master&#8217;s degree? Where are some of the struggles? I&#8217;m sure the answer is no so what are some of the struggles you faced, even being on the top of that power resumes?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I never really had a problem with the interviewing part of the &#8216;getting through the door.&#8217; It was always after getting through the door that the cultural problems really started to sink in. To get stand up at a board and write code off the top your head in a number of different languages, my jam was always straight up C and I can still write code on the board straight up C, even today. You remember I said all the algorithm questions and all the algorithm patterns and all that is getting through the interview is not really that hard. It&#8217;s after being in the job that the challenges start to emerge.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For much of my career, I was the only woman, not just on the team but in the department. In fact, that was the way until I was able to actually start hiring women actually, believe it or not, until I was in the driver&#8217;s seat to make hiring decisions. One job I had that there was a woman on the team but I&#8217;m just ticking off all of my positions in my head, going all the way back to the beginning of time. My first job I ever had, I had a woman manager but it was hospital IT. That&#8217;s a different world because it just is when you&#8217;re living in a world of nursing and doctors and they have a different take on position on things, which is something I didn&#8217;t realize. But if I look at my second job, my third, my fourth job didn&#8217;t have women on teams. My fifth job and then by sixth job, where I was finally a hiring manager. Out of all of those, there was only one that there was another woman on the team and there was two.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Throughout my entire career, it wasn&#8217;t so much the interview process or the call back process or &#8216;getting in front of hiring managers&#8217; process or even &#8216;getting in the door&#8217; process. On the team, there were never any peers. It was interesting. It was never even peers on the team or in team leadership or in product. Usually, I have to go out to marketing before you actually find any other women that happen to be on the team. Then once I was in the driver&#8217;s seat where I can start making some hiring decisions and resumes got to me, I started hiring women, which is something I carry along with me through my career now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Did you have any role models when you&#8217;re coming up, if there weren&#8217;t very many women in the field? Who did you look up to?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My mom. My mom has a PhD in molecular pathology. She is a director in pathology and associate professor at University of Maryland in Baltimore. She actually didn&#8217;t get her PhD until she was in her late 30s while I wasn&#8217;t around. But the story is she went to Michigan Tech and she actually want to be a plant biologist. She got into the PhD program at Michigan Tech for plant biology and just before she started her program, they yanked her position and all of her funding out from underneath her because she was informed that a friend of the dean for the program had a son and they needed to find him a place and because she was a woman, they were going to prefer him over her. If she want to do plant biology, she had to leave.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> She was a medical tech and then she went back and got her PhD at Wayne State and then she was a head of one of the major labs at the American Red Cross and then she moved to the University of Maryland in Baltimore. My mom&#8217;s always been a symbol of perseverance against pretty much everything. She&#8217;s still there today so that&#8217;s why I look up to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That story is unbelievable. It&#8217;s really not unbelievable. It&#8217;s just really sad.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was 1971. I got a reflection of it in 1991 and I have a 12-year old daughter who wants to go into Applied Mathematics and we will see it again in six years.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It sounds like you&#8217;ve experienced a lot of isolation as mostly being the only woman on your team. I&#8217;ve seen a lot of chatter on Twitter this week. Marco Rogers posted some stuff about the double bind that he experiences as a person of color in tech and then, I think Sarah Mei was tweeting about some of this as well. I&#8217;ve seen a bunch of other people talking about the double bind where as a woman in tech, you are either told that you are too aggressive or that you&#8217;re too nurturing or that you&#8217;re both at the same time, which is a special trick to pull off. Have you experienced any of that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had a manager for five years who every single one of his yearly reviews informed me that I was too aggressive and I would never move forward in my career, unless I was more female. I ignored his advice because it was bad.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Literally, he said more female?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I need to be more of a woman and more caring and think more about the men&#8217;s feelings around me. I would make him more comfortable if I changed in that way. That hasn&#8217;t happened.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Glad to hear that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ll let you know if I ever does that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve definitely been on the receiving end of being called aggressive or abrasive and there&#8217;s some truth to it because when I know I&#8217;m right, I do not yield. I don&#8217;t want to have that sort of confidence that I&#8217;m that right all the time. But when it does come up, I am relentless in my pursuit of doing the right thing and that has definitely caused me a lot of trouble in the past. How do you think your career would have been different if you taking that advice?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t think that I can physically take that advice. When I went to go and build the game, I don&#8217;t think I would have survived that environment. That&#8217;s an interesting world of video games and it&#8217;s funny because I have done video games twice. Media Station is actually a game studio. I don&#8217;t learn from my failures apparently. But I think if I would have taken that advice and wouldn&#8217;t have learned how to stand my ground, I don&#8217;t think that I would have been a successful at ZineMax Online Studios as I was.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that this double standard between you have to be more warm and more nurturing while you&#8217;re too aggressive but I need to be more aggressive and I need you to defend your decisions, I think that it&#8217;s just bad advice and you really have to find your own way in the situation that you&#8217;re at the time, if that makes sense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Definitely. I&#8217;m interested in hearing about how working in a gaming company was different from working in a more traditional, what we think of tech environment. I have a friend who specializes in programming AI for bosses in video games and she&#8217;s told me some real horror stories about what games studios are like and the grind and the long hours. I&#8217;m curious how your experience was in that industry and maybe, why you left it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s an old David Foster Wallace essay called &#8216;A Supposedly Fun Thing I&#8217;ll Never Do Again.&#8217; In that case, it&#8217;s about him being on a cruise ship, which also a supposedly fun thing that I don&#8217;t really want to do again. The video game industry is both amazing and terrifying and a call out to all my friends who are still in it, &#8220;Hi. Are you still there? I will parachute you guys in like hot dogs and other edible food that we can shove under the doors so you can get food.&#8221; Shout out to my friends at Blizzard and Ubisoft and still at ZineMax. It is the group with the most passionate people that I have ever worked with in my life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> These are people who love what they&#8217;re doing, they&#8217;ve live for it, they breathe it, they play their own games, they eat their own dog food. They play other games for fun and for work, they do nothing but [inaudible] all day and they know every single thing that&#8217;s coming out and the game schedule. They know every conference, every sub-conference, every blog, every major person on Twitter. These people live and die and breathe video games and they are terrific to work with and if anybody ever has a chance to do it, I actually highly recommend the experience.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But it was also an experience in getting things done extremely fast, understanding what is important and what is not, learning how to sort of weed out the egos from the job that has to be done because code has to be delivered. It is an educational experience in how to handle the pressure from social media. One thing to see one piece of feedback or one tweet on your product and it&#8217;s another thing to see it on Twitterfall when it&#8217;s coming at 10,000 tweets in a half an hour. Those are two very different experiences and I have had them both.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When it comes to shipping, it is a very high pressure environment. In a lot of places, the teams do pull together and they do pull together to get the job done. There&#8217;s a lot of frustration, a lot of people lose their patience and leave but there&#8217;s also a feeling of satisfaction when it gets out the door. It is a lot of hours, it is a lot of hard work, it is a lot of dedication. You have to want to be there and I wanted to be there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The reason I left is because there was just some internal factors. You&#8217;ve launched AAA MMO and the parent studio is not happy with the launched and they&#8217;re interfering with everything now. It&#8217;s sort of some standard ZineMax story is a joke here from anybody else. Part of it was just some burn out at the end of that and I just needed to go and do something else for a little while. But hilariously, I just wanted to downshift so I went back to startups because I was looking for something slightly slower but it&#8217;s a terrific experience. A lot of people, I still talk to them, people who I work with there, I still talk to them every day. It&#8217;s an environment where you form friendships for life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think I have a good understanding of what you did at ZeniMax. You painted a picture for us. How does that compare to what you&#8217;re doing at Upside now?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s funny because I really started on the ground floor here and I got to think long and hard about our learned lessons, about what we did really well and what we didn&#8217;t do so well and pulled a lot of the management direction that I felt worked really well and brought it here. ZeniMax was, for a very long time, a very move-fast and break-things environment. I&#8217;m a big fan of move-fast and break-things so I brought that ethos here, learned the plusses and minuses of agile versus Kanban versus team size, team communication, overhead, scaling. A lot of those lessons I brought here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But I also try to leave some of the grind on the floor, simply because I believe this is a marathon and not a sprint. Videogame companies, most of their QA is outsourced contract so they don&#8217;t really care if they burn people out on third shift. I have more of an eye towards long term of growing people and growing their careers and retaining them and making people better people than the way I found them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That&#8217;s a plus and that&#8217;s a minus in the video game industry, except for Ubisoft &#8212; I call it Ubi &#8212; a lot of places, they&#8217;re not really big in investment over the long term. I think it&#8217;s very important when building a healthy culture to have investment on personal level and in an organizational level. It&#8217;s just a little bit more of the CTO thinking of how we really should be, as a people and as a department and as a company, instead of just as a thing that needs to ship a thing out the door to the hordes that are waiting to play their game.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That&#8217;s the difference here than what I experienced before. Also, it&#8217;s very important for people who can be together to be together. People need to be together on a mission so we try to build mission here, which is also important. People need to come to work every day and feel like they&#8217;re doing a thing that&#8217;s important. That&#8217;s Upside. That&#8217;s a little bit of what we&#8217;ve done different here than we&#8217;ve done it in previous gigs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Another thing that we&#8217;ve done here is that we&#8217;ve hired a lot more women here. We have women engineers who are working on main product. We have engineers of color who are working on main product, which is super cool. DC is a really cool tech city because we both have historical black colleges here like Howard College. In Howard University, there are [inaudible] and University of Maryland, College Park, UMCP plus Virginia Tech and because the government has these requirements for diversity and hiring and diversity in advancement, we end up having just a larger influx of diverse candidates that come to us who are very, very lucky in the DC environment.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We get to pick from people who otherwise, may not be or have the same opportunity out in Silicon Valley so it&#8217;s really cool that we can start diversity initiatives here and we can bring in more people. We have people that have worked all over from all different industries and all different backgrounds and it just makes Upside, especially Upside tech side of things, more vibrant than a lot of places out there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Emily, you&#8217;re now a CTO. Was it at Upside that you made the transition from being more of a software engineer to more of a manager?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I actually started making the transition from an engineer to a manager all the way back when I worked at Merchant Link, which is the transactional processor in Silver Spring, Maryland. When I had my very first report and then he quit on me and then I had my very second report, that was exciting. Then when I moved to ZeniMax and that&#8217;s when I was heavily introduced to hiring teams. When I moved to Luminal in 2014, I was introduced to hiring a building departments. Then when I came to Upside, I started building the engineering department. I&#8217;ve been on this track since about 2009.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like I&#8217;m in my second time around in software development. The first time, I took a management track and got up the c-level but I found that the further away I got from code, the less happy I was. Around 2012 or 2013, I actually went back to being an individual contributor. I found that the things I liked about management, in terms of mentoring and team building and having some decision-making authority, I could get as a principal engineer. Do you find that&#8217;s your experience too? Is that what you like about management and do you ever miss coding?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I&#8217;m going to take that back &#8212; the missing coding because my daughter came to me with wanting to program a simulation about doing bacterial spread infections and I spent the next six hours reading SIR algorithms and going through all the differential equations and then finding out how to implement them in Python and then figuring out, reading a bunch of example code about how to implement them for zombie outbreaks. Then using a whole bunch of MATLAB stuff to pull in various maps in the United States to simulate zombie outbreaks in United States. Apparently, I do miss coding. I&#8217;m not going to say I don&#8217;t.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> He asked me to look into a problem and I just go right down the rabbit hole. One of the things I&#8217;m especially good at and was the real sweet spot for me, one of the things I really enjoyed was the architect hat, which isn&#8217;t really so much coding anymore but thinking about projects on a large scale. Instead of just thinking about my one piece of code really deep, if you&#8217;re writing like some kind of file system and you&#8217;re trying to deal with some of the L1/L2 cache miss algorithms for your file system, it lets you really go and really deep in some operating system driver. That&#8217;s the principle engineer right there, all the way down to the metal.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> My sweet spot was &#8212; and I&#8217;ve noticed this ever since grad school so this is not some new thing &#8212; the ability to think about all the pieces in the system and be able to hold them in my head and have them all work and then be able to follow the little traces in my head. It&#8217;s like having your own little tracing system that runs in your head where nobody can see it, which isn&#8217;t terribly useful to the team but was incredibly useful to me. To be able to work through some of those systems and I&#8217;ll be able to communicate back with product and UX and engineers and whoever else had a stake in it, here&#8217;s how the system is, here&#8217;s implications, here&#8217;s what we can do, we can design this. I still have some pretty decent whiteboard skills this day.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It&#8217;s interesting because I&#8217;ve taken that piece of skill set of being able hold everything in my head at once and I transposed it onto people, instead of just things. Sometimes, I joke and claim that I just see everybody who&#8217;s in engineering, just as a process list. I&#8217;m just walking through doing a &#8216;ps -ef&#8217; and seeing what everybody&#8217;s doing and what exactly they&#8217;re working on and I can see all the processes running at once and how they&#8217;re scheduling on the processor that is Upside, which I think drives my direct reports nuts.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But I&#8217;d largely take the optimization program that I was running on systems and transposed it to people and how we deal with various things that are not working and how we rearrange systems and how we grow systems in a way that we can scale out the entire department, the entire business and how it interfaces with things like customer service or marketing or our growth team and how they all have little input and exports and how everything should work together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think I do drive people a little bit nutty because I will talk about it in a very dry engineering way of here&#8217;s how this should work and here&#8217;s how this process should communicate and here&#8217;s my deck and here&#8217;s the steps go. But it&#8217;s worked really well for getting Upside off the mark and getting us from 10 people to 100. It&#8217;s been a useful skill. I don&#8217;t think I would go back to building code. I don&#8217;t think I would go back to writing things other than fun evening projects trying to [inaudible] flow running or whatever I&#8217;m playing with today. I actually don&#8217;t miss being an individual contributor. As a kind of long winded but that was my answer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was really interesting. I have not done management track. I&#8217;m not sure that I ever want to. The thought of trying to move in to that direction is scary to me but it was really a fresh perspective to see how you thought about it so thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You are welcome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It is interesting to hear about the idea of treating systems of people, at least in part, the way that you might treat a system of code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I will tell you that people are way more difficult. If computers do exactly what you tell them to do and people never do what you tell them to do. They&#8217;re really never. You just want to walk around and hook a debugger up to them and try to figure out where the code is wrong. Leadership is super interesting. It&#8217;s mostly putting out your vision and trying to build these North Star and say, &#8220;We need to as a team get to North Star but I really just wanted MVP of the things so please, just give me a little skate board. We&#8217;ll get to the North Star. Be patient but just give me a little bit of this. Awesome. Now, ship it. Now!&#8221; It&#8217;s fun in a different way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A moment to take a second to give a shout out to our newest $25 level sponsor, Risse Rigdon. I hope I&#8217;m not mispronouncing your name. Risse is on Twitter as @risuikari and I want to remind people that as a Patreon, you get access to our exclusive Slack community. I think we just passed 100 people, is that right Sam? And we talked to &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Two hundred, in fact.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Two hundred. Wow. We talk about things that come up after listening to the show, you have the ability to suggest guest, to suggest questions to our guest and to just be around like minded-people who understand that software is about people and that, we are all greater than code. If you&#8217;d like to join that community, please go to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. Pledge at any level and we&#8217;ll get you in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You helped make the show happened so thanks to all 200 of you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Emily, I&#8217;m curious, at the beginning you talked about the importance of a PhD if you want to go into something like data science. We really haven&#8217;t touched on data science very much. Have you intersected with data science at any point in your career? In my personal experience, I see a lot more women in data science than in software engineering. I&#8217;m curious if that&#8217;s been your experience as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. This is interesting because it&#8217;s sort of a two-pronged question. My first integration with data science was actually at ZeniMax. We stood up a giant data science system basically from scratch and hired a bunch of data scientists and discovered really horrifying facts about our game. We built fun simulations like the death map where you could bring up the entire map of the MMO and just see where everybody was dying at. Those are really cool. That was one of the best application. But you can watch like heat maps of what quests people were playing and what content was doing really well and what content wasn&#8217;t doing so well. It was in the direction there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The entire premise of Upside is actually built on data science and we recently really put down the hammer on building a data science department. I have noticed that a much larger proportion of women in data science than there are in straight up software engineering. I suspect it&#8217;s because we&#8217;re looking for people in more of the hard sciences, where there&#8217;s been a shift that&#8217;s been moving since the late 80s. I know that in economics, it&#8217;s really bad. I read that flame war on Twitter. There&#8217;s another iteration of it going at economics Twitter right now about there&#8217;s no women in economics. I&#8217;ve seen that one.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But I do know that in biology and chemistry and applied mathematics and especially astronomy, it was a big one for a long time because it was almost entirely male-dominated, there&#8217;s been a large shift to being sort of this 90/10 to being closer to maybe a 60/40 representation. When you put out a call for data scientists, we get a really good gender mix between men and women who come in and apply. We need to go upstairs and count all of data scientists that just appeared one day here. It was remarkable but we&#8217;re running about 50/50 in our gender diversities here in Upside, which is super cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Majority of them do have PhDs. They don&#8217;t always have PhDs in applied mathematics. They do come from a diverse background. I believe it&#8217;s because data science largely came up through the bio track, through genomics and bioinformatics, where all the way back to my work in hospital IT, where everything was a little bit more gender parity. There&#8217;s been a lot of gender parity moving in biology and the medical field for really long time. It was very, very bad in the 80s but it moved in a much more positive direction there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In the genomic field, it&#8217;s pretty much a 50/50 split and you can reach and you can get people who get data science there and a lot of data scientist say that they don&#8217;t really care the nature of the problem. They just really care about the data and doing actual science to the data that they collect. It&#8217;s a little bit different to thinking about things. It&#8217;s a huge growing right field and it&#8217;s getting people from all over. It&#8217;s not just this one skinny pipeline of software engineers going through college, coming out taking software [inaudible]. That&#8217;s my theory. I would need to look at the data to understand if that&#8217;s really correct or not but a theory seems to be burying itself out pretty well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things I worry about with any job that has a pretty high college qualifications is that you&#8217;re self-selecting for people who have a lot of privilege. You&#8217;re self-selecting for people who have the ability to afford to go to a master&#8217;s program or a PhD program. I worry that that means that we&#8217;re selecting for upper middle class white women, as opposed to focusing on other dimensions of diversity. Has it happened to your experience too?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that is probably true. I went to Michigan and one thing that Michigan Engineering &#8212; which doesn&#8217;t overlap with data science but that&#8217;s my background &#8212; was very proud of its scholarship program for underprivileged children who are coming out of Detroit. I can&#8217;t speak about through any other university or any other universities program and props to my homies at Michigan, there was a lot of outreach and a lot of work to bring in students that came from, especially Detroit in particular but also setting them on flint in the sticks, bringing them in and getting them into programs where they would shine. I know that Harvard is hideously unbalanced. Thirty percent of the freshman class are all legacy and other bits of nonsense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> My husband went to Maryland College Park. He actually was in chemistry and not in computers and he was there for a bunch of years actually. They were very diverse department too and were very big about reaching in to DC and serving underprivileged students and getting them into graduate programs. I&#8217;m going to answer for that, as I guess my long winded answer is I know that the public universities are trying to do something about that problem and I can&#8217;t speak to the private universities. I can&#8217;t speak to the Harvards or the Stanfords of the world.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I do find it interesting that you&#8217;ve mentioned that you&#8217;re drawing a lot of talent from the other STEM fields, especially bio. I have the impression that there are not as many jobs in those other fields and they don&#8217;t pay as well so I wonder if tech is managing to attract a bunch of those people just because of all the money that&#8217;s currently here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a different theory, which was my theory is that they all went to fintech in New York and fintech isn&#8217;t all that hot anymore, now they&#8217;re all moving into the next field.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Financial tech, you mean?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. For a while, especially before the Great Recession, fintech was draining data scientists out of the universe.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Really?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, there was a huge move. Especially PhD physicist was the biggest one but physicist and mathematicians, they were being pulled very heavily out of academia and out of the bio and moved into fintech where there was a lot of money to be made very fast. The problems were interesting because if you&#8217;re hiding vast amounts of fraud in the financial system, I guess it&#8217;s true, then problems are interesting with the crash and regulation. I saw a little bit in The Economist recently talking about the return of some of the synthetic CDOs at beta phase. I&#8217;m sure that they&#8217;ll all be pulled back to New York, sooner or later but the crash came and then they all went to a whole bunch of different industries, mostly to tech.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So there is a diaspora but not from where I thought it was. That&#8217;s really cool. Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When you were talking about the demographics of the data scientist, you mentioned that you would have to get the data on that, which in addition to being very deliciously meta to me, it made me start to think about the ways that data kind of describes our lives. A lot of cool stuff has come out of that but I think the people have also been starting to realize that it&#8217;s scary in some ways, the data contained so much information about us. I know this is kind of a big question but I wonder what your opinion is about where that line is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a very useful book that&#8217;s out called, &#8216;Weapons of Math Destruction&#8217; by Cathy O&#8217;Neil who is also a data scientist who originally was teaching and then went to fintech and then left. At the end of that day, we&#8217;re just talking about algorithms that take training data and do computation on them and largely, some fancy calculus and some matrix transformations and some curve fitting and then spit out weights. That&#8217;s largely what data science does. It&#8217;s an optimization problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The problem comes from those models. We build models and we identify features on them that we actually wanted to test against and optimized for &#8212; some of that are data science language. We try to build a model and run a problem. An interesting problem that you could try to solve for is I would like to predict what is the fashion that are going to come out of the New York runway based on the Paris fashion show. There&#8217;s an interesting blog article where somebody did exactly that and took all of the pictures and fed it into a model and it started generating possible fashions and did a bunch of categorization and clustering.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It is interesting because you could see which designers have what kind of styles or what kind of styles are popular, how things are moving to the style world. That is a very neutral model. It doesn&#8217;t really help people or hurt people, unless you&#8217;re really into the fashion world, then you&#8217;re spending lots of money on it, then it might sucks some of your money out of your wallet. But models can be used in a variety of ways and it&#8217;s all based, more or less in the training data that is given. If the training data that it starts with is impure or is biased or it doesn&#8217;t have the right information that&#8217;s framing it and it&#8217;s just pushed through one of these models to the other side, it could definitely be a source of harm.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In Cathy O&#8217;Neil&#8217;s book, her opening chapter talks about the DC school systems and that they were trying to filter out the good teachers from the bad teachers. The training data that was going into a model that was done by some company in Boston that nobody had any say over, they were taking, basically the change in student&#8217;s test scores year after year.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The teachers figure this out and they would cheat or they would game the system in some way, that it would show that students would have this massive gain in their test scores during their year, during the tenure with that teacher and then they would hand them off to a teacher the next year and the teacher thinking that she was getting these students that had performed in these particular test scores that they would be at a certain level. They would come to her classroom and they would be like two or three levels below that. Then she would get hit by the model and say, &#8220;Your scores have really dropped,&#8221; because you&#8217;ve ended up the year before cheated and some teachers who are excellent teachers lost their jobs because they were given some random score that came out of this model that was clearly had some curve overfitting problems that were associated with it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The teachers had recommendations and they found other jobs but it definitely damaged their reputation, not just the model in the process but also the school system. We see that a lot. One of the big places that these models are used is in advertising dollars. That&#8217;s probably the biggest place that we know of is used in advertising dollars and we&#8217;re seeing it right now with all the brouhaha over Facebook and Russians spending money on it and highly optimizing it. It&#8217;s got a neural net model that&#8217;s sitting on the back that you say, &#8220;I need you to optimize for people who live in Western Michigan that have labeled themselves as Republican and Christian,&#8221; because they pick up these profiles of people and the algorithm knows how to get ads directly to their very targeted eyeballs. It&#8217;s cheap because you&#8217;re maybe only putting out a thousand ads, instead of a television ad, which you pay for spots for whatever it costs for all those eyeballs at once.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There are some strong negatives about data science but on the other hand, if you start talking about, say that the genomics fields, data science is extremely powerful when trying to do combinatorial mathematics for finding new drugs. Otherwise, we would have to run the simulations on thousands of these drugs and it&#8217;s very expensive and it&#8217;s very slow. We started dropping the cost of drugs over time because now the cost of research is going down because we can have AIs, largely being able to just get rid of all the negatives before we even take a look at them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Data science is a big plus and minus. We&#8217;re building a giant data science department here at Upside because we have an interesting problem, which is travel data. Travel data turns out to be huge. We were getting three terabytes of data a day and we had to sift through all of that to be able to find flights and hotels for people. The big question is how do we start building automated shoppers and sorting around your preferences. To be able to push all of the poor flights that have like two connections, don&#8217;t have any Wi-Fi or the plane is not comfortable, how do we push all that stuff to the bottom and bring up all the flights and hotels that are quality up to the top.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It turns out to be pricing is a huge data science problem, where there&#8217;s a combination of how do you set margins versus how do you find quality versus how do you set preferences versus how do you get in other stakeholders needs into the data to be able to bring up something that&#8217;s of high quality to the customer. In that sense, we give people quality and reduce the amount of time searching and be able to build trust so in that way, the models are very positive model because we&#8217;re basically an automated shopper that is for that person&#8217;s needs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That sounds like a really interesting problem. When you are describing it, it seems almost building a program that can think the way that a human might think about what a human&#8217;s preferences would be.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wouldn&#8217;t try to humanize it like that. It&#8217;s a machine that knows from the way that we push data through it. It knows what is good and it knows what is not good based on our whole lot of data that have seen in the past. Based on knowing what was good in the past, it can make a suggestion about what it thinks will be good in the future. That&#8217;s the thing to remember about data science and all these models, especially I know that Facebook has them, Twitter has them, Google has them and everybody&#8217;s talking about how cool this AI is and if it&#8217;s good or if it&#8217;s evil.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The thing to remember about it is that these AI models, they&#8217;re not sentient. They only know what happens in the past because you fed the past to it and it can only make suggestions about the future, if no conditions ever change. That&#8217;s the thing to remember about these models. The moment that conditions changed in some way, the model is invalid and the answer that is given are now wrong. It&#8217;s not like a human that can take a new ideas and sort through them and synthesize them and then from that, be able to have a new answer. It needs to be told something has changed and if something&#8217;s changed drastically, it needs to be rewritten from scratch and rebuilt.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That&#8217;s why it&#8217;s so good for something like spam because spam, this is same kind of patterns over and over again. With an infinite amount of trading data, we just sort of push it through that, it&#8217;s like, &#8220;This is spam. This is not spam.&#8221; It gets better over time because there has a bigger and bigger data set.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That reminds me. I need to spend my $25 Amazon gift certificate, get some new windows and remodel my bathroom.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Amazon&#8217;s got some great models that if you go and it suggests you, you&#8217;re buying this and here&#8217;s the other five things that you might like. It does a terrific job.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve seen that fail pretty gloriously. I actually took a screen capture of this because it was so good. They recommended a septum to me because I bought the Zombie Survival Guide.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. That&#8217;s amazing. It think she&#8217;d love that. Based on your past purchases and past searches, it thinks that&#8217;s perfect for you because you bought a Zombie Survival Guide.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I literally just bought Weapons of Math Destruction on Amazon while we&#8217;re talking so I just went back to Amazon to see what&#8217;s recommending me. It&#8217;s still just like, &#8220;You should probably buy Star Wars Legos.&#8221; Now I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Yeah, that sounds like me.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, well, why wouldn&#8217;t you buy Star Wars Legos? Is there a Porg Lego yet? Does anybody know if they put up the Porg yet, as a Lego?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think they have. The Last Jedi had just come out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have to get the Porg chewy for my dog. I have to get one.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s why I was looking at them because the new type of Lego sets came out already for the new movie and I was like, &#8220;Yes!&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. The algorithm absolutely knows what you want.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It does.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe, it is sentient but only in Amazon.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And then, of course there are the cases where you buy something that you only buy once every five years like a refrigerator and then Amazon says, &#8220;Here are five other refrigerators you might be interested in.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, you might want to buy five other refrigerators. Have you considered it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;re a refrigerator enthusiast now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I will now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ll think about. I spent a lot of time searching for a very strange books on Amazon so it&#8217;s totally confused to what I want.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;ve talked about the importance of feeding good data to your model, which is something that we&#8217;ve talked about indirectly a few times on this show. I wonder if that&#8217;s something where having people with a background in doing actual science is helpful. Does that training include skills on how to analyze the quality of your data and find where the biases in it are?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. That is a big yes, especially the start point of people from economics. I know that they&#8217;re trying to make everybody the irrational actor and humans are not rational actors but it does give them the training to look for biases and to keep them from reflecting their own opinions in the data and allow the data to talk for itself to get down to real answers, which I have found from building a startup in a business to be unbelievably powerful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m curious if that extends further to identifying bias in the data itself like the canonical example there being something like predictive policing, where you&#8217;re feeding it data that&#8217;s based on biased arrest reports and so on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a chapter in Weapons of Math Destruction where she actually talks about this exact issue. I highly recommend the book, if you&#8217;re very interested in where data science is falling down. But there&#8217;s several companies that are startups out there, most of them are San Francisco startups that are trying to take a lot of policing data and push it through models to be able to predict clusters of possible crime so that police cruisers can be dispatched with higher efficiency.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But because it only knows about the past and it doesn&#8217;t know about the future and it knows that poor communities have a larger occurrence of low-value crime like somebody did graffiti or somebody going to the back of an alleyway or whatever, it makes it look like there&#8217;s a larger cluster of actual crime right there but it&#8217;s never going to pick out someone committing fraud because that&#8217;s a lower incidence of the crime. You&#8217;re not going to dispatch cruisers to go around in lower Manhattan looking for instance of fraud, although we know it&#8217;s all there. It&#8217;s going to go and just dispatched to the Bronx and because there&#8217;s a higher propensity of lower value crime and that just happens to be what&#8217;s in the data.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That can be a reflection of a human being&#8217;s biases and one thing we must be careful about is that we are not reflecting human being biases in the data when we filter into the model because the model is just going to amplify those biases. Always keep in mind that the model only knows about the past, then we know that the model can inadvertently have a racist overtones and tendencies. Even though it&#8217;s just a machine doing mathematical computation, it can look like it has racist tendencies if we happen to put that data through the model, if that&#8217;s what we&#8217;re looking for.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It&#8217;s a curve fitting problem. It&#8217;s a matter of putting the correct data from the beginning to train the model so that it does not have biases and what pops out of it is something that approximates the truth. That&#8217;s where we really get in trouble with data science. Everything is a logistics problem in the universe and we want to be able to dispatch and deploy our resources that we have because we don&#8217;t have many of them on the problems that are of the number one highest priority thing that we have on the table.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If we&#8217;re putting our biases in what we think is the number one highest priority thing, it&#8217;s not really but that&#8217;s what we&#8217;re putting it. We put in the model and it tells us, &#8220;You were right. That is really the highest priority. You should send all your police cars down to that neighborhood because that&#8217;s really were all the crime is,&#8221; then it becomes a self-perpetuating process and it&#8217;s something we need to be very cognizant of as we build all of these systems out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What training do we have and what training do we need that would help us identify it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a really good question. I think part of it is simply having an understanding of what the problem is from an unbiased point of view and it&#8217;s hard to get to that place.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So you&#8217;re basically saying we&#8217;re screwed.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t think we&#8217;re screwed. I think that we need to understand that these are just machines and they&#8217;re not all-knowing, certainly not yet and we need to be cognizant that we may be pushing our own human foibles into them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, my joke was basically just saying that if we need to be able to look at something from an unbiased perspective and we&#8217;re all humans here, that&#8217;s kind of a bootstrap problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re at the point where we should start wrapping up. Is there anything else, Emily you wanted to touch on before we do that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The only thing that I want to bring up really briefly is just back to the very beginning, the women in engineering topic. One thing that has come out of all the women enjoying in tech right now is really the importance of mentorship and internships for women who are very young and early in their career to be able to get the encouragement that they need. Even me on my side, I think it&#8217;s someplace that we&#8217;re falling down across the entire industry right now. At starting from high school, maybe even starting in middle school, I see it with my daughter. She&#8217;s in seventh grade.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Her science teacher is trying crazy to encourage her and she lives in a tech home so she&#8217;s can even encourage with her but I see it all along the pipeline and just as wrapping up, as we&#8217;re talking about women in engineering and data science and getting people more and more involved in the industry as a whole, that I think that it should start at the beginning. Instead of thinking about, &#8220;They&#8217;re in college. They just come out. How can we keep them here?&#8221; I think we need to talk about how do we keep them in 7th grade computer classes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Coraline asked the question about how do you think your career would have been different if you had taken that bad advice from somebody and I wanted to ask the opposite question, how do you think your career would have been different if you had had more women on your teams and women peers from earlier on in your career?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How would have been different if I had more women peers? It&#8217;s an interesting question. I&#8217;m trying to imagine what that would be like. I think I wouldn&#8217;t have gone for my PhD. I think I would have finish them at the Masters. I think I wouldn&#8217;t have gone all the way and that would have been a significant difference. I probably would&#8217;ve pushed into management a lot earlier as well. There was never any encouragement from my side. It&#8217;s just me go and get things done. I think I probably would have moved faster and harder in my career than I did and I probably would have taken a few more risky opportunities that were on the table than I did.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Emily, at the end of our shows, we like to do a little section where everybody gets to reflect on one thing that really struck them and made them think about what we talked about in today&#8217;s episode.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have been thinking a lot about bias and we talked about bias in terms of machine learning but there&#8217;s another kind of bias that I was thinking about and that is my experience with being self-taught, with being a college dropout. I think I am biased toward hiring people with a similar background story to me, people who have taken an initiative on their own, learning what they need to learn to break into our field. I know I definitely have a bias towards people with that story and probably because it resonates with me in terms of my background.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I get the sense and Emily, I hope this isn&#8217;t unfair, that you have a bias toward people with degrees because that&#8217;s how you came up and came into the field. I think, we think all about our biases in terms of negative impact on things like diversity and getting more people in the tech from different ethnicities or different genders or different socioeconomic backgrounds. But I wanted to think more about other hiring biases like the resumes that do get to the top of stack. Are we favoring people with higher degrees or we&#8217;re favoring people with no degrees. That&#8217;s something I want to think about a little more.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Following on to that. We&#8217;ve talked about bias a fair bit and I wanted to mention that it&#8217;s well worth your time to do a little bit of research into the various cognitive biases that we have as humans that we are inherent because knowing about a cognitive bias doesn&#8217;t necessarily mean that you can vanquish it once and for all. It&#8217;s always going to be there but not knowing about a bias means you&#8217;re going to fall into that trap every single time. Even just going in and looking at the Wikipedia page list of cognitive biases, it&#8217;s super educational and you&#8217;ll learn something about yourself right away.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For my reflection, I am thinking more about how computers aren&#8217;t people and what we said about that, which sounds so obvious when I word it like that but I think that people in general have a real tendency that anthropomorphize things. I know that I certainly do but I think a lot of people do and that&#8217;s how we end up with Siri and Alexa and these computers that we speak to like they&#8217;re people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It was really interested in what Emily was saying about how computers can&#8217;t think like people because they can&#8217;t take in new information and change their minds the way people can. A lot of the technology that is cutting edge these days is kind of scary for me. I&#8217;m kind of a little bit of like a skeptic in that way but that really hit the nail on the head about what&#8217;s scary about it to me. I was really happy to have heard that perspective so I can now think what has really on it and how it makes me feel about tech so thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really enjoyed doing the podcast. This was a fantastic experience and thank you all so much for inviting me on your show. I really enjoyed it. My reflection is that I really do enjoy teaching. It&#8217;s interesting to be able to talk and dig into a topic with interesting people like yourselves and just sort of reflect on computers and people and society and what it all means.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Great. Thank you very much for being here. We&#8217;ve really enjoyed this conversation and I think our listeners will enjoy it as well and looking forward to seeing how people react to the podcast in our Slack community in some of the ideas we brought today. We&#8217;ve definitely covered a lot of ground. Thank you very much and to all of our listeners, we love you and we will talk to you very soon.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Emily Dresner: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/multiplexer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@multiplexer</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://about.me/multiplexer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">about.me</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://web.upside.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Upside Travel</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:06</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Emily’s Background and Superpower</span></p>
<p><b>02:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Having a Master’s Degree: Was it worth it?</span></p>
<p><b>08:08 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Struggles After Retaining a Master’s</span></p>
<p><b>10:31 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Role Model: Emily’s Mom and Her Story</span></p>
<p><b>12:11 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “The Double Bind” </span></p>
<p><b>14:47 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Experiences Working at a Gaming Company</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise by David Foster Wallace</span></a></p>
<p><b>18:33 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Transitioning to Upside and Building a Healthy Culture</span></p>
<p><b>21:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Engineering Vs Management</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show,<br />
buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Thank you </b><a href="https://twitter.com/risuikari"><b>Risse Rigdon</b></a><b> for your support!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p><b>29:09 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Data Science</span></p>
<p><b>32:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Self-Selecting for Privilege </span></p>
<p><b>36:38 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Data Science and Security/Privacy</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553418831/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0553418831&amp;linkId=c1f1ddfeccb618a067410f6a11670af3"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O&#8217;Neil</span></a></p>
<p><b>46:55 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Having a Background in Actual Science; Conquering Biases</span></p>
<p><b>51:35 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Importance of Mentorship and Internships from the Beginning</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Having a biases towards hiring people like yourself and other hiring biases.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Research cognitive biases.</span></p>
<p><b>Jamey:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Computers aren’t people.</span></p>
<p]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Emily Dresner: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/multiplexer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@multiplexer</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://about.me/multiplexer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">about.me</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://web.upside.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Upside Travel</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:06</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Emily’s Background and Superpower</span></p>
<p><b>02:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Having a Master’s Degree: Was it worth it?</span></p>
<p><b>08:08 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Struggles After Retaining a Master’s</span></p>
<p><b>10:31 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Role Model: Emily’s Mom and Her Story</span></p>
<p><b>12:11 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “The Double Bind” </span></p>
<p><b>14:47 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Experiences Working at a Gaming Company</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Shipping Out: On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise by David Foster Wallace</span></a></p>
<p><b>18:33 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Transitioning to Upside and Building a Healthy Culture</span></p>
<p><b>21:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Engineering Vs Management</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show,<br />
buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Thank you </b><a href="https://twitter.com/risuikari"><b>Risse Rigdon</b></a><b> for your support!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p><b>29:09 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Data Science</span></p>
<p><b>32:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Self-Selecting for Privilege </span></p>
<p><b>36:38 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Data Science and Security/Privacy</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553418831/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0553418831&amp;linkId=c1f1ddfeccb618a067410f6a11670af3"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy by Cathy O&#8217;Neil</span></a></p>
<p><b>46:55 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Having a Background in Actual Science; Conquering Biases</span></p>
<p><b>51:35 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Importance of Mentorship and Internships from the Beginning</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Having a biases towards hiring people like yourself and other hiring biases.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Research cognitive biases.</span></p>
<p><b>Jamey:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Computers aren’t people.</span></p>
<p]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Emily.png"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Emily.png"></googleplay:image>
										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/954/052-masters-degrees-double-binds-and-data-science-with-emily-dresner.mp3" length="56246747" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>58:35</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>051: Creating Safer Spaces with Soo Choi</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/051-creating-safer-spaces-with-soo-choi/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 18 Oct 2017 05:00:38 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=946</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Soo Choi talks about creating safer spaces at conferences and in workspaces, forgiving people without negatively labeling them, and having fierce conversations.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Soo Choi talks about creating safer spaces at conferences and in workspaces, forgiving people without negatively labeling them, and having fierce conversations.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Soo Choi: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/soosiechoi"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@soosiechoi</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://devops-research.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">DORA</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “The Venn Diagram Podcast. It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but it’s definitely not that other thing.” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:09</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Soo’s Background at NASA and Superpower</span></p>
<p><b>06:01 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Wanting Attending Conferences and Speaking and then When Speaking at Conferences Goes Wrong</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRDZIMKJwUg&amp;t=7s"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Soo Choi: Changing Diversity Constructs: My Journey as a Woman in DevOps @ DevOpsDays D.C. 2017</span></a></p>
<p><b>16:10 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Creating Safe Spaces: From Conferences to Workspaces</span></p>
<p><b>21:29 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Allies and Advocacy; Talking Salary</span></p>
<p><b>24:12 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Safe Spaces vs Safer Spaces</span></p>
<p><b>28:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Forgiving People Without Labeling Them (i.e. Sexist, Racist, etc.)</span></p>
<p><b>38:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Having “Fierce Conversations” and Collecting Better Tools</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.thagomizer.com/blog/2017/09/29/we-don-t-do-that-here.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aja Hammerly: We Don&#8217;t Do That Here</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Soo: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sharing experiences in open and safer spaces.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Listening to each other’s experiences. Sit with cognitive dissonance, be okay with it, and see what it has to teach us.</span></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Learning from other’s experiences.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to Episode 51 of &#8216;The Venn Diagram Podcast. It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but it’s definitely not that other thing.&#8217; I&#8217;m Sam Livingston-Gray and it&#8217;s just my profound joy to be here with my fellow panelists, Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Sam and I am thrilled to be on this excellent podcast, which has a shorter than that. It is Greater Than Code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yay!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And today, we have a guest and her name is Soo Choi and she is part of the DevOps Research and Assessment Team, also known as DORA: DevOps-Research.com. In the past, Soo has been a senior product manager at Chef, a director at Rackspace for OpenStack Products, a co-founder and COO of Anso Labs and a program manager at NASA. In her spare time, she chases two children around the northern California coast. Soo, welcome to Greater Than Code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am really pleased to be here. Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Now, I just want to ask you about NASA.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, absolutely. It was a really, really interesting experience. One of the first projects that I worked on was untangling NASA&#8217;s financial systems, helping standardize the NASA travel policy because it becomes really interesting when you have scientists who need to travel out to the middle of a desert and camp to test different instruments. Then from there, I was put on a project to really understand what do we do when we send something to space like a satellite or some type of intergalactic explorer and we&#8217;re not getting data for maybe five to 15 years and what does that next generation storage and data center look like.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What does it look like?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It looks like the cloud. You know, it&#8217;s really interesting that you can&#8217;t really build infrastructure for these types of requirement, especially due to the fact that while whatever instrument is out there in space is setting back this data, it&#8217;s actually considered top secret until it lands into our facility. You can build these things but then it will be obsolete by the time the data gets here. Then also, what if that instrument just didn&#8217;t work. Unfortunately, projects have literally exploded on the landing pad at launch or there has been a misconfiguration, then you waste all of this time and money and what do we do to make just-in-time data centers and that&#8217;s my time at NASA.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cool, so from the data goes from space to the ground and back up to the clouds.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. It&#8217;s the great way to look at.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting that you have five to 15 years to plan, except you have to plan for something that would be secure and state of the art, five to 15 years from now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. I don&#8217;t know about you. I have a crystal ball but my crystal ball isn&#8217;t that great, no matter how much I try to scrub it so you end up doing a lot of theoretical conversations and you end up really having to sort of step out of your zone and instead of making like these crazy project plans, you need to actually spend some time talking to futurists &#8212; people who really actually love to think about these things and not just in the context of your one little project but what the world will look like in that short time span. Ten to 15 years is not even a blink when it comes to how the world works in the age of the world.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, wow. I just had a horrible thought.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Does this mean that we&#8217;re getting XML from space?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, all of your JSONs will be saved for us. I said that wrong. &#8216;All of your JSONs will belong to us.&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Very good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay. It&#8217;s time for the famous Greater Than Code question. What is your superpower and how did you acquire it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think my superpower is in fact people with a purpose and a sense of urgency. I&#8217;ve been lucky enough to be working on and leading some complex projects and it&#8217;s pretty difficult to get everyone on the same page when scope is pretty large. I feel like that that&#8217;s what I excel at.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s really valuable. You also did that at conferences?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really try to make sure that my number one direction when I&#8217;m at my prime directive when I&#8217;m at conferences is to learn as much as possible and then if I can help make connections and infect people with a sense of urgency with whatever topic that is thrown at us, then it is my job to do that.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">But honestly, the superpower question always cracks me up. I don&#8217;t know why but I always get like a little grumpy about answering it because I&#8217;m not like this sad person who has a horrible backstory of our parents dying and I&#8217;m an orphan and I have emerged with this honed special skill. That always sort of bothers me and it makes &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Superpowers are free.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, that&#8217;s a good point but I&#8217;m warming up to the idea.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, for what it&#8217;s worth for a while, my superpower was being able to identify actors who were on Babylon 5, even if they had been under heavy prosthetics at the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What&#8217;s the giveaway? Is it the voice? Is it the mannerism? Or &#8211;?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t know. It&#8217;s just this thing. I look at it and I&#8217;ll be like, &#8220;That actor was on Babylon 5 in Episode 27.&#8221; I may have been more than slightly obsessed with B5 but next to that, years looks pretty dang and good, doesn&#8217;t it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Practice makes perfect.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Soo, when and why did you start going to conferences and speaking?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I felt like at this point, I was really excited about the work that I was doing. Even before that, I&#8217;ve always been interested in public speaking because conferences are probably the big thing versus speaking at a meeting and presenting ideas to an audience and that was important to me, honestly to get what my directive was at that time, for whatever interesting complex project I was working on.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">From there, it seemed like we need to share this information, those to open data project. At NASA, we&#8217;re heavily involved in the open source communities and what I loved about that was this idea of let&#8217;s just share ideas without a common cause. Before then, when you go to conferences, it&#8217;s really about like how do you make and monetize something versus just sharing ideas. That&#8217;s really how I got excited, then I got un-excited really quickly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you mean that before open source conferences were about monetization?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I misspoke. I really feel like I got involved in conferences because I was already a leader in the thing that I was doing at the time. It seemed so natural and I was really encouraged to go out and share our projects story out to a bigger audience.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, so at NASA, you were encouraged to go share the story and you like how conferences have progressed into a dialogue.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. I think that format is pretty amazing. I love the idea that you are going to sit in a room with like-minded folks who care about said topic and discuss it in a humane way versus lots of shouting. There&#8217;s no politics in open spaces, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We tried.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s the ideal.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And then you said bad things happened.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and I think this is why I really have been speaking about making safe spaces outside of work and then also, that drives down to why do we need safe spaces and what&#8217;s going on within our workplace were lacking diversity. I feel like all of it is connected and I feel like the more folks that I could reach about my experiences from the perspective of going to conferences and bringing that home of our whole environment, when it comes to diversity and women in tech and inclusion, the better off we will be as a whole.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It certainly seems like there should be a positive feedback cycle in there somewhere, like the more safe spaces we have, the more people will stay in tech and not burnout and then the better representation there will be and then at some point, we&#8217;ll need fewer safe spaces, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s right. But I feel like &#8212; and tell me if you&#8217;ve felt this at all &#8212; we do create these safe spaces at conferences and then our participants go back to where they work and it&#8217;s not a safe space any longer. How do we take our code of conduct? How do we take that atmosphere that we create and help them create that in their actual working conditions?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or even better, help allies to create that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s right and I feel like allies and advocates are very important to make this happen. We cannot have this burden on ourselves, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I should rephrase that. Because ally is a verb not a noun so how do we help all of us ally with people to create the safe spaces that they need without making them do it themselves.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yep.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, I wanted to back up. What year was it that you started going to conferences?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, my goodness. I started going to conferences and I&#8217;m going to age myself and you&#8217;re going to think I&#8217;m old but in 2001, right after 9/11.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, what a lovely time to start travelling.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yep.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s okay because my first conference was in 2000 so you&#8217;re not alone.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>At the time, I was working for a UK-based telecom named Cable &amp; Wireless, who actually line of business was really all of the telecoms for all of the British territories that are out there so I had a chance to travel to the Caribbean and to many places throughout the world on behalf of Cable &amp; Wireless because there&#8217;s new thing called the Internet and we were a bunch of webmasters.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow. Cool. I know you talked about this in your talk. Do you want to tell the listeners the examples of problems you had at conferences?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. Imagine that you start your day off by getting on a plane and then you get off into a new city and I actually got into a taxi and the taxi driver decided that I need to meet his mom and started drive me away from the city and I had to jump out of that taxi and walk to a payphone and the police can&#8217;t do anything because what he did wasn&#8217;t necessarily illegal and nothing negative has happened to me, physically. They gave me a ride to my hotel and then you go to said conference and you try to ask a question and someone talks over you.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">You say hello to someone that you sit next to and then they follow you up in the elevator to your room. You try that night to prep for your talk and someone has found out your room number and just keeps dialing your room over and over and over again. Then after the said talk, you start answering questions about your talk that had nothing to do with your talk. It&#8217;s actually questioning not any of the content of the talk or the way that we are seeing the world to help find a solution for some of these complex problems but actually questioning my authority and what right I had to actually stand in the front of the room. Then you leave said conference and you go back home. Overall, imagine that happening within a 24-hour experience or in 48 hours and you&#8217;re just exhausted.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My God. Why did you ever go back ever?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And then what happens is that it manifests itself in very weird ways. You don&#8217;t know how to talk about it when you get back. You get a lot of positive feedback from your peers of, &#8220;I heard you talk at such conference,&#8221; and there&#8217;s also this wonderful kind of feeling where you&#8217;re special because you got to go and speak on the behalf of said organization. But inside, you&#8217;re just sad. That just really blew and you can&#8217;t figure out why because back then, we didn&#8217;t have the words that we have now to talk about said things. But you get back on the horse and you try again and little things like I am completely miked up and I&#8217;m ready to speak and a guy comes up to me and says, &#8220;Hey, there&#8217;s no coffee,&#8221; and I thought he was offering me coffee and I was like, &#8220;Oh, thanks. I am jittery enough. Don&#8217;t need any more,&#8221; and he literally held his cup in his pen and made a clicking noise and he said, &#8220;No, you don&#8217;t understand. There&#8217;s no coffee.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and I unleashed on him and I didn&#8217;t know at that time they turned on my mike as the audience was coming in and I wasn&#8217;t myself at my best. Then you get judged for that. You get judged by not being &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s right, Sam. You get judged by not being an outstanding member of the community and not beholding the values because you brayed at someone and you try to explain what happened. In the viewpoint of the person that I was yelling at, he made a mistake but in my viewpoint, I am talking years of embarrassing situations at a comfortable situations of being harassed that come out and get triggered at that moment.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m sorry. That was not a mistake. That was somebody who chose to be a dick to somebody that he thought was in a service position and that&#8217;s not okay. It wasn&#8217;t okay, even if you were the person who was supposed to get the coffee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sam, can I make it even more worse? Explaining the situation, someone asked me, &#8220;What were you wearing?&#8221; and I was like &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, my God.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And I was like, &#8220;Excuse me?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You were wearing a mike.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, really.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And I was wearing a white shirt and a black jacket and he was saying that, &#8220;Maybe he thought you looked like the catering staff.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>On stage?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>On stage, like right as I&#8217;m about to go on stage, that you have to justify why you reacted that way, even though from that slight, my reaction and I could be pretty ruthless verbally when I&#8217;m unhappy about something. It was probably like a little too far but then having to justify what happened is also another horrible place where you feel alone and you try to talk to other women about it and many are supportive and their first reaction is WTF. Then they start sharing their stories about things that have happened in them in the workplace and at conferences or even at the grocery store or in parking lots.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">It really does become completely overwhelming so we&#8217;ve got to find a way to talk about these things in a constructive manner and again, I really like the idea of taking the safe places that we build at conferences and bring that back to the workplace somehow and how do we do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You mentioned one thing. Maybe it was in the pre-call conversation. I don&#8217;t remember. One clear way that we do that is when a woman or an underrepresented minority or just anybody tells you about their experience, believe them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s not that hard.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, when people listen to your story about the coffee, someone who hasn&#8217;t had similar experiences might be like, &#8220;Oh, it was just one incident. What&#8217;s the big deal?&#8221; But that that one mistake in a context of tons and tons of other harassment and dangerous harassment and obnoxious harassment but it doesn&#8217;t even have to be dangerous or obnoxious. Just those little things over and over and over, it&#8217;s a completely different experience, then something like that is the exception.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. We have to ask ourselves, &#8220;Why don&#8217;t we believe these people? What about us doesn&#8217;t, that we don&#8217;t actually value them maybe equally as ourselves and our experiences?&#8221; That&#8217;s why I&#8217;m a huge advocate to build a safe space. You actually have to do things like make sure that you have equal pay for your team and that&#8217;s a leap for a few senior executives when I talk one-on-one with them, because in my viewpoint there is a reason why we don&#8217;t believe these people and the people that we don&#8217;t believe are people that aren&#8217;t like we just met them. We have work side by side, killing ourselves on these projects and then for some reason, we question the experience that they had and they don&#8217;t understand that. Why is that?</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">Let’s go and let&#8217;s try to make it an equal and fair playing field when it comes to salary, when it comes to salary bands, when it comes to performance reviews, to make it a safe space outside of the conference area because that is the piece that conferences don&#8217;t have. We&#8217;re not gunning for promotions. We don&#8217;t feel like there&#8217;s a scarcity of resources or power or control at the conference. I feel like they&#8217;re more like themselves at a conference versus at work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a fairly interesting point that at conferences, we don&#8217;t have the scarcity culture so part of making a safe space at work then, becomes encouraging a culture of abundance at work of there is enough to go around, there is enough respect, there is enough listening, there is enough salary.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely and performance reviews, for instance and there&#8217;s tons of research on this, women get very vague feedback and there&#8217;s terms like, &#8220;You&#8217;re too aggressive,&#8221; or, &#8220;You&#8217;re too docile,&#8221; and there is not a clear &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sometimes both, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There is no win.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There is no win in that situation and why is that. How do we just even that out to, at least make sure that we are showing that we value everyone equally.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that actually goes back to something you said just a minute earlier about equality in pay bands. A great way to show that you value people equally is to literally value with your money people equally. It seems like it should be obvious that that&#8217;s not a revenue negative strategy because paying somebody the same as the other people that are on their same level, especially when there has historically been inequalities in pay, it seems like it would be such a great way to improve retention and avoid all of those costs associated with people leaving and you needing to be hire and retrain for those positions but that&#8217;s a whole another rant.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Your company can benefit from other companies biases.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And disproportionately so because if biased companies are the norm, then you&#8217;re totally fair company is going to seem like a shining city on the hill, by comparison.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Very much so. That&#8217;s exactly right. One of the shocking things to me is when I do tell audiences at conferences and I do talk to senior executives, when they ask me what they should do about diversity, whether they refused to believe that that would help. They question it and they say things like, &#8220;It&#8217;s actually a pipeline problem,&#8221; so my response is if everyone knows that you pay people equally, you would be amazed at the number of resumes you will get in a second. Let’s count it down: 3, 2, 1, whoosh! Of all the resume&#8217;s and referrals that you will get.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>People will be to pass to your pipeline.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Very much so.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s a pipeline problem and you are the pipeline.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like that would be an amazing factor with creating safe spaces. I feel like that that is very tangible and you could do metrics and KPIs on that, versus touting that you have a safe culture to speak what you want to speak about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As developers, and we don&#8217;t have control over salaries, what can we do?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You mentioned allies and advocates earlier, if I was an ally, I would tell my female or underrepresented minority what I make and share salary stories because I have seen that happen way too often and the women are so sad. I think a lot has happened due to the fact that we hired by salary band based on someone&#8217;s former W-2. If you&#8217;re coming out of college, you get offered $60,000 but your male colleague is actually making $72,000, 20% more than you are and you&#8217;re getting promoted and you&#8217;re getting pay increases. You&#8217;re never going to catch up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They’re going to do the things to build wealth way before you will. As in, get a mortgage, pay off their car, pay off their student loan debt. Twenty percent is a huge amount when it comes to equality in the workplace and you&#8217;re seeing that your colleague is doing better than you are and you just don&#8217;t understand why. But there is that current in there and I think we need to fix that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a total taboo and companies really encourage this because it&#8217;s to their advantage to engage in price discrimination on hiring us. They discourage us to reveal our salaries to each other but it&#8217;s your salary. You can talk about it. That is not illegal and they can&#8217;t legally fire you for it, if that makes anything.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It is and I feel like there&#8217;s companies like CA, which is a large organization who stopped asking people what they made before and &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Then, it&#8217;s not about the pipeline. You&#8217;re not part of the pipeline nearly as much the narrow pipeline if you&#8217;re not attaching yourself to it in that way of basing salaries on previous salaries.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And the nice thing about that too is that it if you can get into one of those companies, it completely offsets the compounding problem that you have, where either you start out at $60,000 and you stay at the same company, you get 3% to 4% raises or you job hop. But even when you job hop and you get 10% or 20% or 30% raises, which is not entirely uncommon, you&#8217;re still getting those percentages on top of what you started with. As the years go by, it just gets worse and worse and worse.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s compounded exactly. It is your math class or your in-action. Or as they say in your math, which makes me quite jealous because I feel like they have more math than we do. I&#8217;d like to hear other people&#8217;s ideas on how we advocate towards building safe work environments that aren&#8217;t just about, even though they are important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have one.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think I&#8217;m honestly tired of the touchy-feely things and I want action and I want it now. I want a big company out there&#8230; Oh, that&#8217;s actually a good point, Sam. What do you mean by safer spaces versus safe spaces?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My partner works in the nonprofit world and has for many, many years and she has a lot of anti-oppression training that she&#8217;s gone through. One of the things that people in that world apparently talk about is making safer spaces versus making safe spaces because you can never make a space that is completely safe but you can, at least introduce some mitigating measures to make things better than they were. As long as you keep doing that, you&#8217;ll keep getting better and making progress.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, that&#8217;s a great point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s a really minor point about one letter but it seems like something worth talking about because if you want to talk about creating a safe space, that can seem impossible but you can do one thing to make your space safer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. As developers. We don&#8217;t have control over our workspaces but we have influence. We can make them a little bit safer. As an example, personally I think I&#8217;ve been incredibly lucky and have had very few problems as women in tech and some of the things that have helped me, I think are I haven&#8217;t felt threatened like I need to be on the defensive, like I need to constantly prove myself and be able to justify my ideas in meetings so I&#8217;m able to be open and ask questions and thrive. Some of that has been my male coworkers having my back.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I know that if someone is in a meeting who doesn&#8217;t know me and gets the impression that I&#8217;m dumb and makes a comment to that effect, my friends and coworkers are going to laugh at that dude and that&#8217;s really helpful. On one hand, especially when there are clients involved and people that we didn&#8217;t hire, we can&#8217;t be sure that a meeting is going to be free of sexism or racism. But we can make it so that our underrepresented peers know that if there is sexism or racism, we have their back and we&#8217;re going to say something so that they don&#8217;t have to fight that themselves.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s right. I&#8217;m sort of thinking about the idea of safer spaces or safe spaces because I really like that because that actually puts your brain in a place where it&#8217;s a continuous improvement of my workplace versus this ultimate goal of this ultimate checklist. I also like that idea as I feel like we have excluded some of these small ideas because they seemed too trivial or they seemed a little too weird or unpopular but I feel like, maybe if we just start throwing ideas in the way that we brainstorm about solving our clients&#8217; problems or solving this next technology problem or trying to improve our mean time to recovery, if we take that energy and think about how to make a safer space for our colleagues in a workplace, think of what we would accomplish.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and you know, we have the same idea in agile, in the larger agile world of doing a retrospective and figuring out a thing that we can tweak can change and then gather information on that. There&#8217;s no reason that we need to apply that only to our technical practices or to our workflow. We can apply it to our culture as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. I feel like we can challenge the old constructs that are out there of what it means to have to go to work. We could change that construct that when you go to work, you will feel as comfortable in your work environment as you do in your home. I feel like if we can make our workplace, our home, the conferences that we attend within the devops community, within the whole IT Industry, as a whole, imagine what that would feel like.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s something else I wanted to talk about and I&#8217;m not sure how popular this is going to be but &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; Those are the best.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Those are the best? Okay. I have my talk that folks can take a look at and I showed it to a few of my people I really respect in the industry and they asked me and they challenged me on a few slides and those slides were about, &#8220;How do you forgive people who may not know or understand their privilege and may not know their actions are actually having a negative effect without labeling them a sexist, a racist or a connotation that means that they are a bad person versus doing a bad thing?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then we spun off into this interesting world of morals and diatribes around that and philosophy of good versus evil. We had to pull ourselves back but I removed those slides just because it seemed like a distraction but I&#8217;d love to hear other people&#8217;s thoughts on how do we forgive these men and women and when people do things that actually hurt us and how do we share that and how do we give them immediate feedback, where they will take and move on and not alienate your entire community.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is a great question. People are just [inaudible] behavior. Just as ally as a verb, but what I want to say, so is sexism. The point being&#8230; I mean, sexism isn&#8217;t a verb but I want it to be so I guess I&#8217;m talking about sexist behavior. You know what? If you have sexist thoughts in your head and you never speak them or act on them, I don&#8217;t care. I can totally work with you. This is fine.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because you know what? We all have sexist and racist thoughts in our heads. It&#8217;s just part of the culture we grew up. It&#8217;s the air we breathe.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I sure do. It is and to say, you&#8217;re a racist is like saying you&#8217;re alive in America today. But to express that or act on it, that&#8217;s what we&#8217;re trying to change.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. How do we do that in a way where we would turn that person that did the negative thing and it&#8217;s caught what it is that did the sexist or racist or &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oppressive, I believe is the general term.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and the oppressive thing and how do we get them to understand their actions, their reactions and recover from that? Then also teach someone else and recognize that behavior and help correct that person&#8217;s behavior. I call it the kindness chain but I&#8217;m not sure what we should call it. But I feel like that there&#8217;s got to be a way that we could start this chain reaction of this teaching in this moment and then hopefully, they will go on and teach and then everyone is an ally and everyone is an advocate and we finally put all of this to bed in the big women in tech, like big capital letters and it&#8217;s just all of us in tech.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That would be beautiful. There&#8217;s an opportunity there of if someone really does respect you as a person and you can tell them privately and quickly, &#8220;I know this was not your intention but when you said X, I felt Y and it&#8217;s because of the larger context in the culture in combination with what you said but if you could let not do that, it would help.&#8221; Then ideally, like you said, they take that as an opportunity to correct other people who didn&#8217;t know that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s like the Party Parrot. In Stripe, at some point in Slack, I think I posted a Party Parrot emoji and it&#8217;s like this flashy, dance-y parrot thing and it&#8217;s very funny. But one of the people at Stripe get seizures from those flashy colors. Not seizures, migraines. But some people get seizures and because he told me about that, I immediately deleted the Party Parrot emoji and now I run around deleting Party Parrot emoji&#8217;s from every Slack that I&#8217;m in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or you can replace the Party Parrot with a safer one.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, I do. I do have a different Party Parrot that&#8217;s like this slow, green Party Parrot. I think it&#8217;s really cute.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like that Party Parrot, actually. He’s my favorite or she&#8217;s my favorite. I really like fierce conversations that are confrontation model, which as you name the issue, you select a specific example that illustrates the behavior and situation you want to change with that individual. I think it&#8217;s important also to describe your emotions around the issue. Then the next one I believe is you clarify what&#8217;s important and what we can gain, what we can lose if this isn&#8217;t addressed and not just for yourself but also taken in the context of the team that you work on, the company you work for. Then you might have contributed to this problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For instance, I might have not said and addressed the first two or three times that I witnessed this behavior but I feel like you have to also talk about your wish to resolve the issue and even though this is the fourth time that I&#8217;ve seen this, I really want to resolve this issue and you have to invite him or her to respond back to you and give them a moment to respond.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It is very uncomfortable to go through this and it&#8217;s very uncomfortable for the person on the other side too but I think that you will always come out with some positivity when it comes to your relationship moving forward. At least, you know where you stand on both sides, which I think that transparency is very important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yes, so these conversations when they are resolved with mutual respect, build relationships. You mentioned in your talk that it&#8217;s harder to have these fierce conversations if the person on the other side doesn&#8217;t know the convention of fierce conversations.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s right and I feel like we have done a great job as an industry, making sure that everyone understands frameworks on the way that we work. We don&#8217;t do a great job of putting out frameworks or the way that we&#8217;re going to interact with each other when feedback needs to happen. If we had a framework and one of them that I like is fierce conversations or many others, for us to resolve an issue or to get it out there, it feels like the right move.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like that, frameworks for interactions. It&#8217;s like having a debugger or observability.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, absolutely. We have frameworks for everything. We have frameworks for conferences when it comes to a code of conduct. We know that we&#8217;re going to have breakfast and lots of coffee and then lunch and plenty of discussion around it. What we don&#8217;t have is some type of model that we all agree to and we know that we&#8217;re going to follow when it comes to giving feedback and that goes right into performance reviews. That goes right into accountability of once the feedback you&#8217;ve given the feedback and the other person has received it of what happens next.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Introducing this kind of framework for interactions, like the fierce conversations, is something that you can do to ally with the people who might need to have these conversations because it&#8217;s going to be easier for them to use the framework if they didn&#8217;t introduce it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Interesting. I&#8217;ve been sitting here and thinking too about these things in terms of being tools in a tool box. Again, if I can draw a parallel between development work and what we&#8217;re talking about, as developers, we wind up with a bunch of tools like inheritance, delegation and if we&#8217;re talking about refactoring, we have a whole bunch of different tactical level of refactorings that we can do and we can employ at different ones at different times based on what seems appropriate in the moment.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Each of those is a tool and by adding more and more tools to your toolbox, you become better at handling problems more adeptly. Just in that same way, that sounds like these fierce conversations is a tool. It sounds like a very, I don&#8217;t want to say heavyweight tool but it&#8217;s a tool that requires a lot of energy to wield. That sounds like a really useful one. I wonder if there are other ones that we can look for as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I want to mention a wonderful blog post by Aja Hammerly called &#8216;We Don&#8217;t Do That Here&#8217; and I&#8217;ll just leave a link for that on the show notes. I highly encourage our listeners to go on and look that up. Just this idea of collecting different tools is a wonderful way that we can get better at handling more social situations more adeptly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For me, I feel like we can&#8217;t take this at a team by team basis but it does again, matter the culture of your organization if you let all of your teams to use whatever tool choice, for instance. But there has to be a basis of setting the tone and the culture that we give feedback and we know how to receive feedback in a constructive manner and also, pay everybody equally.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Those two things are pretty revolutionary because they&#8217;re not anything to do with making someone a better coder. This is not going to necessarily help you respond to incidents better. This is something that makes us, as a whole as part of the environment. The things like this don&#8217;t show up in a performance review or we don&#8217;t say these things to a CEO of a company. If we said to a CEO of a startup right now, &#8220;I think everyone needs that agile training,&#8221; money falls out of the sky. If you say, &#8220;We need to have feedback and confrontational model training,&#8221; you may have to write a business case but we have to make it okay to go ahead and spend money and resources on things in the tool box that aren&#8217;t tech related.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And going back to what you said earlier about being able to take feedback, that is something going back to what Jessica said about how we can ally and help make spaces safer, we can model taking feedback well and we can model it both in a technical context, which I find a sometimes easier to take feedback about a design that you&#8217;ve given because there&#8217;s just, in my experience less ego around that. You can also model taking personal feedback if you have the opportunity to get it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. It’s somehow tied with, if you have a culture of failure as acceptable. I have seen where failure is acceptable within an engineering organization within a team, you have blameless post-mortems. But when it comes to human reactions, people feel like they can&#8217;t fail on those and they need to express opinions and they feel stifled and then you have another group of people who have to deal with this emotional wake of this negative feeling of what happened from that situation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Again, it kind of compounds.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yep. It’s not an easy one but I feel like if we continue to have this dialogue and Sam love the term saver spaces and we continuously approve on that. I feel like there is a way that we can make all of our lives better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We have reflections. That was just a beautiful ending note.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was, yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is there anything critical before you go to reflections that you want to cover?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s hope. There are shows like this where they have someone like me who is not an expert in this field in any way, shape or form. I can only talk to you about my experiences. There are plenty of other women and underrepresented minorities that you can have talk about this topic in a lot more authoritative way. Thank you for letting me share my experiences in my professional career because this doesn&#8217;t happen very often in an open space and a safer space like this.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you for sharing them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was my reflection.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just wanted to mention that&#8217;s really all any of us can do is share our own experiences and that just means that we all have to listen to each other as many as we can.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, because when they described experience does not jive with your experiences, you could choose to be like, &#8220;I have to either reject my experiences or your experiences so clearly, I&#8217;m going to reject what you just said.&#8221; Or you could be like, &#8220;That&#8217;s totally different from my experience. I can learn from that. The world is bigger and wider than I thought it was.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That makes me so happy that we can use the words to talk like that. I love it when someone says to me, &#8220;Huh? I forget that I came up in privilege where this was very easy for me. I didn&#8217;t realize how hard it is for other people.&#8221; That type of empathy versus negating that person&#8217;s experience makes me feel like I have just seen that person&#8217;s authentic self for the first time, even though I&#8217;ve worked with that person for the last 10 years in the industry.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Which means that any time someone shares one of these experiences with you, it&#8217;s an opportunity to build that relationship.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely because they are speaking on things that are affecting their mind and their heart and they want to talk to you about something that is risky and ultimately unattractive and so uncomfortable and they&#8217;re willing to share that with you and they&#8217;re not doing it to make you uncomfortable. What they&#8217;re trying to do is they&#8217;re being their authentic self to you of giving you feedback of what you&#8217;ve done and you need to be authentic &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And trust.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And trust. Oh, Sam, trust. Wow, that is just so important in these conversations for us to move forward on both sides.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I always just saying that when somebody shares that story, they&#8217;re trusting you. They’re trusting that you&#8217;re going to be able to hear it well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and they trust you to help them to do the heavy lifting, to spread the word that you can help in the situation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and they&#8217;re not trusting you to not feel uncomfortable. That’s a thing. It’s not about you can&#8217;t feel uncomfortable. It’s about how do you feel about feeling uncomfortable. If I feel okay about being uncomfortable in a conversation with you, then I can learn. So much of what we do isn&#8217;t about how we feel. It’s driven by how we feel about how we feel.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s right. I could totally relate to what you&#8217;re saying to that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I&#8217;ve been sitting here trying to think about this and I think about it in terms of cognitive dissonance. Somebody tells me a story that puts me or the people who are like me in a not so positive light and that creates cognitive dissonance because the story is at odds with my own self-image or the self-image that I&#8217;ve inherited from my culture. The problem is not that cognitive dissonance. The problem is what you choose to do with it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that &#8212; this is my call-to-action, I think &#8212; we can all become better at just sitting with cognitive dissonance and being okay with it and writing through it and seeing what it has to teach us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In fact, it is my personal opinion as of yesterday &#8212; I forgot what I was reading &#8212; that cognitive dissonance is not a weakness of humans. The fact that we can hold two contradictory observations in our head is a superpower because we can&#8217;t possibly see all the world. We can&#8217;t possibly model all the world. We cannot have one accurate model of the world in our heads but we can have multiple, sometimes contradictory models, that each apply better to different situations like the experiences I&#8217;ve had in my life versus the experiences you have had in your life. These are different slices of the world.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If we can hold dissonant models in our heads, then we can practice empathy as opposed to sympathy. This is the bit where sympathy is about how I would feel in your situation, which means my model of the world. Empathy is about I see how you feel your model of the world.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. For a lot of my career, I have been pregnant and I would show up to big client meetings and customer meetings pregnant and you should see their reaction of a woman traveling, that is pregnant on a plane and coming to see them and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Do you need to rest? Are you okay?&#8221; which is funny because I&#8217;m always confused for a second because I&#8217;m massively pregnant right now, okay, yes. They’re trying to relate to me and they&#8217;re trying to be kind. But they&#8217;re having some cognitive dissonance right now of someone that they&#8217;ve only seen on video is negotiating a multimillion dollar contract with them and then they see me in person is what&#8217;s happening. I always found that very interesting that straight to about what&#8217;s going on physically with me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a surprise that they had when you didn&#8217;t look exactly like they pictured you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. If you are Korean, you would know that my name is the Jane Doe of Korea. It’s the kimchi of Korea. But a lot of times too, people don&#8217;t know because they didn&#8217;t grow up with other people of my nationality and they don&#8217;t know if I&#8217;m a male or a female. That&#8217;s always fun in chat groups.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, sometimes it is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, interesting. As somebody with a name that is applicable to both genders in our culture, I haven&#8217;t really noticed that but I think that&#8217;s because I am already on the side that most people will assume that I am in tech.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>True. We’re not likely to be Sam or Samantha. Soo, thank you for joining us for this conversation today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely and thanks Jessica. Thanks, Sam and please keep in touch and Mandy, thank you so much and I&#8217;m sorry, we had to reschedule but I really hope it was worth it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It totally worked out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SOO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, thanks listeners. We’ll be back at you pretty soon.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Soo Choi: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/soosiechoi"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@soosiechoi</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://devops-research.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">DORA</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “The Venn Diagram Podcast. It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but it’s definitely not that other thing.” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:09</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Soo’s Background at NASA and Superpower</span></p>
<p><b>06:01 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Wanting Attending Conferences and Speaking and then When Speaking at Conferences Goes Wrong</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRDZIMKJwUg&amp;t=7s"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Soo Choi: Changing Diversity Constructs: My Journey as a Woman in DevOps @ DevOpsDays D.C. 2017</span></a></p>
<p><b>16:10 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Creating Safe Spaces: From Conferences to Workspaces</span></p>
<p><b>21:29 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Allies and Advocacy; Talking Salary</span></p>
<p><b>24:12 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Safe Spaces vs Safer Spaces</span></p>
<p><b>28:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Forgiving People Without Labeling Them (i.e. Sexist, Racist, etc.)</span></p>
<p><b>38:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Having “Fierce Conversations” and Collecting Better Tools</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.thagomizer.com/blog/2017/09/29/we-don-t-do-that-here.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aja Hammerly: We Don&#8217;t Do That Here</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Soo: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sharing experiences in open and safer spaces.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Listening to each other’s experiences. Sit with cognitive dissonance, be okay with it, and see what it has to teach us.</span></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Learning from other’s experiences.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to Episode 51 of &#8216;The Venn Diagram Podcast. It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but it’s definitely not that other thing.&#8217; I&#8217;m Sam Livingston-Gray and it&#8217;s just my profound joy to be here with my fellow panelists, Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Sam and I am thrilled to be on this excellent podcast, whic]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Soo Choi: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/soosiechoi"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@soosiechoi</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://devops-research.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">DORA</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “The Venn Diagram Podcast. It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but it’s definitely not that other thing.” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:09</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Soo’s Background at NASA and Superpower</span></p>
<p><b>06:01 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Wanting Attending Conferences and Speaking and then When Speaking at Conferences Goes Wrong</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRDZIMKJwUg&amp;t=7s"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Soo Choi: Changing Diversity Constructs: My Journey as a Woman in DevOps @ DevOpsDays D.C. 2017</span></a></p>
<p><b>16:10 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Creating Safe Spaces: From Conferences to Workspaces</span></p>
<p><b>21:29 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Allies and Advocacy; Talking Salary</span></p>
<p><b>24:12 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Safe Spaces vs Safer Spaces</span></p>
<p><b>28:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Forgiving People Without Labeling Them (i.e. Sexist, Racist, etc.)</span></p>
<p><b>38:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Having “Fierce Conversations” and Collecting Better Tools</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.thagomizer.com/blog/2017/09/29/we-don-t-do-that-here.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aja Hammerly: We Don&#8217;t Do That Here</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Soo: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sharing experiences in open and safer spaces.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Listening to each other’s experiences. Sit with cognitive dissonance, be okay with it, and see what it has to teach us.</span></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Learning from other’s experiences.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
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<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
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<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to Episode 51 of &#8216;The Venn Diagram Podcast. It’s a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but it’s definitely not that other thing.&#8217; I&#8217;m Sam Livingston-Gray and it&#8217;s just my profound joy to be here with my fellow panelists, Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Sam and I am thrilled to be on this excellent podcast, whic]]></googleplay:description>
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					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>48:04</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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							<item>
					<title>050: Open Source Anarchism with Steve Klabnik</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/050-open-source-anarchism-with-steve-klabnik/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 11 Oct 2017 05:00:09 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=928</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Steve Klabnik talks open source governance, succession planning, and organizing groups of people in a non-authoritarian way.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Steve Klabnik talks open source governance, succession planning, and organizing groups of people in a non-authoritarian way.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>This episode is sponsored by Instrumental application and server monitoring!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://instrumentalapp.com/"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-931" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Instrumental-1.png" alt="" width="590" height="113" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Instrumental-1.png 590w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Instrumental-1-300x57.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 590px) 100vw, 590px" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Instrumental’s goal is to help developers answer application performance questions FASTER, with a powerful query language, real-time metrics, blazing interface, and automatic metric collection. </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Sign up for a free developer account at </b><a href="https://instrumentalapp.com/"><b>InstrumentalApp.com</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/coralineada"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/loooorenanicole"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lorena Mesa</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Steve Klabnik: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/steveklabnik"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@steveklabnik</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.steveklabnik.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">www.steveklabnik.com</span></a> <b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Greater Than Crabmeat” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:02</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Steve’s Background, Origin Story, and Superpowers!</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skrillex"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Skrillex</span></a></p>
<p><b>06:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Contributing to Open Source</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff"><span style="font-weight: 400;">_why the lucky stiff</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackety_Hack"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hackety Hack</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://poignant.guide/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby</span></a></p>
<p><b>11:07 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Succession Planning</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Meme Hustler</span></a></p>
<p><b>20:12 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Organizing Groups of People in a Non-Authoritarian Way</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/various/authrty.htm"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mikhail Bakunin: What is Authority?</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The RFC Process in Rust</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicalism"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Syndicalism</span></a></p>
<p><b>36:23 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Avoiding Using Language with Political Connotation</span></p>
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<p><b>39:46 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Is anarchy equally accessible to everyone or is it only accessible/available to a privileged class?</span></p>
<p><b>43:11 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Problems with One-upmanship and “Shittalking” in Communities </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://blog.aurynn.com/contempt-culture-2"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aurynn Shaw: Contempt Culture</span></a></p>
<p><b>50:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Seeking Out Different Environments and Building Environments People Want</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Jamey: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Leadership and how important it is to not put too much power in the hands of a few people.</span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> How do you build systems of governance that don’t depend for their success on the goodness of the rulers?</span></p>
<p><b>Lorena:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> How do we learn to speak with others in ways that are inviting and create a safe space for us all?</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The notion of intentionality.</span></p>
<p><b>Steve: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jargon and exclusion.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello everyone and welcome to Episode 50 of &#8216;Greater Than Crabmeat.&#8217; I&#8217;m here with the lovely and talented, Jamey Hampton.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Coraline and this is the 50th episode of Greater Than Code and I&#8217;m here with Rein Henrichs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello, thank you and I&#8217;m here with Lorena Mesa.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi and it may have been a while but today we have a fantastic person we&#8217;ll be chatting with today. Steve Klabnik work at Mozilla, is in the core Rust Team and leave the documentation [inaudible]. He&#8217;s a frequent speaker at conferences and he&#8217;s prolific open source contributor and previously working on projects such as Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Welcome, Steve. We&#8217;re excited to have you today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, thanks so much. This gives me a lot of fun. I&#8217;m really glad to be here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Steve, we&#8217;d like to open up the show with getting to know our guest a little bit better, getting to know the person behind the public profile and we generally start with the question, what are your superpowers and when did you discover them?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s an interesting question. I actually have a story about this, which is I once had the worst superpower ever. I no longer have it though. A long time ago, I used to shave my head into a Mohawk and then I let it grow out so it kind of wore it down to the side, instead of being up in spike. It kind of looks just like I had part of my head shaved. This was also ended up being around the time that Skrillex became popular as the musician and since I also wear dark-rimmed glasses and all black, people used to joke that I look like Skrillex.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Now, at one time I was living in LA and a friend of mine was working at a music startup and he had a party to go to at Skrillex&#8217;s record label and there was a chance that Skrillex was going to be there so he invited me along because he thought that would be really funny if we could get a photo of me and Skrillex and be like, &#8220;Steve is different than Skrillex. He&#8217;s not actually the one.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I walked into this party and I described it as having the most boring superpower ever, which is I could tell who knew Skrillex and who did not know Skrillex at that party because the people that did know Skrillex would look at me and just be like, &#8220;Oh my God, what a fanboy. This is so dumb,&#8221; and all the people who did know Skrillex would look at me and be like, &#8220;Is that Skrillex?&#8221; You just see either total contempt or total hopefulness in their eyes of everyone I saw at this party. That was my totally useless superpower. I no longer have that haircut so I don&#8217;t get the comparison anymore but it was pretty hilarious at the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Just because I have to know, was there anyone that you were surprised [inaudible] hopeful eyes that you were Skrillex?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I didn&#8217;t really know anybody that was at this thing so it was mostly just like a Saturday barbecue at this record label so I didn&#8217;t know anyone except for the friend that brought me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m sorry. I&#8217;m just trying to imagine Skrillex at a Saturday barbecue because that doesn&#8217;t seem his &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Like the place?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The barbecue sauce and the shirt, yeah. Big smear across his face.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hey, it&#8217;s LA. You&#8217;ll never know, right? I&#8217;m hoping you weren&#8217;t in ecopark [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, this is in downtown, unfortunately.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What about today, Steve? You still have superpowers, right? You’re still a superhuman?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If I had to pick my superpower today, I guess it would be one of continuing to post on the internet far after I should stop. I should be able to get away from the internet but I seemed to be everywhere all the time and that is sometimes, very useful and sometimes, very harmful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have to confess that years ago I followed you on Twitter and you just overwhelmed my tweets streams and now you&#8217;re a little less and I don&#8217;t follow you anymore.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s cool. I used to tell people when I would meet them, they&#8217;d be like, &#8220;I&#8217;ll follow you on Twitter,&#8221; and I was like, &#8220;I&#8217;m really sorry.&#8221; Twitter is like just a stream of consciousness for me, basically so it is a lot and I tend to fall people who also tweet a lot so it&#8217;s totally weird how there&#8217;s this different segments of Twitter. It seems good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So mental note: watch out when 280 characters are starting in AB testing because you may completely overwhelm my [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can I tell a funny Twitter story? It&#8217;s a short one. A friend of mine was talking to one of his friends and he said, &#8220;Do you know, Rein H?&#8221; and his friend said, &#8220;The Twitter socialist?&#8221; I really feel like my brand is getting out there and I&#8217;m really happy about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That should be in your bio, for sure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I tweeted earlier today, &#8220;Can&#8217;t wait to start all my tweets with &#8216;&#8212;PGP signature&#8212;&#8216; and there&#8217;s sign all of my tweets with the extra space.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think my favorite suggestion for how to use all the extra characters was bringing back UseNet sigs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My Twitter story is that the first time that I was going to a phase where I was putting a lot of jokes in my bio and my first conference that I was speaker at was AlterConf and I had totally forgotten that a few days before, I changed my Twitter bio to &#8216;Christian, husband, father,&#8217; so everyone who saw my first conference saw and then want to follow me on Twitter. They just saw my face and it said, &#8216;Christian, husband, father.&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nice. I tweeted out a job opening at Stitch Fix and was reaching out specifically to marginalized people in tech and then my director pointed out that my Twitter name was &#8216;abrasive AF.&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was so great.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like to read AF as &#8216;as foretold.&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nice. Steve, you&#8217;ve been a very strong presence in the open source community for a very long time, for as long as I&#8217;ve been aware of you, at least and a prolific contributor. I often wondered if you ever slept. What got you started in contributing to open source.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is basically, entirely by accident. Long ago in Ruby world, there was a person who went by the name &#8216;why the lucky stiff,&#8217; like W-H-Y, the question. Then he dropped off the face of the planet. I had really, really admired his work. He actually came to the town where I was living at a time but I couldn&#8217;t show up and I was like, &#8220;I&#8217;ll just catch him some other time,&#8221; and then he disappeared so I never actually got to meet or talk to Why. But he disappeared and I thought his projects are really important. At the time I was really heavily focused on programming education and teaching people how to code. That&#8217;s always something I was scared about at the time, that was pretty much everything.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> His biggest project in my mind and the thing that all the rest of his work was building up to, is a thing called Hackety Hack. Hackety Hack was basically a Ruby IDE but it also contains interactive lessons for learning how to program in Ruby. You actually started off with the entire DSL just for Logo. You started off by writing Logo code but in Ruby instead and then it would do all the Logo stuff and then, eventually it gave you the power of the full language.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That was really important and I didn&#8217;t want it to die so when it disappeared, the broader Ruby community kind of said like, &#8220;Who&#8217;s going to pick up all of his old projects,&#8221; and I decided that I wanted to help whoever came along to work on Hackety Hack. I basically said to the person who is handing out commit bits on these projects, &#8220;I don&#8217;t want to be in charge of this but I would love to help whoever comes along and does want to be in charge of this,&#8221; and he said, &#8220;Cool. Here you go,&#8221; and then no one else showed up. I kind of just de facto became in charge of Hackety Hack.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I had a lot of struggles with it at first. One of the things about Hackety Hack is it&#8217;s technically a C program with the Ruby interpreter embedded inside of it so it reach really deep into the guts of Ruby and this was Ruby 1.8 and for Ruby 1.9, they completely rewrote the interpreter entirely so all that code was completely invalid. Plus on a Mac, it use bindings to the old Carbon APIs and I had just gotten a shiny new MacBook that had the first version of MacOS that no longer contain those deprecated AIs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The first six months of working on Hackety Hack was me just trying to get the darn thing to build at all and somebody who did Ruby all the time, I was not really that well versed in fixing C compilation errors and all that kind of shenanigans. That was really the initial part of it and that&#8217;s where work eventually led to me talking at conference. Somebody was like, &#8220;You should submit a talk to RubyConf about this,&#8221; and I was like, &#8220;The people want to hear about this at a Ruby Conference. I don&#8217;t know,&#8221; so I submitted it and people were so excited, I got asked to speak at a couple other conferences about it. From there, I continued working on Why&#8217;s projects. That sort of the origin story.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When I started with Ruby in 2007 or 2008, one of the first resources I came across was Why&#8217;s Poignant Guide and that was instrumental in me learning Ruby. If you haven&#8217;t seen it, you should track it down. I think it&#8217;s still available all over the place but it&#8217;s probably the most fun introduction to a programming language I&#8217;ve ever seen. It&#8217;s still sort of a cartoon, it&#8217;s a very tongue-in-cheek, it&#8217;s very whimsical but it really gets to the heart of what makes for Ruby-Ruby and it&#8217;s an amazing resource. I missed Why. He did a tremendous amount for the Ruby community in his formative years and I hope that wherever he is now and whatever he&#8217;s doing that he&#8217;s successful and happy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Same. To continue that story briefly, eventually I had to stop working on Hackety Hack and Shoes to underlying GUI toolkit. There are still some people working on Shoes now but Hackety Hack is effectively dead and I had a lot of conflicting feelings about working on this project because you&#8217;re basically taking someone else&#8217;s life&#8217;s work and making it your life&#8217;s work. I spent a lot of the time in the early days being like, &#8220;What would Why want me to do with this project, but if he was gone and it&#8217;s my project now then I should have done what I wanted to do with it. I have said a really complicated feelings so I&#8217;m sort have gone from all that stuff now and it was really big complicated.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;ve lots of feels and eventually, he did come back and publish another work. I had no title but I call it, &#8216;Closure,&#8217; and I also gave a talk about it because similar to the Poignant Guide, it is full of whimsy and instead of teaching programming, it&#8217;s more personal. It&#8217;s more of a pure story than it is a learning programming kind of thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think one of the things that that story [inaudible] Steve is that with a lot of projects, at least in the Ruby world and I imagine in another communities as well, they started as one-person efforts. Eventually, people lose interests or people move on and there isn&#8217;t a lot in terms of succession planning for these things. That&#8217;s why organizations like Ruby Together have been formed to say, &#8220;Oh my God. This person who is working on Ruby Gems or whatever is no longer contributing anymore and this is really critical to our infrastructure. Somebody has got to do something.&#8221; Do you have thoughts on succession planning?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. My thoughts are mostly I am often the successor and then end up abandoning it myself. That&#8217;s what happened with Hackety Hack. That also happened with Resque so that was originally written by Chris Wanstrath at GitHub and then went to Terence Lee and then went to me and now, I have handed it off. All of those things were like a situation where at some point time, I showed up and was like, &#8220;I want to work on this now,&#8221; and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Thank God. Somebody wants to do this. Here, have the keys of the kingdom.&#8221; It&#8217;s hard and there&#8217;s no plan.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It&#8217;s tough to even have a plan though because you can&#8217;t know what people are going to have the time and energy to work on, both personally but also professionally. Part of the reason why I&#8217;ve been able to do this for so long is I&#8217;ve always worked at jobs where work on open source is part of that, like part of the job so if that was not true, I definitely would not have gotten merely as involved in open source and that&#8217;s a huge barrier, I think to a lot of people being able to work on open sources.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I made an analogy before and it&#8217;s like you don&#8217;t ask a jackhammer to continue jackhammering the sidewalk on the weekend for fun. This is our professional job but it&#8217;s also a thing we do for fun. It&#8217;s hard to know what life has in store in the future. I don&#8217;t know&#8230; Like succession stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That brings to mind something, Steve a criticism that, I think [inaudible] makes an open source quite a bit is that it is a capitalist exportation of free labor.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. There is an old interview of me that maybe the internet is really mad a while back where I said that open source is a mega capitalist conspiracy. What I meant by that was not like a conspiracy in the sense of a bunch of men huddled around a table in some dark room, making evil plans but a group of people whose interests aligned them to work together against other people. This actually goes back to the foundations of open source.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Open source itself, again part of the reason why I said open source specifically is that open source was created as a way for companies to profit off of free software and it was deliberately neoliberalized in general but made a political and immoral and less restrictive so that companies could get richer. There&#8217;s a really great article in The Baffler called The Meme Hustler about this. It goes through some of these history. It was like originally created by mega libertarians so the companies could steal your work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You said apolitical. Do you really believe that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is what they presented. I don&#8217;t believe that anything as apolitical, personally. I think that liberalism presents itself as being apolitical as a political strategy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think though the metaphoric to what you&#8217;re talking about earlier is around the idea of a jackhammer and really, we don&#8217;t give pause and think about the where&#8217;s that line, where&#8217;s me, where&#8217;s my labor and if you bring that with you or there&#8217;s kind of a continuity because it&#8217;s a part of your identity. I&#8217;m curious, can you give us some idea as having been the successor, what are some lessons from the trench that you&#8217;ve learned if you are talking to someone who might be taking on that role as a successor when there isn&#8217;t a clear succession plan? Maybe if not lessons, maybe just some things to observe or watch for.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that part of it is knowing why you want to get involved in open source in the first place. It&#8217;s really easy to just like want to contribute to open source because that&#8217;s a cool thing or something or maybe people told you that it&#8217;s fun. But I think that if you have a strong understanding of why you want to do it, then that can be helpful in preventing things like burnout. It can also induce burnout. For example, the reason I work on open source, and generally sort of what my career trajectory has been, is that I want to work on increasingly bigger and bigger things that affect more and more people, to have more and more impact on the world.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For me, like Resque for example, I don&#8217;t actually care about Resque. I don&#8217;t have a passion for a job queue, server or projects but I do know that Resque was being used by hundreds of thousands of people and had no support or whatsoever so I figured I could do a lot of good by getting involved with Resque and helping out. It&#8217;s also why I have used to work on applications and then I started working on libraries and then I started working on frameworks and now, I&#8217;m working on a programming language and all of those things are moving down the stack of being more fundamental and therefore, reach more people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If I write a web application in Ruby, only my users of my web app are going to be affected by it. If I write a library, then some other people that are in Ruby will be able to actually use my work so I go from an audience of basically no one to an audience of a lot of people. If I write a framework and gets popular, a larger chunk of programming community gets affected. If I work on a language, then literally every user of that language is affected by my work. That&#8217;s just me but I think that knowing why you want to do it can help.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was really struck by what you said earlier about taking someone else&#8217;s life&#8217;s work and then making it your life&#8217;s work. I wonder if you have any advice on how to hit the right balance, I guess between being respectful to the original creator but also, bringing your own unique perspective to what you&#8217;re doing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I was reading a blog post recently and I&#8217;d wish I remembered whose it was but I can&#8217;t remember it at the time. But the point of the post was communities are formed by creating shared values. If you want to work on another project and bring your attention to it, I think that by understanding the values that the project was originally created with and help you figure out what your answer to the situation was.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Maybe. It might have been. I&#8217;ll find it later. Maybe, you&#8217;d look at the show notes and maybe we&#8217;ll laugh because it actually was you. But for example, taking over the Hackety Hack, Why&#8217;s core values were fun and whimsy and learning so if I had made Hackety Hack fitting where there was an ad on the sidebar that was like, &#8220;Take your programming lessons with whoever and started like making money off of it.&#8221; That would be an inauthentic continuation of the projects because it would be going against what they originally wanted. The way that I would express fun and whimsy and learning is different than the way that Why would do so, so it is like making my own project to a degree but it&#8217;s still within that original framework and vision.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Sometimes, things are just broken and you have to start over. I also think that if your vision of the project is significantly different, then forking it and renaming can be a really great strategy to making a project your own, while saying explicitly, &#8220;We have a significant enough break from the past that we&#8217;re now turning it into this other thing so I think that also can be a useful tool.&#8221; You don&#8217;t have to be totally bogged down by the weight of your predecessor like if it&#8217;s yours, you can do what you want with it. Sometimes that just means moving on and sometimes that means really significant changes. It just really depends.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You think that happens in response to communities becoming toxic?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have definitely seen it happen in response to community becoming toxic for sure. IO is the latest instance of that that I can think of. The other funny thing about this, which I&#8217;m sure all of you appreciate but I think it&#8217;s worth reiterating is that none of this has anything to actually do with the programming or code or textual aspect of these projects. That&#8217;s one of the reasons why this is difficult. I often think, if you go to school for this job, you&#8217;ll learn all these things but those are not the actual skills that I use every day. I&#8217;m not trained in conflict resolution or managements or any of these kind of things but are really, really important to running these kinds of projects.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s why this podcast exists. We don&#8217;t talk about tech. We talk about what it takes to make tech and the people behind it. That&#8217;s right along within our values.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I thought it was worth reemphasizing. Yes, clearly already true in this room.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things that we talked about last week that everyone will get to hear soon when we release that episode is how do you organize a large group of people in a non-top down hierarchical authoritarian way. Let&#8217;s say you have an engineering group that has 150 people in it. How do you get work done? How do you collaborate in an effective way without resorting to totalitarianism?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There is this article that is very old and I always get the dude&#8217;s name wrong. I always think it&#8217;s one of them and it&#8217;s always the other so it&#8217;s probably incorrect but I&#8217;m going to go with Bakunin because I think that&#8217;s right but I might be wrong. A famous quote from a noted anarchist, Bakunin back in 1800s and the essay is called, &#8220;What is Authority.&#8221; Authority is obviously a question that anarchist are really concerned with. Basically, the famous part of that essay is there is a difference between leadership and authority. You can lead as a leader. A lot of people call this &#8216;leading by example&#8217;.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> An example he uses is a bootmaker. He&#8217;s like if I needed a new pair of boots and I go to a bootmaker to buy them and I ask his opinion on what boots I should buy, is that him having authority over me or am I taking into account the work that they have done and that&#8217;s a form of leadership. This person has worked to make boots their entire life, therefore they have expertise so I&#8217;m going to follow their lead when that comes to these boots or whatever.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Falling back to just &#8216;I&#8217;m in charge and therefore you must do what I say&#8217; is not an effective way to lead people. At least, I don&#8217;t believe it as effective way to lead people. The best way to do it is to demonstrate what you want other people to do to inspire them to do the same so I feel like that is a much less authoritarian means of leadership, rather than just like, &#8220;I&#8217;m the boss so do it.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Recently, as of the recording day of this podcast, we got into a Twitter battle with Robert Martin better known as Uncle Bob. It struck me that we hold certain people in our various communities as leaders, even when they don&#8217;t demonstrate leadership capabilities or even good judgment.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. He&#8217;s a jerk face and also, solid as in very good. Go at me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I believe I was involved with someone adding you on this very topic so I feel you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, so how do you address when leadership is granted to someone or grandfathered into a leadership position, when they really have no business being a leader?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think this is extremely tough and it leads to all kinds of problems. I think that one of the best ways to defend against this is to not give that one individual that kind of status in the first place. It also ties in honestly, to the succession thing we&#8217;re talking about earlier like a long time ago, there was a Ruby Conference in Athens, Greece. I went there. I was really excited and one of the things that some of the people there had told me, they were like, &#8220;Steve, we&#8217;re really worried about you. You really need to take some time off and chill out. The reason that this is true is that you do so much right now in the Ruby world and if you burnout and disappear, then stuff is going to get bad. If you can manage to give away some of that, the system will overall be more sustainable.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They were simultaneously concern about me as a person but also about this question of sustainability. I think when you have these people who are leaders that have too much specific power, then that can lead into these kinds of situations where it&#8217;s like, &#8220;What do you do to remove them? They’re the person in charge of everything so you can&#8217;t get rid of them?&#8221; Or sometimes communities keep around people who are toxic because they are so pivotal to the project that removing them would effectively be the death of a project so the solution there is to not have been relying on one individual so heavily in the first place.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Obviously, this is difficult when most open source projects are literally run by one person so obviously, they just by default, are completely in charge but as projects grow, I think that not putting the power in the hands of one person is most important. Basically, I don&#8217;t want to work on any project that has a BDFL anymore. I think that leadership model is inherently flawed.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s &#8216;benevolent dictator for life.&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Didn&#8217;t something like this happen recently with the DSA where I&#8217;ve actually only ever seen his name written &#8212; Danny Fetonte?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s not really inherently about that. DSA is Democratic Socialists of America. They had a situation recently where the Austin chapter elected a person who was a cop to be on their leadership. That became very controversial for a number of reasons. To me, it was not so much about him having too much power. It was more of a question of like, &#8220;Can you put someone in charge of a socialist organization who is a member of the police?&#8221; I guess that could be construed as police have too much power in some sense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. For me, I was more referring to the way that they went about trying to remove him from power and trying to deal with that situation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Part of the problem was that he was elected and then there was questions about whether or not he had covered up the fact that he was a cop. In his little advertisement for people to vote, he had said that he organized government employees when he could have said organized police and things like that. Then there&#8217;s the question, which came out after the vote like, &#8220;We have a democratically elected leader. Many people do not want him anymore. What do we do?&#8221; I don&#8217;t follow the DSA close enough to fully appreciate the nuance of how that process went down. I do know eventually, he decided to resign and kind of complained about it as he did so.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s one thing for the organizations to have a structure like a no-confidence vote or something like that but I think a lot of the leaders, at least in open source, they&#8217;re not there because they&#8217;re elected. They&#8217;re not serving at that&#8230; Oh, shit. What&#8217;s the word?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Pleasure of a queen?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>They&#8217;re not serving at the pleasure of their communities. They just happen to be the person who created something or they happen to be the person who stepped into that role or they happen to be the author of a popular book and you can&#8217;t remove them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And these communities are also generally built by people who have no idea how to manage communities like that. They just accidentally happened upon that role for other reasons.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s an uplifting metaphor but I do like to think about it as kind of like the fish at the bottom of the barrel. I think when people get so passionate about things and you get much more of these smaller group of people who are very, very opinionated about things, that regrettably how I see that. I&#8217;m curious, have you ever experienced anything like that yourself, Steve or if not, how can you be mindful of observing, &#8220;We have someone who&#8217;s grandfather [inaudible],&#8221; and how did you start a discourse to really push that idea at the top, like why are we doing this, how do we think about this, how do we tried to maybe change our position toward this pattern and moving at a different direction.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was really tough because in many instances, the happy path here is that leadership is reflective enough to understand that this is happening and then address it. For example, Rust, the programming language that I work on, originally had a person who created it. His name is Graydon and Graydon is a wonderful person and as such, he dislikes the BDFL model and he explicitly said, &#8220;I am not the BDFL of Rust. That&#8217;s not a person I want to be,&#8221; so when it became bigger than him, he end up creating a team of people to share the leadership responsibilities so we had a core team for a while and that&#8217;s pretty common on open source projects.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Eventually, the core team became a bottleneck, I guess is the right way to put it. It turns out that the project was working so fast that when you require all major decisions to go through, even a group of we have eight people at the time, that can become a significant hindrance so we actually restructured our governance so that now, it&#8217;s like a federated governance structure instead so actually, 60 people who are in charge of Rust. That enabled us to move forward in a good way but also, it&#8217;s like acknowledgement like, &#8220;One person or group of people has too much power. Let&#8217;s figure out how to spread that around a little bit.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The first one was because he was expressly mindful of this. The second transition was partially us recognizing it. I was on a core team at the time and partially that enough people in the community who are agitating for it that made sense to do so. That&#8217;s ultimately the way that it happens if leadership is not insightful enough or also just doesn&#8217;t care because they don&#8217;t want to give up the reins, you pretty much have to agitate for change and if the powers of [inaudible] that don&#8217;t want to listen to you, then there&#8217;s a historical solution [inaudible] and that&#8217;s happened to a lot of projects recently.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Also known as revolution.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It sounds like in the case of Rust, there was a strong sense of shared values, going all the way from the originator, to the core team, to the group of 60, to the federation and then &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. He had a code of conduct in the first commit, in the very first part of the repo, for example so it&#8217;s spelled out from the beginning.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Then in other cases, there&#8217;s a mismatch either by other people coming in the community and a different idea of what the community values are that spreads, maybe from the grassroots up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And that can be both good and bad. For a long time before Rust 1.0, we&#8217;re worried like we really like the community we&#8217;ve built but as we bring more people in, how can we be sure that they&#8217;re not going to be jerks basically, because sometimes that&#8217;s a thing. People get involved and then it turns out that you don&#8217;t get along and things are bad. Every community has problems. I&#8217;m not going to say that Rust is free of problems but I guess, I&#8217;m just saying like it&#8217;s not just the leadership is bad, therefore I&#8217;m an agitate for good things. Sometimes it can be, &#8220;Leadership is good but I&#8217;m a bad person so I&#8217;m agitating for bad things,&#8221; and you also have to deal with community members who want to take the project on the direction of the rest of people don&#8217;t want to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I worked in a lot of startups and I&#8217;ve seen a similar thing happen where at the beginning, there&#8217;s this sense of shared values and they start hiring a lot of people. Then you hire a lot of Chads because the market&#8217;s flooded with Chads. For those who don&#8217;t know, Chad is our playful term for the 25-year olds software developer who has no awareness of systems of oppression or other social justice issues. He&#8217;s very focused on the code and believes in meritocracy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As Chads come into your organization, even well-intentioned Chads, you have a values draft. I think some of that comes down to communities not knowing how to communicate their values, not knowing how to express their values in a way that new community members can evaluate maybe before joining and evaluate their own behavior as they get involved to make sure that they&#8217;re fitting in with those cultural mores.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I think that sometimes too can get even more complicated in the sense that sometimes values are clearly articulated but it feels like no one understands that that&#8217;s true. The way that I feel about Rails is that David has been extremely upfront about his values and where wants the project to go but people don&#8217;t seem to notice. I got involved in Rails and had a very different idea of what Rails should be and what it should work on and that&#8217;s one of the reasons why I ultimately stopped working on Rails because I realized like, &#8220;Wait a minute. David has been saying for years what he wants this project to do and I disagree with that so what am I doing?&#8221; I feel it&#8217;s very strange sometimes, then you realize that there can even be people who project values onto a project and they&#8217;re not even in the stated ones, even if it&#8217;s not actually muddy and it expresses itself in a number of different ways too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m a little curious because you mentioned that the core team starts to recognize itself as a bottleneck. I&#8217;m curious because one thing, I think that&#8217;s [inaudible] Python community is you might have people who&#8217;ve been working with a tool or working from language for a long time and they just don&#8217;t have knowledge of where to go [inaudible] their concerns or where they can bring their [inaudible]. I&#8217;m serious, was this more be self-directed [inaudible] or was there kind of a push and pull from multiple faces? Can you walk us through that a little bit?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Part of the reason that this happened is a little bit of both is sort of the short answer. Longer answer is that Rust institutes this process called the RFC process on major changes to the language. Now, they can&#8217;t be backwards compatible so major additions to language, I guess at this point. Historically speaking, the core team was in charge of accepting or rejecting any RFCs. It was not just a feeling that was true but you could literally look at the metrics of, &#8220;There are now 60 RFCs that are waiting for us to review. There are 100 RFCs that are waiting for us to review. There&#8217;s 120 RFCs&#8230;&#8221; We&#8217;re clearly not keeping up with this influx of things that need to have decisions made on them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We already had structuralize the way that people wanted to make changes and that made it easier to notice and this was actually happening. Again, this goes back to this diffusion of leadership, like even people on a core team are required to write RFCs. No one gets to just make whatever changes they feel like it so it&#8217;s all like pseudo-democratically designed in the first place. That&#8217;s also helpful in terms of not letting things get off the rails but it was really that but the RFC is piling up is like, &#8220;Oh, man. We clearly can&#8217;t be the only people making a decision here.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m curious of the team of 60 people. I totally get why that&#8217;s convenient for not creating a bottleneck. When you&#8217;re giving so many people the keys, how do you prevent a single person from making unilateral decisions that other people don&#8217;t agree with?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>To get slightly more of the details to have this work so I think it&#8217;s relevant, there still is a core team and our job is basically cross-cutting concerns and big picture vision and stuff. Then in theory, resolving ties if there are tie breakers. One of the requirements for spinning up a team on Rust governance is that a core team member has to be on the team. They start the team off. This is partially to keep tabs on this kind of thing but also, if your job is cross-cutting concerns, you need to be paying attention to everything all the time. If that was the whole core team&#8217;s job and that still would reintroduce the bottleneck, the way that you do it is have someone whose job is basically like, &#8220;This probably needs to be brought to other teams as well because this particular initiative is equally about the docs team and the language team,&#8221; or whatever and making sure that coordination happens.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What you&#8217;re describing there, it sounds a lot like syndicalism.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, it is. I don&#8217;t say these things to those people. They don&#8217;t know. I like to joke that Rust is an Anarcho-Syndicalist Project but we just don&#8217;t use those words at all because it&#8217;s a structure that works. It was never expressively that and in fact, most of the people, I also should say that the Rust teams in general are politically, very ideologically diverse so it&#8217;s not like everybody on the Rust team is super anarchist or whatever. It just turns out that people that think about how to diffuse power have some solutions for how to do that so you use their ideas and modify them. We&#8217;ve constantly evolve the way governance works and are going to continue to do so in the future.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I actually am very, very interested if I say, I might be describing these things and we&#8217;re seeing here some consensus like, &#8220;You&#8217;ve got anarchism.&#8221; I&#8217;m curious, are you purposely intentful on not using words that may have political connotation when you&#8217;re working in maintaining and a project or making decisions? If you are purposely trying to stay away from like that, I&#8217;m curious why you may try to stay away from language that might have a little bit of a political charge to it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am expressly focused on not introducing this kind of thing into Rust spaces. There&#8217;s a multiple reasons for that. The first one is that you describe as a charge and that&#8217;s true. I think that a lot of people, if it was described in those words, would never want to do it but when it&#8217;s not described in those words, do and I care more about the doing than about using the right words. That is part of it. It goes back to my lead by example stuff for sure in the past to some degree.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The other reason that I do it honestly is there&#8217;s two other good reasons. I&#8217;ll do the boring one, then the interesting one. The one that is boring is that it&#8217;s actually off topic, I think. This is really complicated and I&#8217;m going to say it in the same broad terms and it&#8217;s maybe a little weird but bringing expressed politics in that way into an open source projects leaves to derailment. I don&#8217;t mean that in the sense of any kind of politics. Again, literally everything is politics like this is inherently politics. But when you use words that people have strong reactions to, it can distract from getting the goal done and I don&#8217;t always believe that that is the right way to do it. I generally think that I&#8217;m known as the person who&#8217;s usually being too over the top about bringing these kinds of things so I definitely agree that different strategies work in different times and places. But I think that it would actually obscure getting the work done, basically is a second reason.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The third reason is because as someone who has relatively extreme political views, given that I&#8217;m someone with a minority position on certain political at things, it&#8217;s simply self-defense. I don&#8217;t need people coming after me due to my personal politics. One of the easiest ways to prevent harassment on this angle is to just not ever actually use those words and just do my best. Then that way, I take less crap for it. I think those things are all intertwined.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That kind of lead to a new question that someone in our Slack community has. Before I get to that, I want to say Greater than Code is listener supported and you can support our program and support conversations like we have and received, by going to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. Pledge at any level. You get access to our Slack community, which is wonderful. We are also looking for sponsors and this episode is actually sponsored episode and sponsored by the Instrumental application and server monitoring platform. Instrumental&#8217;s goal is to help developers answer application performance questions faster with a powerful query language, real-time metrics, blazing interface and automatic metric collection. You can sign up for free developer account at InstrumentalApp.com.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That being said, Steve we had a question from someone in our wonderful Slack community about whether you have opinions on whether anarchy is equally accessible to everyone or only accessible and available to a privilege class?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think this is also probably a good time to briefly mention that I don&#8217;t consider myself to strictly be an anarchist. This is probably too long to get into at the moment but I used to and I don&#8217;t anymore. I definitely agree with the sentiment overall that there is a tendency on the left to rely on what&#8217;s effectively a meme culture so it&#8217;s like, &#8220;Oh, you recognized this book written by that one dude that one time,&#8221; or, &#8220;You know this slogan that has been around forever and if you don&#8217;t, you&#8217;re not a real leftist.&#8221; I&#8217;m shaking my head while I&#8217;m saying this basically and this creates a culture of exclusion, specifically. I think that that is definitely a problem on the left.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It&#8217;s also difficult just in general. This comes across in programming a lot that jargon is necessary for people to have high bandwidth communication between experts but is therefore also exclusionary into nonexperts and this is a question I grappled with a long time with Rust for example and that whole shenanigans. That&#8217;s deliberately exclusionary because once you get to a certain level on a topic, you want to not constantly re-litigate the basics so you invent jargon so you&#8217;re on the same page with someone. But then, when it becomes all about the jargon, you&#8217;ll leave out all the people and you don&#8217;t get people room to grow into it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I definitely think that anarchism and other forms of leftism have a problem with being exclusionary. I don&#8217;t think that it&#8217;s intentions but as we all know, that doesn&#8217;t actually matter. It&#8217;s just is so &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Intentions [inaudible] magical.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly. I think that understanding is not intentional. It&#8217;s a way to lead a path forward, rather than an excuse for the way that it is currently. To some degree, that&#8217;s why I try not to get super into the books or citing a specific details about, &#8220;Did you read this and that?&#8221; Because then, lots of people have written lots of books and lots of topics and they disagree with each other. I&#8217;ve had arguments that people that are basically both of us just citing books that were citing each other back at each other before and that&#8217;s boring and not interesting and not productive. I definitely feel the left needs to work on this as an issue.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s like that scene in Good Will Hunting, in the bar.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, definitely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What scene is that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a scene where Matt Damon&#8217;s character encounters a pretty snotty college bro dude who tries to humiliate Matt Damon&#8217;s character&#8217;s friend by being smarter and then Matt humiliates him by being smarter and it&#8217;s all like, &#8220;You&#8217;re in this year of history so you probably read this book. Well, next you&#8217;re going to read this book, which will demolish the position of the previous book that you read.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Specifically, he wasn&#8217;t even trying to be smarter. He was repeating an argument from a book as his own argument and Matt Damon&#8217;s character is like, &#8220;Oh, I saw you read that book, which is why you&#8217;re parroting its argument. Well, guess what? In the future, you&#8217;re going to learn that some other books demolishes that.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you think that bleeds over into these sort of jargon ideas like one-upmanship? Do you that bleeds over into conflicts within communities but also between programming communities?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Definitely and it also bleeds into our leadership celebrity culture example because again, if jargon is exclusionary, a great way to be perceived as an expert is to create new jargon because then if your jargon catches on, you&#8217;re the person who coined the term so you get to be the authority of it forever and no one can ever question your interpretation of that particular thing because you&#8217;re the one who said it the first place.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>JSON.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, or Rust or SOLID. This has reference earlier &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>NoSQL.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You guys are saying jargon words and I can also say jargon words. I mentioned thinking about how the person who coined the term &#8216;GIF,&#8217; thinks incorrectly that it&#8217;s pronounced as &#8216;JIF.&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Fight me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This can definitely lead to lots of problems interpersonally. This is something I&#8217;ve been thinking about a lot, which I&#8217;ve been referring to as &#8216;shittalking&#8217; between programming language communities, is that often new communities and their excitements of their new technology will create new jargon. Then people get old man at the cloud about it and they don&#8217;t like the new jargon so then they get upset about the jargon and start criticizing it for no good reason. This breeds contempt, which I think is very harmful to communities overall.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s a book thing but maybe I&#8217;ll explain it without referencing whose ideas this is because again, we&#8217;re trying to be not exclusionary here. I read a thing one time and it pointed out this difference between, you can express values in an active or a reactive way. Active values are all based on like, &#8220;I believe X. I want to do Y.&#8221; Reactive values are like, &#8220;That person&#8217;s values are dumb and that&#8217;s what my value is.&#8221; A reactive value is inherently about building your values off of what you perceive to be the problems of others values.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This is what I think that Rails got wrong with Node and also as one of the examples of the situation, again as somebody who&#8217;s had a good job of articulating his values, DHH really values tearing down other programming languages and language communities to the point where I have been on stage at a Ruby conference and been like, &#8220;You all do know that you&#8217;re not the cool kids anymore. You making fun of Java, makes you sounds really out of touch.&#8221; It&#8217;s a bad look for a number of different reasons so &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>At the O&#8217;Reilly conference with 2000 people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. It&#8217;s one of those things where this then gets perpetuated and causes the repetition. Fundamentally, it creates and in-group and directs hate towards an out-group and if you want to become part of the in-group, you also target hate at the out-group as a way to gain social currency. That creates this really nasty feedback loop that is not only abhorrence ethically but also I believe leads to incorrect technical decisions. I think that&#8217;s one of the reasons why Rails has kind of fallen behind the wayside because DHH expressly does not care about investigating other people&#8217;s stuff. He misses out on a lot of things that are positive about those things that could help build Rails, for example. It seems like he&#8217;s chilled out lately, incidentally I&#8217;ve heard. Again, I&#8217;m also basing this on multi-years ago of situation of him.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the reasons I stopped working on Ruby is that I feel like it made me unhealthy as a person. It&#8217;s not because Ruby in general is not great and Ruby people aren&#8217;t generally great but there is just this culture of trash-talking other projects and it made me a jerk frankly and I didn&#8217;t like it. I saw this opportunity with Rust to sort of reboot how I interact with people in many ways because I didn&#8217;t want to be a jerk but my jerkish tendencies come out, instead of making them go away. We&#8217;ve been really mindful in Rust world that I will just not say something if I don&#8217;t like it, instead of saying that it&#8217;s the worst thing ever created, basically and it&#8217;s just a healthier way to be for all around in general for everyone involved.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I totally agree with everything you just said, Steve and I think that negativity breeds so much more negativity around it. People do this not in the tech community too. I&#8217;m using it in real life with air quotes around it but I know a lot of people who literally define themselves and their personalities by like, &#8220;These are things I don&#8217;t like,&#8221; instead of like, &#8220;These are things I really love,&#8221; and it&#8217;s so tiring to listen to people talk like that. It&#8217;s not interesting to have conversations about that. I think the same thing is happening in our communities and it&#8217;s making our communities tiring and uninteresting also.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Steve, I also have those jerkish tendencies and I used trash-talk JavaScript all the time. After reading Aurynn Shaw&#8217;s Contempt Culture, I realized how unhealthy that was and how negativity isn&#8217;t good for anyone. What I will tend to say now is that, for example Go doesn&#8217;t make me as happy as Ruby makes me, which is not a value judgment. It&#8217;s rather a reflection on what I enjoy or what suits my particular style.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and then, I guess just because we&#8217;re all looking at it from different vantage points but I think what&#8217;s been really interesting to me as I come to arrive at spaces I felt comfortable, it is actually when I learned probably incorrectly early on in my programming career that if I didn&#8217;t come with strong convictions, if I wasn&#8217;t there with the five things to save for every one line of code written, that I was doing something intrinsically wrong. That kind of world view that outworker question to understand why as a programmer, that&#8217;s a very precarious situation at the end. It&#8217;s very fascinating to hear your story from working with Rails to growing into observing what it is that truly makes you happy and maybe sometimes, the absence of wrong positions that actually allows us to get more comfortable. I&#8217;m not sure if that&#8217;s exactly giving justice to what you&#8217;ve expressed but I think that there&#8217;s something there that we could dig more into it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You don&#8217;t have to have a hot take on every single thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and it also comes with the recognition that because I&#8217;m this way as a person or as Coraline put it, destructive tendencies in this regard, it also means that I will occasionally slip up and I need to, either apologize for those things or just figure out ways to catch myself from going into that thing. It&#8217;s also really tricky because criticism, I think is important. It&#8217;s a matter of what the criticism is. It&#8217;s not about not ever saying that something is bad because there are bad things but there&#8217;s the right way to go about it and a wrong way to go about it. It&#8217;s more complicated than just simply nothing is ever wrong. This give me a whole another gigantic long thing so I just leave it that, I guess.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You mentioned earlier about you chose to move to the Rust community &#8212; I think I&#8217;m paraphrasing you inaccurately here &#8212; because you felt like the community your in before it enabled these behaviors that you didn&#8217;t like and you wanted to move into a community where this behavior enabled the way you wanted to be. I think that&#8217;s really interesting for me because we know that humans mirror each other. We mirror our emotions. We mirror our behaviors. The way a community acts has a lot of influence on the way its members act.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When you see someone around you doing something, you think it&#8217;s okay. It becomes part of the norms. I guess my question is how do you gain the sort of metacognizants to realize that about yourself and to want to seek out a different environment? And how do you build such an environment where the behaviors that are unable are the wants that you want?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think this ties back in all of the other things that we had. This is an excellent thing. One thing I&#8217;ll say is that I didn&#8217;t actually come to understand this until after it had happened. I made this move for a number of reasons and it only later came to me that part of my underlying motivation were these aspect of things. Part of that was also, I had a couple of personal situations that caused me to reflect heavily on some things. That was also part of, not only the big move of things but also realizing the stuff that was a thing that made me reconsider a lot of stuff. That&#8217;s the metacognition part of it. It&#8217;s not like everything you do can ever be thought through. Sometimes, you&#8217;re just realizing why you did a thing after the fact.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In terms of building this kind of situation, I think that this goes back to early discussions about intentionality and values building. Again, Rust is not perfect. We have many flaws in this, just like anybody else, have tried to lead by example and bring other people on in leadership positions who share that same values that we hold. If somebody was trash-talking other people&#8217;s projects all the time, we would not put them on a team or take them off a team, if that was a thing that turned into that. I think that leading by example in that way holds it together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Things are still relatively young so there&#8217;s always time for things to break and also, things are not perfect but I think that the problems that I see in the Rust world are like an extremely toned down version of the things that I used to feel happens in the Ruby world so it&#8217;s not like, &#8220;This person is being a massive jerk.&#8221; It&#8217;s like, &#8220;This person consistently gives unstructured criticism, instead of structure criticism and it would be much more helpful if they would give structured criticism instead.&#8221; It&#8217;s a difference of degree.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I realized sometimes and I go back and look at historical things, I look at GitHub thread or Ruby Mind thread or something and be like, &#8220;I used to think this was normal.&#8221; The problems I have today don&#8217;t seem nearly as bad as the ones I had back then because it&#8217;s not as intense but some of that just comes down to doing it for the long haul. Like I said earlier, a lot of this is about doing good things and not doing bad things and doing that over a sustained period of time is difficult.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The way that I present myself on forums is extremely different than the way that I used to and doing that over long periods of time is really the only way to pay more than lip service to a value, I guess. I don&#8217;t know, I guess that was a little rumbly but I hope that vaguely got into there. I guess I don&#8217;t really know of any other way to do it, other than find other people who want to do it and do it together and then eventually, other people who agree with what you&#8217;re doing will join up and you just keep including the people that share what you&#8217;re trying to get done on the world. I think that applies to everything, not just software.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. That&#8217;s a great advice. Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s a great note to end on to, Steve. At the end of our show, we&#8217;d like to do reflections and talk about the things that we found most interesting or most poignant about the conversations we had and maybe some actions that we individually would like to take to enact before learning that ahead on the show. We&#8217;re going to move in to reflections. Who would like to go first?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think I&#8217;ll go first. I feel like the theme that really struck me from this show was about leadership and how important it is to not put too much power in the hands of a few people. I had thought about this before, particularly in terms of the bus factor, which I was talking about recently with some non-tech friends. The bus factor is like if someone on your team got hit by a bus tomorrow, how would your team be able to go on. The idea is like one person cannot be the one source of knowledge in your team or your company.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m talking about this with some non-tech friends and they were kind of horrified that I was talking of people getting hit by buses, which also made me think that this metaphor is normal to me that I was just like, &#8220;Yeah, well what if?&#8221; It&#8217;s a really mean thing to say about your co-workers. But it&#8217;s not just in case if something happens to someone or if they decide to leave your organization but it also gives you and your community the power to remove people that are bad for your community. I had never really thought about the bus factor in that sense. It&#8217;s not just about security for our process. It&#8217;s also about power to make sure that we have a community that we feel good about and we don&#8217;t get stuck with contributors that make us feel uncomfortable. That&#8217;s what I was thinking about, I guess.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can go next because actually, what I was going to say is pretty similar, I think to what Jamey was saying. It&#8217;s kind of funny, Steve that you were talking about moving away from anarchism because I think we&#8217;re sort of ships in the night in that regard and I am starting to incorporate more anarchist thought into my own beliefs. One of the things that I struggle with a lot is how do you build systems of governance that don&#8217;t depend for their success on the goodness of the rulers. You were talking about in Rust, you had a ruler who basically said, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to step down and give away a lot of my power,&#8221; and that only happens if you have a good ruler, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yup.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So how do you build systems of governance that are resilient to evil rulers and don&#8217;t depend on further success on having good people, being lucky enough to have good people in leadership position because you eventually won&#8217;t.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Lorena, do you have thoughts?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I&#8217;ve been re-watching Star Trek Next Generation and the whole part with the Q continuum, being both judge and jury and [inaudible] and who are you to judge us? But I think there&#8217;s something very real in that part of the conversation and I really appreciate that I was brought up to say, was how do you learn to speak with others in a language that is inviting and creates a safe space for us all. The idea that we might have strong ideas and convictions and beliefs but maybe because of loaded jargon or maybe falling into patterns of your community that could exclude others by knowing that and then how do you put yourself to a higher standard to try to create that kind of space, when you yourself try to both observe the community and make sure things don&#8217;t happen but also preventing yourself from being that person who might be reifying some of those structures.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I guess for me, that&#8217;s always an idea of learning to reflect on your own, be mindful of your own world and how these things can unfold. It means that you&#8217;re on open source and you&#8217;re thinking about, &#8220;How am I [inaudible] in this. Am I here for the right intentions? Am I actually working on this project because I care about it?&#8221; The idea that you&#8217;re caring open source just for the sake of being an open source that actually the right for you or as we heard story today, if you develop the eternal guideline for you how you&#8217;d get back to open source, then you can understand and check in with yourself. It&#8217;s about respect your personal space but also respect the community at large.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>These are great points. One of the things that got out of the conversation is the notion of intentionality. That sort of touches on the importance of establishing values around an open source project, leading by example, which I thought was a great point and then figuring out how to communicate community values to new members of the community. I think all of that ties into this theme of value resilience, how do you maintain this values over time as the leadership changes, as members of the community change. I think you have to be intentional about those things, otherwise you&#8217;re going to drift into chaos. Steve, what are your thoughts?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>While this was a thing that I gave an answer to, it was also a thing that is leading me to more questions. The question about, not about jargon but was about this inaccessibility of much of leftist thought is a thing that has been rolling around in the back of my brain and having that question asked, lit some things up that allowed me to give that answer but I definitely am going to be continuing to think about, again with this idea of understanding things after they happen. I&#8217;ve been very interested in some people&#8217;s efforts recently to do things like discounted groceries drives or feed the people programs and Food Not Bombs and these kinds of inherently accessible political organizing because it&#8217;s not actually about what book you read but it&#8217;s about, &#8220;You need to eat some food, let&#8217;s make this happen.&#8221; Thinking about that as a non-exclusionary politics is very interesting to me and probably something I&#8217;m going to think about more.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> My brain draws connections between things and I like to explain those connections. So often, I&#8217;ll bring jargon into a conversation because something will remind me of a book I&#8217;ve read and then I get excited about it and then I&#8217;m like, &#8220;There was this book,&#8221; but that is an attitude that can be exclusionary and that&#8217;s something I&#8217;m going to have to think about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I also don&#8217;t know how you balance that with essentially, anti-intellectualism. One that I often mention books, at least in my mind so that I appear well-read, so that people know that I&#8217;m not the only person who&#8217;s ever thought of this. There is in fact a place you can go if you want to learn more about the thing I&#8217;m talking about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I have totally had people mention a book and then I go and read it and I read everything else the author has ever written because I&#8217;m like, &#8220;This is really great,&#8221; but that&#8217;s a contextual thing. It&#8217;s not always perceived that way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would actually like to know what the book was that you wouldn&#8217;t tell us earlier.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was specifically Nietzsche and I totally forget which book specifically it is but the concept of the ressentiment and master slave morality.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome. I think we all have some work to do and we all going to need some time to process. This has been a wonderful conversation, Steve. Thank you so much for joining us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>STEVE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. That&#8217;s great. Thank you for having me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This episode marks, like I said, the 50th episode of the podcast. We have been doing this podcast for about a year now and we&#8217;re looking forward to more years of serving our community and bringing interesting conversation to you. Thanks, Steve for being a part of that and thank you everyone for listening and we will talk to you again very soon.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
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<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>This episode is sponsored by Instrumental application and server monitoring!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://instrumentalapp.com/"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-931" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Instrumental-1.png" alt="" width="590" height="113" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Instrumental-1.png 590w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Instrumental-1-300x57.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 590px) 100vw, 590px" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Instrumental’s goal is to help developers answer application performance questions FASTER, with a powerful query language, real-time metrics, blazing interface, and automatic metric collection. </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Sign up for a free developer account at </b><a href="https://instrumentalapp.com/"><b>InstrumentalApp.com</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/coralineada"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/loooorenanicole"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lorena Mesa</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Steve Klabnik: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/steveklabnik"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@steveklabnik</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.steveklabnik.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">www.steveklabnik.com</span></a> <b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Greater Than Crabmeat” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:02</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Steve’s Background, Origin Story, and Superpowers!</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skrillex"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Skrillex</span></a></p>
<p><b>06:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Contributing to Open Source</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff"><span style="font-weight: 400;">_why the lucky stiff</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackety_Hack"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hackety Hack</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://poignant.guide/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby</span></a></p>
<p><b>11:07 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Succession Planning</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Meme Hustler</span></a></p>
<p><b>20:12 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Organizing Groups of People in a Non-Authoritarian Way</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/various/authrty.htm"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mikhail Bakunin: What is Authority?</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The RFC Process in Rust</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicalism"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Syndicalism</span></a></p>
<p><b>36:23 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Avoiding Using Language with Political Connotation</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help keep us a weekly show, buy and ship you swa]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>This episode is sponsored by Instrumental application and server monitoring!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://instrumentalapp.com/"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-931" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Instrumental-1.png" alt="" width="590" height="113" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Instrumental-1.png 590w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Instrumental-1-300x57.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 590px) 100vw, 590px" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Instrumental’s goal is to help developers answer application performance questions FASTER, with a powerful query language, real-time metrics, blazing interface, and automatic metric collection. </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Sign up for a free developer account at </b><a href="https://instrumentalapp.com/"><b>InstrumentalApp.com</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/coralineada"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/loooorenanicole"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lorena Mesa</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Steve Klabnik: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/steveklabnik"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@steveklabnik</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.steveklabnik.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">www.steveklabnik.com</span></a> <b> </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Greater Than Crabmeat” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:02</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Steve’s Background, Origin Story, and Superpowers!</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skrillex"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Skrillex</span></a></p>
<p><b>06:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Contributing to Open Source</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff"><span style="font-weight: 400;">_why the lucky stiff</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackety_Hack"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hackety Hack</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://poignant.guide/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby</span></a></p>
<p><b>11:07 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Succession Planning</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://thebaffler.com/salvos/the-meme-hustler"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Meme Hustler</span></a></p>
<p><b>20:12 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Organizing Groups of People in a Non-Authoritarian Way</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/bakunin/works/various/authrty.htm"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mikhail Bakunin: What is Authority?</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://github.com/rust-lang/rfcs"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The RFC Process in Rust</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicalism"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Syndicalism</span></a></p>
<p><b>36:23 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Avoiding Using Language with Political Connotation</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help keep us a weekly show, buy and ship you swa]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Steve.jpeg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Steve.jpeg"></googleplay:image>
										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/928/050-open-source-anarchism-with-steve-klabnik.mp3" length="60877205" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>yes</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>Yes</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>01:23:04</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>049: Technology For the Greater Good with Reyn Aubrey</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/049-technology-for-the-greater-good-with-reyn-aubrey/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 04 Oct 2017 05:00:18 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=907</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[We are joined by 19-year-old entrepreneur Reyn Aubrey to talk about building technology for the greater good, his startup PocketChange, habitizing donation, analyzing and collecting charity data, and anarchist organizing principles.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[We are joined by 19-year-old entrepreneur Reyn Aubrey to talk about building technology for the greater good, his startup PocketChange, habitizing donation, analyzing and collecting charity data, and anarchist organizing principles.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>This episode is sponsored by </b><a href="http://upsd.io/2wmwtFp"><b>Upside</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://resources.upside.com/team?utm_source=podcast&amp;utm_medium=organic-social&amp;utm_campaign=Podcast&amp;utm_content=GreaterThanCode&amp;utm_promo=0"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-785" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png" alt="" width="1000" height="128" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png 1024w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-300x38.png 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-768x98.png 768w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-600x77.png 600w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo.png 1382w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://resources.upside.com/team?utm_source=podcast&amp;utm_medium=organic-social&amp;utm_campaign=Podcast&amp;utm_content=GreaterThanCode&amp;utm_promo=0"><b>Bundle your flights and hotel. Save money. Earn gift cards.</b></a></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/coralineada"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Reyn Aubrey: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReynAubrey"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@ReynAubrey</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://pocketchange.social/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">PocketChange</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="mailto: reyn@pocketchange.social"><span style="font-weight: 400;">reyn@pocketchange.social</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “For Good or For Awesome?” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:18</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Reyn Aubrey’s Background, Origin Story, and Superpower!</span></p>
<p><b>06:04 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Culture of a Company and Tolerance</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591842336/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=1591842336&amp;linkId=d86ed2c7e657e11ade2384e415053c25"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin</span></a></p>
<p><b>08:12 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Becoming an Entrepreneur at 19-years-old and </span><a href="http://pocketchange.social/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">PocketChange</span></a></p>
<p><b>10:40 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Charity Evaluation Criteria; “Wicked Problems”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://pocketchange.social/charities"><span style="font-weight: 400;">pocketchange.social/charities</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (Coming Soon)</span></p>
<p><b>14:33 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Habitizing Donation</span></p>
<p><b>16:22 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Analyzing and Collecting Charity Data</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.guidestar.org/Home.aspx"><span style="font-weight: 400;">GuideStar Charity Navigator</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.charitywatch.org/home"><span style="font-weight: 400;">CharityWatch</span></a></p>
<p><b>19:02 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– How PocketChange is Structured</span></p>
<p><b>20:34 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Ideation of “Technology For the Greater Good”</span></p>
<p><b>24:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Reyn’s Path Into Business and Entrepreneurship</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B014ICFYNS/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B014ICFYNS&amp;linkId=dcbce35af1882a89f041061b386407b0"><span class="a-list-item">Start It Up: The Complete Teen Business Guide to Turning Your Passions into Pay by </span><span class="a-list-item">Kenrya  Rankin</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><b>28:33 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Good Business Beliefs, Virtues, and Values</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><b>34:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Bringing Anarchist Organizing Principles Into Business</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.panarchy.org/ward/organization.1966.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Colin Ward: Anarchism as a Theory of Organization</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-two-pizza-rule-for-productive-meetings-2013-10"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The &#8216;Two Pizza Rule&#8217; Is Jeff Bezos&#8217; Secret To Productive Meetings</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><b>37:23 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Advice For Others Interested in Social Entrepreneurship</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><b>42:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Launching PocketChange and </span><a href="http://get.pocketchange.social/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Reserve Your Launch Day Invite</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><b>44:51 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Gathering and Raising Venture Capital</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><b>47:35 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Advice For Others Interested in Social Entrepreneurship (Cont’d)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><b>Rein: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Check out</span> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stafford_Beer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Stafford Beer</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> A culture being defined by the least of something you’ll tolerate and entrepreneurs should solve for “Wicked Problems” &#8212; not pain points.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><b>Jamey: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">All charities are not created equal.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><b>Reyn: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">A value that isn’t acted on is at best an inspiration and at worst a pretense. Also, non-dominance based work relationships.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
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<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, everyone. I&#8217;m Rein and welcome to Episode 49 of &#8216;For Good or For Awesome?&#8217; I am here with my friend, Jamey.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi. Just a reminder, even though we are both good and awesome, the actual name of the show is Greater Than Code and I&#8217;m here today with my good friend, Coraline.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hey, everybody. It&#8217;s Coraline. As Jamey mentioned, you may know me from such podcasts as Greater Than Code, For Good or For Awesome and many others. We have a very special guest with us today but before we introduce our guest, I wanted to mention that this episode is brought to you by Upside, one of DC&#8217;s fastest growing tech startups. Upside is looking for innovative engineers who want to disrupt the norm and they&#8217;re always hiring. Check out Upside.com/Team to learn more. We&#8217;re very thankful for our sponsors. If you would like to sponsor us at any level, go to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode and you&#8217;ll gain an exclusive access to our Patron-only Slack community. If your company would like to sponsor us, please send them to GreaterThanCode.com/Sponsors for a prospectus.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Now, it&#8217;s my pleasure to introduce Reyn Aubrey. Reyn is a 19-year old student entrepreneur. He&#8217;s on five businesses. The most recent of those is PocketChange, which is a tech company harnessing social media for good. Reyn has won a variety of awards, recognitions and competitions and he&#8217;s currently the youngest competitor ever to be in the Denver Startup Week&#8217;s $100,000 Pitch Challenge as a semifinalist. Welcome, Reyn.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi. Thanks so much for having me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Reyn, the first question we ask any guest on our show is what is your superpower and when and how did it develop?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would say that my superpower is my ability to really listen to people and understand where people are coming from on things. I think that everybody&#8217;s got a really interesting perspective and you can&#8217;t really assume anything about anyone based on what you can see. It takes a lot of time to get to know somebody. I guess my superpower will be I&#8217;m willing to spend that time getting to know people as people versus as a label or as whatever group they fall in or anything like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that definitely has come from my background. I&#8217;m originally from Hawaii. I&#8217;m a white male but I&#8217;ve always been a minority and kind of have a loose sense of the word because Hawaii is very predominantly other ethnicities and definitely one of the biggest melting pots in the US so I really been able to shift how I see people and how I view people and really come at them and come at all interactions and conversations with open mind. My ability, I think to hear people for people and listen to people for people is really, really unique in terms of the way I look at the world.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s interesting that that was part of your upbringing. I think that learning, that ability to understand people generally develops as we mature. Was that something that you even experience in your childhood?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Incredibly, yeah. For me, it was all about the people that I surrounded myself with. I had, I think two white friends out of all everything else and I never really understood how unique that was because that was the only frame of reference that I had. Hawaii is one of the most isolated land masses in the world and when you&#8217;re there, that becomes your whole life. Having that kind of be a part of me since I was a little kid, I think was kind of really interesting. I&#8217;m not going to come out here and say, &#8220;Oh, this is super unique. This is great,&#8221; or anything like that but I think it just gives me an interesting perspective on people and the way things work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Now, that I&#8217;m on Denver for school and the school that I go to is a predominantly more affluent white school, it&#8217;s been a really interesting shift for me and kind of interesting challenge of how I do business and how I think about myself and who I am and all of that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What&#8217;s it like, I guess immigrating into a predominantly white group of people when you come from a much more diverse upbringing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s really weird. I think that the biggest thing I noticed that was weird was that a lot of people never really had thought about their race or their background or that kind of thing. I don&#8217;t want to generalize but for a lot of people, college is kind of the first time we&#8217;re able to have this discussions and kind of a safe area or a brave area. I just thought it was really interesting so coming into it, I really had to understand that and understand that other people were not coming from the same place that I was coming from, in terms of their understanding of all these different things. That&#8217;s not to say that I understand the struggles of all of the things that are going on right now because I definitely don&#8217;t. I&#8217;m still a white male.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But I think that coming to the school and being fair to people who had never thought about race or never thought about that privileged was really an interesting thing for me and I had to approach it with an open mind and had to constantly remind myself for that if someone would say something that was ignorant or they didn&#8217;t know something, I kind of viewed it as my responsibility to be willing to call it out. Not to have the answers but just be willing to have a conversation about something that I wasn&#8217;t comfortable with or something along those lines.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s something that I wish more white people or more white males would take responsibility for. I think a lot of the emotional labor and a lot of the work being done to address racism in this country is being done by people of color. There&#8217;s this persistent message on Twitter that people of color cannot end racism and it requires white people of talking to their racist families, talking to their racist friends, calling out racism when they see it in public. It&#8217;s really refreshing to see that at 19 years old, you have an understanding on that. At 19 years old, you&#8217;re brave enough to do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s interesting. I was actually reading a book called Tribes by Seth Godin and a lot of other entrepreneurs have read and it talks a lot about culture of a company and if you allow me to go down this tangent real quick. A culture of a company is defined by the least amount of something that you&#8217;ll stand for, your baseline, your cut-off point. I was actually having this debate yesterday, this conversation yesterday that in terms of when issues come up where there&#8217;s something that is not okay or you&#8217;re not comfortable with, regardless of if that situation is resolved by you saying something, setting the line of this is okay and this is not okay is fundamentally incredibly important because it sets the tone for your community and then if we can get enough people to set the tone and set the line that this is not okay and this is okay in super small ways, I think that&#8217;s how we push something forward. It&#8217;s not through big programs or in a massive marketing campaigns or viral Twitter videos. I think it comes from a whole lot of people coming together and saying, &#8220;This is not okay and this is what I stand for in my personal life.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think I totally agree with that. I think that even if you say something in the moment to someone and you don&#8217;t change their mind, maybe they&#8217;ll think about it later and start to internalize that information slowly and even if they&#8217;re maybe not listening to you, maybe someone else who is listening is listening to you and is getting something out of that, which I think about a lot when we&#8217;re having these discussions online, that if I make a comment to someone, maybe it&#8217;s not getting through to them in the way I hope but who know how many other people are going to read that comment.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I couldn&#8217;t agree more.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really like what you said. I assume it&#8217;s a Seth Godin quote and it&#8217;s about how much of something they&#8217;ll tolerate. In our politics currently, we&#8217;re seeing some people calling for tolerance of ideas that are actually damaging to our society and our culture and our country and other people are saying rightly so that there is no space in public discourse for people who hold opinions about other people being subhuman but other people being inferior and it really comes down to what we as a country will tolerate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Reyn, you describe yourself a couple of times already as an entrepreneur. I&#8217;d like to hear more about how you got into being an entrepreneur and I also like to hear about your new company, PocketChange. Is that it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yep. That&#8217;s correct.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Tell us about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. PocketChange is my first foray into technology for social good. I believe that at core entrepreneurs solve problems but traditionally, we&#8217;ve been using entrepreneurship to solve pain points not problems. Anything from convenient travel to booking, email, productivity and whatever it is and we&#8217;re leaving the really, really big problems unaddressed: climate change, racism, gender inequality, LGBTQ rights. I really wanted to see if there was a way that I could use technology and my passion for business in a way that really benefited the world and left something bigger than just an IPO or acquisition or something along those lines.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> PocketChange is a technology that we&#8217;re working on creating that aims to target the moment when someone is really genuinely motivated into action and remove all the barriers for that action. Right now, we&#8217;re creating a button that sits on Facebook, next to every piece of content and lights up when you see a post about a cause. Post about a cause could be anything from an article about Hurricane Irma to a video about poverty. Maybe it&#8217;s a livestream about a crisis in another country, whatever it is, any cause in any area, our button will read that post and analyze that post, determine a specific cause from that post that relates to it. For example, there&#8217;s a video about climate change, our technology will be able to identify that is a video about climate change.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then we have a research team that analyzes all charities that do work in the area of climate change and trying to tackle climate change and the term is the single most impactful organization that is tackling that issue. Then in two clicks, we allow our users to donate 25¢ to $2 to that organization all within page. Again, in the moment, if someone really wants to do something, we remove all the barriers for that action. We&#8217;re creating a like button and actually makes a difference.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the interesting things we have to do is choose charities and evaluate charities. Our belief is that we don&#8217;t have to be experts on every topic. We just have to be experts on how we go about choosing charities and what makes a good charity and what makes a poor charity. We&#8217;ve spent a lot of time researching and doing a lot of work in that space.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What are your evaluation criteria? I&#8217;m really curious about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We do basically two things. We look at quantitative and we look at qualitative. We start by trimming based on efficiency. When you&#8217;re only donating 25¢ to $2, it&#8217;s really, really crucial that that charity is actually using the money. I think it&#8217;s always crucial that the charity is making sure that they&#8217;re using the money for a program expense, rather than purely administrative or CEO salaries. We&#8217;ve all heard the stories of these massive charities ripping people off and taking their donations &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Red Cross.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly. We really make sure that all the charities that we work with are spending the vast majority of their money on actual programs and are running a lean mean machine. Then we basically select charities based on diversity of program, along with a lot of other things. We look at leadership and we look at vision and we look at geographic areas and how they&#8217;re adapting and using asset-based programs and all of that kind of thing. But we understand that for the problems that we&#8217;re looking at, which are called &#8216;wicked problems.&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Wicked problems are essentially problems that are really, really hard to solve and can&#8217;t be solved by a simple cause and effect solution, things like climate change and racism and all of the examples I&#8217;ve mentioned before. The way to solve wicked problems according to current literature and example in testing and all of that is you solve them by tackling it from a variety of different angles. There&#8217;s no one solution to any of these problems but a variety of solutions brought together becomes incredibly powerful. We look at programs and charities that have programs in a really diverse set of areas.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Perhaps with climate change, there are definitely things that they need to do. For example, short term fixes, providing food and resources immediately but then also the really more important thing is lobbying in the government and making sure that laws are created and running educational programs so that people understand things, setting up recycling programs so that it&#8217;s easier for people to do that, marketing campaigns and awareness campaigns to really let people know what&#8217;s going on and trying to engage and tackle the problem from a lot of variety of different angles. We really work with charities that are great at a lot of different things, in terms of tackling their problem. If provided the right amount of funding, they could scale those solutions and really make a massive impact on that issue.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You make the evaluation data public?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. We&#8217;re finalizing in the next two weeks. It&#8217;s been pretty crazy. We just got into Denver Startup Week. If we won, that would really speed up our development time so we&#8217;ve been focusing all of our energy on that. But in the next two weeks, we will publish all of the information on how we choose charities, specifics on why we chose each charity and our whole process and you get to meet the research team and all of that at PocketChange.social/Charities. That page isn&#8217;t up but in the next two weeks, it will be with all of the information that we need.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then we&#8217;re also really looking at how can we make the things smarter because we fully acknowledge and understand as 19-year old students, we have some older people on our team as well. But as primarily young people, we&#8217;re never going to have all the answers to all of these things and we&#8217;re never going to be the smartest person in the room. Our power is the ability to acknowledge that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We’re looking at trying to figure out ways to incorporate all of the brilliance of our PocketChanger community and get all of that involved in our charity selection process. Starting with a simple &#8216;send us your feedback,&#8217; updates and all of that kind of stuff but then trying to figure out a smarter way to go about evaluating charities and harnessing the people that are donating through us and to us, to make that process a lot smarter and constantly improve and get better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>To be honest, I think this list of charities evaluated by all of these criteria alone is a great contribution and that&#8217;s not even really &#8212; products, maybe the wrong word but your end goal, like the end goal is to actually have people donating to these. I&#8217;m really interested about the fact that it&#8217;s donating between 25¢ and $2. I feel like there was research and decision making that went into that. Is that true?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, there is definitely a lot to it and we&#8217;re still testing. As all of you know, testing is constantly something you do as an entrepreneur when you&#8217;re building a product: launching and testing and launching and testing and launching and testing. But we set on 25¢ to $2 because our real belief, if the donation is hard and it shouldn&#8217;t be, we really want to create something that people can get behind and use without feeling guilt into it, without feeling like it&#8217;s going to hurt their wallet and they&#8217;re not going to be able to pay rent, without any of that. We really want to habitize donation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Our belief is that &#8212; exactly what we were talking about before &#8212; if we can get a lot of people to come together in a really small way, it creates a super, super powerful and beautiful world where people can say, &#8220;Whether we disagree politically, whether we disagree about all these different things, we can agree that people are hungry and they need food and we can agree that this issue is bad or this is not something that we&#8217;re willing to stand for,&#8221; and we can bring people together. That simply doesn&#8217;t happen when you set $50 pay walls that exclude so many people. It also doesn&#8217;t happen when we&#8217;re just on Facebook, which we acknowledge. It also doesn&#8217;t happen when we&#8217;re just using technology because a lot of people don&#8217;t have access to that so we&#8217;re trying to figure out ways to get around that but we have to choose the path with least resistance for now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We set the 25¢ to $2 to really habitize how people donate and make it something that people can donate without feeling bad about or without feeling it&#8217;s something that their guilty into doing or forced to do or anything like that so removing all the stigma and difficulty and baggage that comes along with donation and really simplify that whole process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s really cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m interested in understanding how you get your data about the charities. I know that there are charity watchers and things like that that publish some information but what do you do that&#8217;s different from them and how do you analyze these charities?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We do use a lot of the online databases out there. There are some really great ones that called directly from IRS filings that the charity is required to file legally. We use a GuideStar Charity Navigator and CharityWatchdog sometimes to really pull our data. The biggest thing that we do is we aggregate so we don&#8217;t necessarily fly out to the charities and interview them and do any of that stuff because it&#8217;s just simply not scalable for what we&#8217;re trying to do. But what we do is we make sure that we pull information and find any conflicts between information from a variety of different sources and make sure that that information is accurate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We know all the numbers to look at, whether that&#8217;s administrative costs, program expenses. We look at percentage of executive team salaries based on donations, restricted versus unrestricted funding, where donations are coming from. Whether it&#8217;s coming from foundations or whether it&#8217;s coming from individuals, whether it&#8217;s coming from a specific area, all of that kind of stuff. We really try to look at donations and charities as honestly and analytically as possible and be as transparent with that data as possible so that any time you donate you have access to all the same information we do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you disagree with us, that&#8217;s completely okay. We understand that everybody&#8217;s going to have a different philosophy and perspective on things so we enable users to input their own charities if they like one better or choose one of our other options. We provide three options if you do not like your default so users really do feel empowered while at the same time, still simplifying the whole process for them and not to have you and your wife go through and see if you can figure out what charities actually going to donate the money and what charity is just going to take it and have a $40,000 launch.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We also believe that no one&#8217;s really done what we&#8217;re trying to do before. If we can do it well, we can really become a very trusted name in the charity space. Whether you use PocketChange or not, our belief is that if we can choose great charities and more people donate to great charities, that&#8217;s amazing for us. If we can laser focus people on donating to just the best charities, it becomes really, really impactful. Maybe PocketChange isn&#8217;t the right tool for anyone. Maybe people don&#8217;t use Facebook or whatever it is, maybe they want to donate more so we want to make sure that all of our information on charities is super easily accessible to anyone, regardless of if you use PocketChange or not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m really curious kind of mechanically how PocketChange is structured. Do you have a team of data scientists that&#8217;s working on that charity data? Who’s doing that work and what specialization do they bring to that process?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Basically, what we do is we have a team of people that follow the process that we outline and then we also have an advisory board of people that go in and look at charities that are real experts in the field. Actually, it&#8217;s kind of funny. We don&#8217;t really use too many data scientists because while charities are very database, they are also is a lot of value to the qualitative side of it. We, actually on our advisory board team, have a lot of social venture capitalists and social investors. There&#8217;s a big organization here called Bettcher and there&#8217;s a lot of basically rich foundations that do a lot of investing in social good projects. Then we have a lot of their team on our advisory board to help refine the process: the head of philanthropy at Western Union, it&#8217;s a big one that we have on the team.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We have a process and we standardize that process so that everyone has access to it and can see the information that we&#8217;re working with and how we choose things. We really standardize our decision making and we really believe that that&#8217;s important for our transparency but then, we also have a team of ridiculously smart, ridiculously talented people who help make the process smarter and who can make decisions, if something goes wrong.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How did you come to decide on this project? Where did you get the original idea? What made you decide this is what thing you want to focus your energy on?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Funny enough, the idea came from these tiny showers we had in our freshman dorms last year and I was sitting in there and I had just seen something on Facebook and 20 million people had watched this video and shared it and everyone was saying, &#8220;This is so sad. I wish I could do something,&#8221; and I started thinking about this happens every day, millions of times a day and everyone seems to want to do something but there&#8217;s no way for us the target it in that moment. Usually, ideas don&#8217;t happen as eureka moments but this one kind of did.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Going back a little bit further than just that moment of ideation and creation was I had run a hoverboard company back home, about a year prior and it became the most successful hoverboard company in the State. The hoverboard being two-wheel self-bouncing devices that were pretty popular in 2015. I launched that company and run that company and it was doing really, really well. I remember, I was really lucky in it because I got to face a lot of things that many people don&#8217;t get to face and I have to face it when I was 17. I remember one day I was in my room and we just made a whole bunch of sales, right in the middle of the Christmas season and I was counting all this money to be deposited into our bank account and I remember thinking, &#8220;This is pretty boring. If this is what I&#8217;m going to do the rest of my life, if the end goal is to make cash that I can buy useless things with, it&#8217;s just a waste of my time.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that we all have an opportunity to do something bigger than just that. I am of firm believer that we should use the things we&#8217;re passionate about in a way that really benefits the world. Now, let&#8217;s not say that other projects don&#8217;t but it&#8217;s just something that I was really lucky enough to kind of brought to my attention and face at 17. I knew that in that moment, I had decided that the next project that I wanted to do would be a social venture, without a doubt. I knew that I loved business and I was in love with the business process but I didn&#8217;t want the end goal to be profit so I wanted to launch a business that really help the world.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Going back to one of my first points was I think that over the next 20 years, it&#8217;s going to be one of the most interesting periods of time that we&#8217;ve ever seen. I think that a lot of things are coming to a point in the next 20 years, whether it&#8217;s clock-ticking on climate change or the incredible racial tensions and things that have been bubbling up in our country, all of the debates that we&#8217;ve been having like resources running low. I think that a lot of things are coming to the head definitely in our lifetime and those problems, I think there are massive opportunities for you to actually do something that really helps a lot of people, not just solves a problem for the minutiae of people who have 98% of the problems in their life already solved.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that there&#8217;s massive opportunity to really help others to increase social standing and bring people onto the same page and empower people all around the world that isn&#8217;t just focused on who&#8217;s the 1% of rich Americans who can afford to buy our [inaudible] product. I think that it&#8217;s really, really important that we target problems that are bigger than things that we traditionally face in business. I know that&#8217;s definitely not an easy thing and most businesses like that will fail, potentially PocketChange included obviously. But I think that there is nothing more important than giving that a shot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m really impressed and this big idea and it&#8217;s great but I&#8217;m also really impressed that you had the background and the experience and the resources to put this together into a real company at age 19. You talked about loving business. I&#8217;d like to hear a little bit more about your path into business and entrepreneurship and some of the other projects that you&#8217;ve worked on previous to this.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. I guess technically the very first entrepreneurial venture I did was a lemonade stand when I&#8217;m six years old, I think. A lot of people can relate to that but I vividly remember, I did one day of the lemonade stand and I remember vividly learning about cost of goods sold because I made all this money and I was super excited and my parents were like, &#8220;Now, you got to pay us back for the cups and pay us back for everything,&#8221; and I was like, &#8220;Oh, man. This isn&#8217;t fun.&#8221; I did one day of that lemonade stand and I was like, &#8220;I can do that but it&#8217;s not my full potential,&#8221; so I hired a bunch of my neighborhood friends in my community and they actually ran a lemonade stand and I was the marketer for the lemonade stand. I went to the local pool and I gave out like little pieces of paper that said, &#8220;Come outside and get 25¢ off of our lemonade,&#8221; or something like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I remember running around and getting the business more into a legit business and I wish I could say it turned into some multimillion dollar lemonade franchise because it did not &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Lemonade.io.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly. Lemonade.ly were now a tech startup. That was my very first venture into the business world. I was always doing entrepreneurial things but I&#8217;d never known that I was entrepreneurial until 8th grade. When in 5th grade, I tried to do a break dancing class and charge my friends a nickel, which was not super profitable. Then I tried to trade currency in 7th grade. I was always doing things that were entrepreneurial but I never knew that that was a legit path that I could go down until my mom bought me this book called Start it Up by, I believe her name is &#8216;Kenya Rajins.&#8217; I&#8217;m not sure I&#8217;ll go in and get that [inaudible]. If anyone wants to read it. It&#8217;s an incredible book about getting started.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> She got me that book and I remember reading about it and saying, &#8220;There&#8217;s all of these people out there that this is what they do full time. They get to run businesses and bigger than anything I&#8217;ve ever dreamed about. They get to have tens of thousands of people on their team all working together towards a goal and everyone is serving a function that&#8217;s crucial to the business and it&#8217;s beautiful.&#8221; I think business is one of the greatest art forms in the world because it&#8217;s so difficult to get two people to work together, let alone 10,000. It&#8217;s pretty incredible.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I remember reading about that and I was like, &#8220;This thing is legit,&#8221; and then I started an online business. I sold my old Legos. I figured out I had eight giant bins of Lego. I was a huge Lego nut as a kid. I made stop-motion animation videos and I love Legos. I was like, &#8220;I no longer want these Legos and I want to give that to other people because I love them so much.&#8221; I figured out that there was a missing piece in the eBay market, where if you package them up in 100-piece sets and put a mini figure in each of them, they made awesome stocking stuffers. I did that, I wrap each one and I put a sticker that said, &#8220;Love, happiness and Legos,&#8221; on it and sold eight bins in, I think a month or two. Then started needing some more supplies so I started going on Craigslist and buying other people&#8217;s lots and packaging it in a smaller lots.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Actually, I started buying my competitor sets and breaking them up into smaller sets and selling them and earning more, which is pretty funny. Then I got into a whole bunch of other businesses, buying and reselling things on Craigslist, which I found a lot of fun. Then I scaled out and eventually, built a Lego mini-figure company where we make custom mini-figures and package them in sets and we&#8217;re selling thousands of them. That was really fun and then the hoverboard company and now, PocketChange.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You talk about having 10,000 people on your team and I think that&#8217;s a wonderful sentiment. But the traditional model of business, the way it works is it&#8217;s a hierarchical top-down, almost totalitarian structure, where people get told by the people above them who get told by the people above them what to do. I sense that that may not be how you want to do things. Is that correct?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s definitely correct. I want to put a qualifier on that. I think that 10,000 people can&#8217;t be reporting to one person, obviously but I&#8217;m a big believer that good things don&#8217;t happen by somebody telling you to do them. They happened by everyone being super invested in it. I think the best companies really, really understand that and really value every single person on the team. One thing we do at the company that a friend of mine just told me about and we adapted it in two hours was we don&#8217;t call anybody employees. We call team members or changers for PocketChange.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> My real belief is that everybody has something to offer and siloing people like you&#8217;re marketing so you can look at tech or you&#8217;re tech so you can look at sales or you&#8217;re accounting or whatever it is, really misses out on some really hidden talents that people have. For example, at PocketChange, it&#8217;s obviously not 10,000 people. We&#8217;re a team of six people but at PocketChange, we were putting together a pitch for the Denver Startup Week actually and I&#8217;m traditionally the pitch person. I&#8217;ve won all the pitch awards and that&#8217;s definitely one of my strong suits.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But one of our people on our team came out and it was like, &#8220;I think you should word it this way,&#8221; and it was perfect. It was exactly what I was missing. That wouldn&#8217;t have happened if it was like, &#8220;You&#8217;re a tech so tell you manager to tell their manager and tell that manager to get it over and send an email or whatever it is.&#8221; I think that the best businesses can come when there&#8217;s a real cross disciplinary interaction that happens between people. We try and do that at PocketChange. It&#8217;s obviously real easy when it&#8217;s six people and we&#8217;re all can hop on a Skype call together. It&#8217;s a lot harder to 10,000 can hop on a Skype call together. But I want to try and build businesses in ways that that make sense for.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I did some consulting for Starbucks, I guess maybe 10 years ago now, some tech consulting and I was really impressed by one of the things they did. First of all, similar to what you&#8217;re saying, everyone at Starbucks was, I believe they call them partners. They actually did a thing where regardless of your position at the company, even at the VP or CEO level, you had to work a certain number of hours every year at one of the stores doing the job. I was really impressed with how people at every level, regardless of their area of specialization: be a tech or marketing or what have you, had intimate knowledge of what happened at the store. They were super focused on making the people at the stores efficient and happy and in turn, making customers happy. I think it&#8217;s really valuable kind of baking that in your culture. Do you have any plans for how to kind of codify clarify that so that, if hopefully as PocketChange grows, you maintain that culture of cross-pollination?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, definitely. We do a couple of things right now and I want to keep them super involved as we grow as a company. Some of this was stolen from my incredible mentor at a company called &#8216;Full Contact&#8217;. His name is Drew. He&#8217;s really helped me a lot and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;How you go about doing this?&#8221; We do a couple of things. One is we have every week with weekly stand ups where everyone talks about what they&#8217;re working on and everyone else can put in their two cents and they can bounce ideas around the room and all that kind of stuff, any issues that they&#8217;re coming up with, all of that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then also, charity selection is obviously a big part of our business. We&#8217;ve talked about that a lot. Everyone in the team, primarily head of technology to our head of marketing, all of that, we all go and we all are going to be working in choosing charities for parts of our job. I think it&#8217;s crucially important that everyone on the team can justify exactly how we go about doing that and people are a lot more unified if we can understand like, &#8220;I understand this issue because I ran into it as well when I was doing it.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Obviously, I&#8217;m not a technical person so I can&#8217;t hop into Mark&#8217;s code &#8212; Mark is our head of technology &#8212; and try to understand everything that he&#8217;s doing but what I can do is I can have a conversation with him during our weekly stand up about the issues that he&#8217;s facing and see what I can do and how I can understand those issues better. As a team member, I can help in whatever way. Maybe there is something that I heard about that I was like, &#8220;I read something somewhere,&#8221; and he goes, &#8220;That&#8217;s perfect. That&#8217;s what I was looking for.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Every week, we have this weekly stand up where people bounce around what they&#8217;re working on and the issues that they&#8217;re facing and everyone hears about it and puts in their two cents and debates and all of that. Then everyone goes through and does the lowest, more grind part of our business, which is the charity selection side. Then we also want to incorporate as much as possible, a roundtable discussion about vision and all of that stuff, into what we&#8217;re doing. I am the founder and CEO but that doesn&#8217;t mean that I&#8217;m the only one with good ideas at the company. By no means is that what that means. We try and incorporate that into everything that we do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things that I&#8217;ve always wanted to try to do is to bring sort of anarchist-organizing principles into business. It&#8217;s very easy to do it when there are six people or 10 people but the harder questions are what do you do when there are 500 people, how do you organize that in a way that isn&#8217;t hierarchical and bureaucratic? There’s a bunch of prior arc here that might be interesting to you, one of the concept is a syndicalism. Basically, people get together and form temporary, voluntary function based teams and then they federate responsibility and organize it a higher level by setting delegates and things like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really, really like that and we&#8217;re still figuring out. We don&#8217;t put a ton of thought into it because we are six people but it&#8217;s something that I think is potentially one of the most important parts of the business.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s an essay by Colin Ward called &#8216;Anarchism as a Theory of Organization.&#8217; That was published in 1966. You can find it free online and you should read it and see what you think.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome. Thanks. I will.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Rein H, I&#8217;m curious. How do you see that working in practice, say I have a tech company of 100 people and hopefully, I&#8217;m doing something for social good. How does that syndicalism actually work in practice?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think one of the questions always is how do you take groups of individuals and give them a common purpose and manage their work at a higher level. The answer is we don&#8217;t really know. We can barely do it in a hierarchical structure as it is, given how many companies are failing to do that. But the basic idea is that the role of a CEO in a company is a function that the company needs. It doesn&#8217;t make you the master of the people that you work with.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There are functions that are necessary to organize and provide structured of a company that don&#8217;t require you to be put into a dominance relationship with other people in the company. They&#8217;re just a function that has to happen and someone who is good at that function should be elected to do it. It could even be a small team does that and members rotate in and out. There are ways to organize that don&#8217;t just grant the privilege of royalty to whoever happens to have the title of CEO at the time. For me I think, the four fundamental principles are organization should be voluntary, it should be based on function, it should be temporary and it should be as much as possible small. When you need to build bigger things, you will let the members and you delegate responsibility in the same way for a period of time, for a particular purpose.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love that. I want to be in an organization like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Me too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know that Jeff Bezos has a great rule, the &#8216;Two Pizza Rule.&#8217; If your team can&#8217;t be fed by two pizzas, it&#8217;s too big. I think that&#8217;s exactly what you&#8217;re talking about and it&#8217;s great.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Some of this goes back to human nature and tribal sizes and the number of relationships we can hold in our head with other people because it&#8217;s a non-linear thing. The power set of all of the people is how many different relationships you can form at any one time. People have said like 150 people is the most you can have in a village before people don&#8217;t know each other and things like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am really impressed that you have this background in business or turning a profit is such an important part of that culture in many ways. Then you took that were able to say, &#8220;Turning a profit isn&#8217;t the most important thing for me. I want to do something important.&#8221; I&#8217;m serious if you have any advice for other people that are in business and entrepreneurship, maybe have existing companies and how to integrate social entrepreneurship into what they&#8217;re already doing, if that makes sense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. I think that one thing that&#8217;s really great that a lot of companies can do relatively easily is as much as possible, create something of a space for people to share new ideas. But then once you do that, make sure that all of your employees take maybe three days out of a year or a week out of a year to go volunteer with local organizations. If employees and team members went out into the communities and volunteered and saw problems in their communities firsthand, they could bring some of that back to the business and say, &#8220;I just volunteer at a recycling organization and for our company lunches, we use all plastics. Maybe we can convert and we&#8217;ll make that and then we become a little bit more green.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think one great policy that people can have is make sure that everybody at the company really gets down to the community and sees real problems that are happening. Then the other thing is, I think if it&#8217;s a shift in how a company operates, it really has to come down to the leadership team of that company, setting the example so you can&#8217;t come out and say, &#8220;We&#8217;re now a green company. We&#8217;re now a socially responsible company,&#8221; and then the leadership doesn&#8217;t follow those practices. I think it&#8217;s really crucial that leadership, not only follow common understanding and common practice around social issues but also that they have an understanding of the issues that they&#8217;re passionate about and they are wanting to solve a brand that I think does it really well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We work with a lot of brands that are socially conscious. It&#8217;s one of the ways that we actually make money at PocketChange. But one brand that I think does it immensely well as Stella Artois, the beer company. Their founder is really, really understanding and really care about clean water so they recently just started a partnership with Water.org, on a multimillion dollar donation partnership and we could talk about charity selection and all of that for the rest of time but the core intent of that was the founders understand that this is a major issue. They understand that their business is uniquely situated to be able to set an example on the market for a company caring about clean water and they all came from the leadership pairing with Water.org.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think a leader setting that example for the rest of their team and saying, &#8220;As a company, this is who we are. We believe that we can use our business to do good as well as make money. That&#8217;s what social entrepreneurship is. If it comes from leadership and if it comes from, also every team member who is going out to the community and seeing the problems that are there and seeing how their business might be able to help tackle that, I think then you can really set up your organization for amazing and awesome socially-conscious things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would argue that you cannot be a green company, you cannot be a socially-aware company because these sorts of things are not things that you are but they&#8217;re things that you do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s easy to make claims and claims require certification and certifications require bureaucracy. I like to say that a value that you hold but don&#8217;t act on isn&#8217;t really a value. It&#8217;s at best aspirational and at worst, it&#8217;s a pretense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think, also people sometimes get very attached to these words that they&#8217;ve used to describe themselves, such that even if a value is, like an aspiration something they want to do, people are sometimes too quick to be like, &#8220;I did a good job and now I&#8217;m done,&#8221; rather than continuing working on that and valuing it and devoting yourself to it in your life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Ethics and awareness, they shouldn&#8217;t be nouns. They should be verbs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I agree.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a concept in systems thinking called, &#8216;the purpose of a system is what it does.&#8217; The idea there is it doesn&#8217;t matter what you claim the purpose of the system is, what you actually have to look at is what it&#8217;s doing and then you&#8217;ll know what it&#8217;s designed to do. You can be a company with all of these values and Coraline is saying, &#8220;If you don&#8217;t act on those values and that&#8217;s not the purpose of your company. The purpose of your company is something else.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Reyn, I&#8217;m curious, how far along are you in launching PocketChange and is there a beta program that people can take advantage of now? If so, what&#8217;s the process for that? How do they get that button on their Facebook feed?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We just launched a real close beta and we launched that in mid-June, actually in the end of June and gather a lot of awesome feedback about it but realize that we have a lot more work to do as we&#8217;re just talking about. We don&#8217;t currently have a product in market that people can download. What they can do is they go to PocketChange.social. There&#8217;s a &#8216;Get PocketChange&#8217; button, right on the home screen. They can click that and put their email in and we should have a product in the next few months.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We&#8217;ll do everything that we really wanted to do. We will be launching early access beta in the next few days that won&#8217;t really do what we wanted to do but will allow users to create PocketChange accounts and get the process started. If anyone out in the Greater Than Code community is interested in doing that, just go to PocketChange.social and click &#8216;Get PocketChange&#8217; and we&#8217;ll let you know when we are ready to have some people to hop on the program, start testing it and giving us awesome feedback.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, please do let us know and we&#8217;ll share with our listeners when that goes live because I think that&#8217;s really worthwhile. It&#8217;s definitely something that people and our listening community would be very interested in. As an implementation question, not technical, don&#8217;t worry, are you in collaboration with Facebook on this or is this something that you&#8217;re adding on in a third-party plugin way?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re starting as a Google Chrome extension because not only does that allow us to over land on top of Facebook but once someone has a download and once we have our technology built, we can instantly go over to Twitter, to any news sites, to Google search results, to email, to anywhere that someone browses. We&#8217;re starting as a Google Chrome extension because integrating with Facebook is real difficult but once we prove ourselves, we&#8217;re also trying to get mobile by making mobile extension.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then also integrating with a lot of other areas that people see content that inspires them. We&#8217;re currently talking with Flipboard and Pocket &#8212; two big news apps &#8212; about integrating our platform there and then a couple of other smaller social medias that would be perfectly situated for it. We&#8217;re also in discussions of how to get that naturally embedded into their platforms but we still have a lot of work to do on our product. We&#8217;re starting as an extension just because it allows us to super easily and quickly over land on top of everything. But the end goal is to integrate into as many platforms as possible.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We&#8217;re still going back and forth between whether we would want to get acquired by Facebook and be Facebook exclusive or whether we want to remain cross-platform which is the real distinct point for us. We go back and forth but right now, we&#8217;re a browser extension.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to ask as a company whose goal is not profit, first are you structured as a nonprofit or are you structure as a corporation?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re structured as a public benefit corporation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So a B corp?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Actually, it&#8217;s a separate entity. B corp is a certification that you get. It&#8217;s really expensive and there&#8217;s a lot of great B corps but many companies will just get that certification to look good but a public benefit corporation means that you have a dual focus of profit and for your stakeholders and then also social capital.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The question I want to actually ask is what is it like trying to get money from VC and other investors as a company that structured like that and doesn&#8217;t have a strong profit motive as some other companies? Also, what advice would you give for other entrepreneurs who want to move towards doing stuff for social good?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In terms of gathering VC, I can&#8217;t speak super and up about it because we&#8217;re not currently actively raising. I&#8217;ve talked to a lot of VCs and we have a lot of interest but we&#8217;re keeping the door shut on VC money right now. I think venture capital can often kill a company before it really gets off the ground because you don&#8217;t know what you&#8217;re doing yet. But in terms of actually raising venture capital money, I think investors do want to do good but they also care that their money comes back and it comes back more.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Social entrepreneurship is beautiful because you&#8217;re not a nonprofit. You&#8217;re a for-profit company that just understands that there&#8217;s other problems to be solved out there. In terms of raising that money, it&#8217;s pretty similar to traditional for-profit companies, in terms of having really good financials and having a plan that makes sense. But then it&#8217;s also comes down to reaching out to the right investors. In Colorado, we have a lot of social venture capitalists that want to invest in these types of companies so we can harness them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then also for social entrepreneurship, there&#8217;s a lot of grant money out there and grant money is pretty awesome because you don&#8217;t have to give up any of your company to get it. There&#8217;s some pretty incredible things out there for companies that are trying to do good. I would say just Google it and reach out. Oftentimes, grant writers will write grants for free and take a percentage of whatever grant you get so it makes total sense to reach out to any grant writers in your area and see if there&#8217;s any Angel groups that are socially focused. In Colorado we have a couple. Back home in Hawaii, we have one. There&#8217;s a pretty decent chance that there&#8217;s at least a small community somewhere, wherever you&#8217;re located that will allow you to raise money in that way and have investors that understand that your business plan is not to IPO in five years or to get acquired in five years. It&#8217;s to do something bigger and also make money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And then what would you say to someone who maybe doesn&#8217;t have much experience with entrepreneurship or maybe does but only in the more for-profit areas that wanted to get into this sort of thing, instead?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would say, speaking to first to people who have done entrepreneurship before, one of the biggest things that you&#8217;ll probably have to face is that it&#8217;s harder to get honest feedback from people. People don&#8217;t generally like to &#8216;hate&#8217; on social ventures so it&#8217;s a lot harder to get real, honest critiques. One way to go about doing that well is to really set up conversations in a way that&#8217;s like, &#8220;We want you to tear this idea apart and that will get better.&#8221; That&#8217;s one thing that a lot of for-profit to more social enterprise companies have to face.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But in terms of people who have never really done entrepreneurship before or are more in that boat and want to build something socially conscious or something along those lines is in my opinion, I think it&#8217;s pretty equally difficult to launch a for-profit company and a social entrepreneurship company. A problem is a problem so definitely there are problems that are easier to solve than others. But a lot of social entrepreneurship, if you can spend the time to understand the issue and talk to the people that can understand the issue, a solution is a solution. Whether that&#8217;s applied to rural agriculture or whether that&#8217;s applied to email, it&#8217;s a very similar process in terms of talk to the people that really understand it, talk to your customers that would use it or your users or your clients or how will you break it down and then go out and start building it. Entrepreneurship is hard but there&#8217;s no reason why people can&#8217;t spend their time and their energy trying to do something in a more impactful way than just more traditional entrepreneurship.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As you may know at the end of the podcast, we like to talk about our reflections on what we&#8217;ve just discussed and anything we may want to leave with our listeners or what&#8217;s been really meaningful for us. For me, I&#8217;m really interested, especially in these social good entrepreneurship businesses. I think there may be an even more of an opportunity there for actually functional horizontal organization. One of the places I would suggest to go to look into that is there is a socialist who was also a management cybernetician named Stafford Beer and he wrote about organizing companies and businesses like they were neural networks, for instance. Some really interesting stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A couple of things that struck me while we&#8217;re talking. I love what you said about a culture being defined by the least as something that you&#8217;ll tolerate. I think that that applies in all cultural contexts, whether you&#8217;re talking about a startup or a group of friends or a conference or an organization or a Slack community. I think that&#8217;s a really interesting of turning idea of values on their heads and not just saying, &#8220;We believe in these things but also we stand united against these other things.&#8221; I think that&#8217;s a really valuable thing to think about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The other thing, I&#8217;m not a big fan of entrepreneurship because I&#8217;ve been on the receiving end of bad entrepreneurs way too often but I love your idea that entrepreneurs should solve their problems and not pain points. I think one thing that the business-minded among our listeners should consider and even the non-business people among our listeners can consider is identifying what you defined as wicked problems. Maybe we don&#8217;t need another startup for food delivery but maybe we need to work on some of the larger issues that are facing our communities and our culture. I think identifying those wicked problems is a really valuable first step in actually doing some good in changing well for good. I thought that these points are really, really interesting and thank you for sharing this.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was really struck about this idea that all charities are not created equal. When we want to donate to a cause that we care about and give our money, it&#8217;s because we want to make an impact on something that we think is important. I think there&#8217;s a bad feeling associated with realizing that you gave your hard-earned money to a charity and finding out that it went to something that you disagree with. That could be high CEO salaries that we&#8217;re talking about or it could even be a charity that is then taking money and giving it to something you actively disagree with.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s been a lot of stories about, for instance like the Salvation Army supporting anti LGBT stuff and if you don&#8217;t know about that, you might be giving money to something that you don&#8217;t want. I think this idea of going through, finding out which charities are using money efficiently, which charities are using money to the things they say that they&#8217;re using it for and which charities are really making a difference is like a huge service.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Even on its own, I think that something that really struck me as amazing and needed and why don&#8217;t we have this before and I&#8217;m so glad that we&#8217;re going to have this. The fact that that&#8217;s only part of what you&#8217;re doing is so amazing to me. I think that you really hit on a really important thing that had been floating around maybe in a lot of people&#8217;s heads but you were able to bring it into a concrete problem and a solution. I&#8217;m really impressed by that and I thank you for doing that and for coming and telling us about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Of course. I think it was actually you, Coraline that said this but a value that isn&#8217;t acted on is at best an inspiration and is at worst a pretense. I thought that was a really, really interesting concept and something that I want to go back and reflect on with the team because every company obviously has or should have a set of core values. But I think that it&#8217;s very easy to let those slip in the day-to-day operations of something. I really want to go back and talk with everyone and see how we can go about making sure that everything that we say we do, we will do. I think that&#8217;s crucial for trusting an organization.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Another idea that I really, really like was this idea of non-dominance based work relationships. I think that it&#8217;s something that&#8217;s really crucial and I don&#8217;t really know how you implemented it at scale but I think it&#8217;s something that we need to be able to figure out if we want to be able to grow in a way that makes sure that we value everyone who is a part of the company. I want to go back and talk with everyone and see how we can go about figuring out how to implement that into all parts of our businesses.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If anyone has any ideas or wants to brainstorm or help on a Skype call or grab coffee if you&#8217;re in Denver or something along those lines, whatever you would like, I&#8217;d like to open up the dialogue and conversation around those ideas. You can e-mail me Reyn@PocketChange.social. I&#8217;m sure Mandy can put it in the show notes or something along those lines. Those were my two biggest takeaways that I really got out of this.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Reyn, it has been an absolute delight talking to you. I think you&#8217;re very inspirational. I&#8217;m very impressed with your acumen and with your devotion to doing some good in the world and I think we need a lot more of that so thank you so much for coming on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REYN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. It&#8217;s been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>With that, we will wrap up. Thank you everyone for listening and we will talk to you again in a couple of weeks.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content like this, please do so at </span></i><a href="https://www.paypal.me/devreps"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">paypal.me/devreps</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.</span></i></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>This episode is sponsored by </b><a href="http://upsd.io/2wmwtFp"><b>Upside</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://resources.upside.com/team?utm_source=podcast&amp;utm_medium=organic-social&amp;utm_campaign=Podcast&amp;utm_content=GreaterThanCode&amp;utm_promo=0"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-785" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png" alt="" width="1000" height="128" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png 1024w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-300x38.png 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-768x98.png 768w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-600x77.png 600w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo.png 1382w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://resources.upside.com/team?utm_source=podcast&amp;utm_medium=organic-social&amp;utm_campaign=Podcast&amp;utm_content=GreaterThanCode&amp;utm_promo=0"><b>Bundle your flights and hotel. Save money. Earn gift cards.</b></a></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/coralineada"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Reyn Aubrey: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReynAubrey"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@ReynAubrey</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://pocketchange.social/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">PocketChange</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="mailto: reyn@pocketchange.social"><span style="font-weight: 400;">reyn@pocketchange.social</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “For Good or For Awesome?” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:18</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Reyn Aubrey’s Background, Origin Story, and Superpower!</span></p>
<p><b>06:04 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Culture of a Company and Tolerance</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591842336/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=1591842336&amp;linkId=d86ed2c7e657e11ade2384e415053c25"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin</span></a></p>
<p><b>08:12 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Becoming an Entrepreneur at 19-years-old and </span><a href="http://pocketchange.social/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">PocketChange</span></a></p>
<p><b>10:40 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Charity Evaluation Criteria; “Wicked Problems”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://pocketchange.social/charities"><span style="font-weight: 400;">pocketchange.social/charities</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (Coming Soon)</span></p>
<p><b>14:33 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Habitizing Donation</span></p>
<p><b>16:22 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Analyzing and Collecting Charity Data</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.guidestar.org/Home.aspx"><span style="font-weight: 400;">GuideStar Charity Navigator</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.charitywatch.org/home"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ch]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>This episode is sponsored by </b><a href="http://upsd.io/2wmwtFp"><b>Upside</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://resources.upside.com/team?utm_source=podcast&amp;utm_medium=organic-social&amp;utm_campaign=Podcast&amp;utm_content=GreaterThanCode&amp;utm_promo=0"><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-785" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png" alt="" width="1000" height="128" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png 1024w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-300x38.png 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-768x98.png 768w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-600x77.png 600w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo.png 1382w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://resources.upside.com/team?utm_source=podcast&amp;utm_medium=organic-social&amp;utm_campaign=Podcast&amp;utm_content=GreaterThanCode&amp;utm_promo=0"><b>Bundle your flights and hotel. Save money. Earn gift cards.</b></a></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/coralineada"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Reyn Aubrey: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReynAubrey"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@ReynAubrey</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://pocketchange.social/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">PocketChange</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="mailto: reyn@pocketchange.social"><span style="font-weight: 400;">reyn@pocketchange.social</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “For Good or For Awesome?” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:18</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Reyn Aubrey’s Background, Origin Story, and Superpower!</span></p>
<p><b>06:04 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Culture of a Company and Tolerance</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591842336/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=1591842336&amp;linkId=d86ed2c7e657e11ade2384e415053c25"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin</span></a></p>
<p><b>08:12 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Becoming an Entrepreneur at 19-years-old and </span><a href="http://pocketchange.social/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">PocketChange</span></a></p>
<p><b>10:40 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Charity Evaluation Criteria; “Wicked Problems”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://pocketchange.social/charities"><span style="font-weight: 400;">pocketchange.social/charities</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (Coming Soon)</span></p>
<p><b>14:33 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Habitizing Donation</span></p>
<p><b>16:22 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Analyzing and Collecting Charity Data</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.guidestar.org/Home.aspx"><span style="font-weight: 400;">GuideStar Charity Navigator</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.charitywatch.org/home"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ch]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Reyn.jpg"></itunes:image>
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					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>56:05</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>048: Finding Our Lane with Marco Rogers</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/048-finding-our-lane-with-marco-rogers/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 27 Sep 2017 05:00:31 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=871</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Marco Rogers joins the show to discuss engaging on social media, staying in your lane, and mixing social justice with your tech career.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Marco Rogers joins the show to discuss engaging on social media, staying in your lane, and mixing social justice with your tech career.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><img class="alignnone wp-image-874" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/velocity_conf_rgb.png" alt="" width="389" height="223" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/velocity_conf_rgb.png 500w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/velocity_conf_rgb-300x172.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 389px) 100vw, 389px" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Build and maintain complex distributed systems.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">We are proud to be partnering with O’Reilly Media. Be sure to check out </span><a href="https://conferences.oreilly.com/velocity"><span style="font-weight: 400;">velocityconf.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> for all of the dates and cities coming this Fall.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The O’Reilly Velocity Conference is the best place to learn about continuous delivery, DevOps, operations, and performance. If you want to build distributed systems and apps that stand up to today’s technological challenges and customer expectations, make plans to attend Velocity in New York, NY (October 1-4) or London, UK (October 17-20). Register with code </span><b>PCGTC</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to save 25% on your Gold, Silver, or Bronze pass.</span></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span><br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Marco Rogers: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/polotek"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@polotek</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Greater Than Code: Like Uber, But For Not Being Shitty” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>02:04</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Background and Superpower</span></p>
<p><b>03:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Outspoken and Dealing with Pushback on Twitter</span></p>
<p><b>04:41 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Staying in Your Lane”</span></p>
<p><b>11:12 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– To Engage, or Not to Engage?</span></p>
<p><b>16:10 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Mixing Social Justice and a Tech Career</span></p>
<p><b>20:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Having Conversations Re: Diversity and Inclusion</span></p>
<p><b>23:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Making Workplaces Inclusive and Changing the Culture</span></p>
<p><b>35:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Educating Others &#8212; But Not on Demand</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-877" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/FB-2-300x210.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="210" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/FB-2-300x210.jpg 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/FB-2.jpg 420w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></p>
<p><b>38:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What is the right way to be an ally? Reading Spaces</span></p>
<p><b>43:59 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Starting/Organizing Working Groups</span></p>
<p><b>45:34 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Advocating for D&amp;I as Leaders</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Diversity and inclusion is hard because it’s more than just one thing.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Don’t have conversations or be in them to not just be wrong.</span></p>
<p><b>Janelle: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Training, teaching, and educating, versus putting together a working group to get things done.</span></p>
<p><b>Jamey: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">It’s okay to be wrong and sincerely apologizing.</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> It’s hard to be who you want to be in a world where people are constantly picking sides.</span></p>
<p><b>Marco:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> How dynamics pay out for people who aren’t fully engaged in the D&amp;I conversation yet.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag, </b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you? </b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Guess what? We have a special sponsor for this episode.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, this episode is sponsored by O&#8217;Reilly Media. The O’Reilly Velocity Conference is the best place to learn about continuous delivery, DevOps, operations, and performance. If you want to build distributed systems and apps that stand up to today’s technological challenges and customer expectations&#8230;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Then, you should go to the Velocity Conference. There&#8217;s one in New York on October 1st through 4th and there&#8217;s some cool people speaking there like Carin Meier and Neha Narula, Ines Sombra and Jess Frazelle. Although there&#8217;s one in October 17 to 20 and that one looks even greater because Kiran Bhattaram is speaking there. She&#8217;s awesome and Angie Jones and Anne Currie. You should totally go. Also if you go to VelocityConf.com and register with code: PCGTC which is for PC Greater Than Code, then you get to save 25%.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, I&#8217;m Jamey Hampton and welcome to &#8216;Greater Than Code: Like Uber, But For Not Being Shitty.&#8217; I&#8217;m here with a bunch of my friends today, including the great Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you Jamey. I am super happy to be here today with Astrid Countee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you Jessica and I&#8217;m really excited to introduce my friend, Janelle Klein.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Astrid and I&#8217;m here with my amazing co-host, Sam Livingston-Gray.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m having a fanboy moment today. If you follow me on Twitter, you probably know our guest already because I retweet him so damn much. Marco Rogers describes himself in his Twitter bio as &#8216;web developer, movie buff and pretty much the best guy you know.&#8217; Interestingly however, his LinkedIn profile shows his title is director of engineering so you can be sure that we are going to get to the bottom of that. Marco, welcome to the show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Marco, I guess one of the ways that we like to start out is by asking you, what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think if I have a superpower, it&#8217;s probably a little bit of a cheat and it&#8217;s really just kind of thinking really fast on my feet. You mentioned my Twitter presence and I have people ask me all the time like, &#8220;Do you think through all these amazing tweet storms that you do?&#8221; and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;No, not at all.&#8221; It&#8217;s really just whatever the last one was. If there&#8217;s one that flows from that, then I write it down and if I don&#8217;t have any more thoughts, then I guess I&#8217;m done. That&#8217;s why, I think Twitter works really well for me. It&#8217;s something that I try to admit that people because the only thing that I&#8217;m trying to do is work through issues out loud so that people can potentially follow along and maybe, we can figure something out together but I don&#8217;t think my thoughts are more cogent than anyone else&#8217;s. I just have them a lot faster, I think so I can go through more. Truly a volume thing that I&#8217;m going for.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I mentioned that I retweet a lot of your stuff and part of that is because you&#8217;re just so outspoken about lots of things but especially, social justice issues. I know you get pushback for that but I&#8217;m wondering how much and how do you deal with it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that I&#8217;m in a very rarified space right at this moment. I&#8217;m earlier in that arc, which I would say started. It got kicked off by Ferguson and the whole thing. I talked to him a little during after trailing Martin and his trial and stuff but it was really Ferguson where I was like, &#8220;We have to talk about this,&#8221; and I found myself doing a lot on Twitter and having people actually respond. But I think there was an arc where what I did a lot was argue with trolls on Twitter and then I realized that that wasn&#8217;t what I wanted for my life. Then there was an arc where &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Imagine that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think there was a period where what I was really trying to do was reconcile, being an outspoken and talking about controversial topics and how that played with my employer. I think I&#8217;ve been really fortunate but there&#8217;s always a line and I was definitely wary of finding that line. But at this stage, I feel I have found that line with my public presence and with my professional presence. At this stage, I also have managed to avoid a lot of the really most controversial conversations and really stay in my own space and talk about things the way that I want to. I think I&#8217;ve managed to strike the right balance like the audience that wants to hear what I have to say. They know how to find me but I don&#8217;t go looking for trouble, nearly as much as I used to. I think it&#8217;s working out great for me right now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cool. We&#8217;ve talked a little bit on the show before about staying in your lane, which I think is a phrase you use fairly regularly. What does it mean to you?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love that phrase. I think I picked it up from Ta-Nehisi Coates, actually. I read Coates a lot, even before he wrote his great book and the article in recreations. He&#8217;s a big deal now but I have been following him for a long time. I cribbed the way that I use it from him, which is that there are always a set of things that I think each person can speak to, either from their own personal experience or their background and have a perspective that actually is grounded in reality. There&#8217;s a whole set of other things that we have opinions on, where those opinions are not actually informed by very much at all.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> More so, if we bring too much of our opinions into that space, we&#8217;re going to end up joining out of people who do have that experience and we&#8217;re creating noise that covers up signal. When I say stay in my lane, what I mean is that I have opinions on everything all the time and I&#8217;ve learned to temper them and recognize that not all of them are valid, not all of them are coming from a place of being informed or having experience or really having anything really cogent to say about it so maybe I should just not say anything because there are people in that space who are going to do it much better than I am.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was really intrigued by this idea of finding the line and normally, when you find the lines, it’s with crossing over them and then realizing, &#8220;Maybe, I shouldn&#8217;t have done that.&#8221; This is something it seems we all have to go through and figuring out where those boundaries are. I&#8217;m just wondering, is there an experience that stands out to you where you felt you were over that line and something you learned from it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah. There&#8217;s more than one. Let me reach back and try to pick out some of the more salient ones. It&#8217;s directly related to finding my lane. There&#8217;s a thing, like I said I think what I&#8217;ve gotten good at is being able to have a conversation on Twitter, that has more complexity and nuance, then people are good at right off the bat because Twitter is a very difficult medium to actually pull that off. I think I&#8217;ll admit freely that it&#8217;s just practice that I think has made me good at it but Twitter is definitely a terrible medium for doing it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But I think what happens is that practice also gets you in a lot of trouble. What I would do is I would go into conversations and try to participate in a way that was not very helpful and it was really just about me making sure that I was a person who was seen as having these conversations and there was a lot of wrong motivations. Like I said, my early arc I think, taught me a lot about what we&#8217;re trying to do here in a lot of social justice movement that we talk about, in a lot of the conversations that we&#8217;re having. It&#8217;s not just for the sake of conversation. We&#8217;re actually trying to figure things out and the people who are closest to that space are actually way more equipped to do that than randoes on the internet, which I am one.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The one that I think sticks out to me the most is when I started to feel like I had the right to speak for other underrepresented groups, just because I felt like I had come to understand some of what their issues were and particularly the LGBTQ community and talking about gay people and trans people and actually trying to speak in a space where their voice is needed to be heard. I was trying to do that thing where I articulate what their issues are. It&#8217;s not to say that I was doing a terrible job of it, maybe I was, but that wasn&#8217;t really the problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The problem was I found myself at odds with people who are gay and were trying to tell me that not only was I kind of getting it wrong but that my input was just not necessary. The conflict there was that the particular person that I think was trying to push me back a little bit, I felt like they had made some really problematic mistakes. I was on that mission to just be like, &#8220;I need you to understand where you&#8217;ve gone wrong,&#8221; and we went through a whole thing and this person did not back down and it was really uncomfortable even for me towards the end. But I was in that space where like, &#8220;You couldn&#8217;t check me. I was too good for that.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That&#8217;s also a really bad space to be in because you are also not in it to learn or to try to help or to elevate the right kind of signal. You&#8217;re just in it to not be wrong. It took me a long time to come around to that conclusion that I have some of those predilections and I really need to resist them. What happened is we had a whole blowout. I had that thing where the people in my Twitter mentions like, &#8220;What is happening right now? What are you doing?&#8221; and these are people that I respect and I should have listened to their input but I was like, &#8220;You kind of get into that internet fight mode,&#8221; and it was really not a good look.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I log off and I was like, &#8220;I&#8217;m done for today,&#8221; and I had a really, really long time to think about it. I really slept on it and came back. It came down to one really simple thing. All the other stuff where I thought other people were wrong. It was still in my head but the thing I think I learned from that more than anything else is none of that mattered if I was coming into a conversation where my input was not solicited, where I did not actually have the lived experience to actually represent any stance that mattered. I was using whatever leverage I had to actually push back on the people who should have the voice in the conversation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I came back and I really apologize to the several people who were involved. I think my takeaway from that was a really big one, which is if there&#8217;s a conversation that needs to be had in the LGBTQ community, it&#8217;s not going to come from me. I&#8217;m not the person who needs to have it. It&#8217;s not even up to me to make sure that it happens by coming in and starting trouble. If it&#8217;s going to happen, it&#8217;s going to be because that community works it out for themselves and like, &#8220;I&#8217;m the problem here,&#8221; and I had to really admit that, regardless of what other things people had done that were &#8216;wrong.&#8217; It&#8217;s just not my conversation to have. It&#8217;s not my lane. What I ended up doing is just getting really good at apologizing to people too, which is like the whole thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a superpower right there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it is. Actually, I should move that one to the top. That&#8217;s actually really, really important one is learning how to really apologize to people in a way that is authentic and actually conveys that remorse for being wrong. Being wrong is okay. I think I tweeted about this too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Another thing that you&#8217;ve mentioned a couple of times now that I think is a superpower is this idea of knowing when not to fight with internet trolls. I like what you said about making a conscious decision about that and I think it&#8217;s very important. You also mentioned like being in an internet flight mode and I can totally relate to that. That&#8217;s a feeling that I&#8217;ve experienced. I wonder what your advice would be about learning when it might be okay to engage and when engaging is the wrong thing to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a really great question. One thing that I feel is really important to do that seems obvious but it&#8217;s not, is to really establish what do you mean by internet trolls. We are talking about those people who have no intention of actually having a conversation, who have no intention of actually learning anything and changing their minds and are literally just there to start trouble and to try to get a rise out of people. The trouble is that there is another set of people who have some really bad and misguided ideas who are ignorant, who are actually real humans and the line between those two things is very, very thin.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think where I was at first was saying like, &#8220;I&#8217;m trying to figure out if there are real people behind these accounts,&#8221; and if there&#8217;s a real conversation to be had because we try to tell ourselves that we should be open to having these conversations even with people that we disagree with. But the reality is there&#8217;s a point of diminishing returns there. Like I said, I&#8217;d ask myself, &#8220;What is the point?&#8221; Am I trying to change somebody&#8217;s mind? That super unlikely over a short, 140-character texts. That is not going to happen. If I&#8217;m not changing anybody&#8217;s mind, if I&#8217;m not learning anything myself, it&#8217;s literally a waste of my time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Once I got on that train of thought, I was like, &#8220;What is valuable about this? What is valuable about coming into this space on Twitter?&#8221; It&#8217;s really for all the people who are potentially listening and potentially getting something out of, maybe the thoughts that we&#8217;re trying to put together in this conversation and that has nothing at all to do with trolls and it doesn&#8217;t even require arguing with people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think there&#8217;s the lowest amount of real informational value in that argument and instead, if you look at where I am today, what I do is I mostly stay in my own space, which means a lot less replies to direct people and a lot less of &#8216;tweeting&#8217; other people so as to start a conversation and instead, I just put these thoughts together myself on my own timeline for everybody who follows me. I get a lot of engagement there. I&#8217;ve been using this phrase, &#8216;kind of go looking for trouble,&#8217; because I think we have this idea that there&#8217;s a lot of value in the back and forth. I would just essentially kind of started at it. I think it&#8217;s actually quite wrong.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s a very little value in the back and forth. Both sides are really entrenched. There&#8217;s not a lot of movement on either side and the only thing that it does is teach people how to argue and fight and be really terrible. That&#8217;s the only thing that you get out of it and that&#8217;s not what I wanted. I just do a lot less of that. I still I have my moments. I still fall into the trap sometimes but I just come around the idea that there&#8217;s just not a lot of value there. More so, there&#8217;s much more value to be had by talking with the people who are actually wanting to listen and there&#8217;s not a lot of conflict there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting, so when someone else says something that you have completely different thoughts about, instead of fighting against them, you just put your own different thoughts about out there, in parallel.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, absolutely. That actually happens quite explicitly. A lot of times, I have a very diverse timeline now and I get all kinds of different thoughts that come across my timeline that make me kind of think about things and either I choose to be on my own space and maybe expand on a lot of thoughts that made me have or even if I want to go and contradicting, even if I want to paint a different picture of things, I still do it in my own timeline, most of the time without trying to bring those people into it directly and have them feel I&#8217;m talking directly for them or that they&#8217;re being attacked. All of that stuff is really counterproductive, to be honest. But there&#8217;s still an opportunity there for me to provide a counterpoint to some of the stuff that people might be hearing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I found that to land super well with people. I think the thing that made the biggest impression on me is that I get messages all the time and direct messages in other ways, where people are like, &#8220;I&#8217;ve never talked to you before but I just want to let you know that you&#8217;ve changed so much of my perspective,&#8221; just being a person that I kind of get to listen to passively and like, &#8220;You&#8217;re always giving me stuff to think about.&#8221; It just really brought home to me that reality, that there are a lot of people who are listening and that you can have influence on them. The people who are fighting the hardest, worth the least amount of your time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a question about how you makes some of the social justice stuff with your tech career because you mentioned in the beginning that you had to find the right balance for you and to make a little bit of time to do that. In talking to a lot of different people, I often hear that they have a particular opinion or maybe they have an experience that they do want to express but they also don&#8217;t want to be like an expert on whatever this issue is and not be seen as just a developer or just an engineer. How did you figure out your path on that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think I&#8217;m still struggling with that to be honest. I definitely have these moments. I used to talk a lot more about tech and I still have a lot of opinions about it. I really am struggling because it feels like the things that I&#8217;m talking about in social justice and just in the larger world, they are so much more important than the tech conversations. I haven&#8217;t found a space where I feel like I can talk about both and give each one the appropriate amount of weight. I think that&#8217;s something that I&#8217;m still struggling with and I think that if I&#8217;m looking at other people that I run in the same circles with, I see a little bit of that too. They&#8217;re like, &#8220;The only thing I really feel comfortable talking about is the tech stuff,&#8221; and like, &#8220;I know this other stuff is so much more important but I don&#8217;t know how to engage there.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think there&#8217;s a little bit of that tension in the community today. I&#8217;m struggling with it myself so I don&#8217;t know if I have really good answers there. If you followed me for a while, you realize that I talk about tech a lot less. It&#8217;s still something that&#8217;s a very big part of my life. I still have lots and lots of opinions on it and yet, I&#8217;ve kind of chosen to backburner that because the other stuff, I think is so present. I think we all kind of go through those phases.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s almost like we need a podcast about the things that are more important than the tech.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I throw this out and I think this is just me being really candid in taking some ownership. I have these people that I know and either I talked to them a lot online or I&#8217;ve actually met them in real life. I know that they&#8217;re good people and I really care about them and they only talk about tech and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I only talk about tech. There&#8217;s other things happening. I never hear you actually mention them.&#8221; It&#8217;s really, really silent but I realized that it was a judgment of mine that I was having a really hard time with. I want to see other people processing the stuff that&#8217;s happening in the world to know that they&#8217;re affected, that they&#8217;re human and they are here with us doing that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When it makes me feel some kind of way about it, then I&#8217;m still trying to figure out. But I&#8217;m really kind of careful not to say anything because I know that&#8217;s my issue and not their issue. Everybody is dealing with what&#8217;s going on in their own ways. Twitter may not be the place that they are comfortable being vulnerable about those things but I think something that&#8217;s kind of in my head today is like trying to figure out where everybody stands. I think that&#8217;s where we are. If I&#8217;m talking to a person, where you stand in the major issues that are happening today, it&#8217;s really important for how I&#8217;m thinking about our relationship and it&#8217;s sometimes difficult for me to pull that out to make that a thing that&#8217;s known. I&#8217;m struggling with that too, I think.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s really easy to relate to you. I&#8217;m thinking about this meltdown panic attack that I had, just seeing all this craziness and stuff happening around me like during Thanksgiving. Everyone on Facebook was posting about their perfect turkeys, making the perfect recipe and getting everything all perfect and I was like, &#8220;How can you sit there and talk about turkeys?&#8221; I just want to scream at people like, &#8220;How can you not see all the suffering happening around you?&#8221; I think I had that similar response of just some things just are more important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I had to, at the same time, in that moment, come to terms with my own hypocrisy that, &#8220;Oh, I&#8217;m the one perfecting the turkeys too. I&#8217;ve got my own bubble of stuff that I&#8217;ve been living in. That&#8217;s me too.&#8221; I think there&#8217;s two sides to it. One is how we cope with stress all of us and I think detachment is one way to do that like just forget about everything going on in the world and focus on your life. You can&#8217;t really blame people for that, either. I think tech is kind of the same way like who really cares about unit testing right now? I&#8217;m just wondering in terms of you interacting with other people and seeing the people in different spaces like that. How those experiences have changed you?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The last several years where the conversations about diversity and inclusion have really grown and kind of taking a center stage, have been really, really important for me personally. I guess for me, I moved to the Bay Area in 2011 and it was a couple years after that, I would say that the conversation really was able to start about diversity and inclusion and for me, it was like, &#8220;We can have this conversation now?&#8221; I remember being really taken aback like, &#8220;Oh, we&#8217;re talking about this now? We’re talking about the fact that there are no other black people around ever. Cool. I could talk about that. I just think I thought we weren&#8217;t allowed to talk about that.&#8221; It was a really, really big change in my life to have people acknowledging something that had just been the way the things were for so long and it wasn&#8217;t something that I felt like was appropriate to talk about. But now we could.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We went from being able to talk about it to being able to say that it was important and that&#8217;s something to strive for, to being able to actually take action and to see things change and like, &#8220;If I look at the way that things change me, it&#8217;s really big to me that I frequently walk into rooms full of tech people and I&#8217;m not the only black person,&#8221; and that was like a story of my life. That was the thing that I would joke with people about when I talk to them about being in tech or going to this conference in doing X, Y and Z. It&#8217;s a thing that, I think black people have tried to turn it into something that we laugh about but it&#8217;s really something that, I think affects us really deeply where we just have to accept the fact that most people around, if we&#8217;re going to move towards where the opportunity is and where the success are, then we&#8217;re going to leave more and more people that look like us behind. Today, I have to make that choice less and less.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m able to be in rooms where lots of people who look me are able to be in the room and doing the same things. It&#8217;s so huge for me personally that representation matters so much and to have people be able to talk to me and look at me like I&#8217;m a person who kind of inspired them to reach [inaudible], it just has had a really profound effect on me personally, I think.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;d to talk a little bit more about inclusivity and workplaces, which I think it&#8217;s really interesting topic that we&#8217;ve been getting closer and closer to as we&#8217;ve been talking because we&#8217;re chatting about and not discussing tech and discussing these more important issues. I feel like now we&#8217;re wrapping it all up in a way like important issues in tech and I really like that. I like this perspective that you have of walking this long road and watching it as the culture has changed and the scenery has changed.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I know you&#8217;ve spoken before making on workplaces inclusive. We had a couple of listener questions about this too actually and what would be really interesting, I think would be to hear some suggestions about how junior devs or people that are earlier in their career, lower in the hierarchy, things that they maybe could do to make workplaces more inclusive. There&#8217;s a lot of advice, I think for senior management and what they can do from their level, where they have a lot of influence but do you think there&#8217;s anything that we could suggest for younger people to help contribute to that environment?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a really good question. I want people to feel like they do have something to contribute there but it&#8217;s hard. If I&#8217;m really thinking about your question, my initial reaction is that, it actually feels really bad to me to go to them and say, &#8220;You have to be the people to carry this forward.&#8221; It feels like we&#8217;ve done so much work just to get them here and then the first thing we do is give it to them like, &#8220;You have to help us because we have no idea what&#8217;s happening.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Even if that&#8217;s actually true to some extent, I think it&#8217;s really difficult and they already have a difficult job. We&#8217;re talking about inexperience people. They already have a really difficult job, which is to come into this space in tech where the stakes are really high, the expectations are really high, there&#8217;s a really strong culture of examining what you know and don&#8217;t know and impostor syndrome is rampant and they&#8217;re trying to make it. They&#8217;re trying to get established and to make themselves feel like they&#8217;re successful here and not get pushed out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I find it very hard to say that we&#8217;re going to give them another job, which is helping us be more inclusive. All that said, I do want to try to answer your question, which was about what advice can we give them on what can they do. I think my answer is a lot more probably kind of diplomatic than people would to hear. I could be a lot more militant about it but I would be doing them a disservice because it doesn&#8217;t work &#8212; being militant. It doesn&#8217;t work at work. In professional space, it does not work. I could tell you stories about that too. Instead, the advice that I had for people kind of going into these work spaces is to take a stance where you want to find the right venue to talk about these things but then be really open and transparent so that other people can see the conversations that are happening and choose to find ways to learn and get onboard. I&#8217;ll try to be more concrete because I think that&#8217;s really vague.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The thing that I&#8217;m seeing a lot more that I think works well is having diversity and inclusion working groups inside companies. There&#8217;s a set of people who are passionate about this and who want to help educate and help make change within the organization and they don&#8217;t have to push very hard. Instead what they do is they just create a group as a space for them to talk about it and to figure out what are the ways that they can try to influence the organization. Then that group can start to do things like ask for executive sponsorship, like have someone from the leadership team actually to come in sit in so that they can hear directly and learn. Ask for things like resources like, &#8220;Can we make tweaks to how the onboarding works.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the big things that I ended up doing at a previous job was to have D&amp;I as a message be part of our onboarding for every new hire so they would get a message about how diversity and inclusion was important to us and why and how to think about it. That&#8217;s actually really important, if you think about all the other ways that companies try to establish culture and how important they think culture is. Putting that message along with all the other culture messages was a really big win.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> My goal is to get people to kind of get together in the company, to find a way to be effective and talk about these things out loud but to make it really, really practical like talk about what you want to see happen at the organization and make real requests and not just talk about the issues and expect people to figure out what you need them to do. I hope that that&#8217;s a helpful answer and I think that working group, once you establish it is a really good place for new people from different underrepresented backgrounds, when they come into the organization, to find like-minded people to find support and it could be really good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that there can also be problems with bad attitudes that have gotten stuck in an organization. When fresh people come in and have a good attitude about something, I think there can be something very refreshing about a younger person coming in and acting just like, &#8220;Of course, we&#8217;re going to be understanding the people. Of course,&#8221; and I think that that can make people think about things differently. I read a lot of employment advice columns and stuff like that and one of the advice things that I see a lot when people like, &#8220;I want to ask my boss for this thing. I think it&#8217;s really reasonable,&#8221; is just ask them in a way that makes it sound you&#8217;re being totally reasonable like, &#8220;Of course, I know you want to help me with this so how can you help me?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think if you have a lot of fresh people coming in and just treating diversity and inclusion like that, like an obvious thing that we know you want to do but how do you do it, that might maybe take out some of those stuck attitude if possible. Maybe that&#8217;s an idealistic way to look at it but that&#8217;s kind of how I feel about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s a really great way to look at it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, especially if the company is growing quickly and you have a lot of new hires, you can change the culture just through quantity.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. That&#8217;s true. Maybe, I should phrase it more as a question because I want to hear if other people have had an experience where you do manage to get a D&amp;I conversation going, maybe you do even manage to affect the hiring but you bring in a bunch of people and all the people who are talking about it are the new people and it starts to feel like a cultural rift to people, like the people who have been at the company that are like, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to hire nice people,&#8221; and they want to have all these really uncomfortable conversations and they&#8217;re really changing all the culture around D&amp;I stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;ve seen that be a place for a lot of tension to arise, especially in the way that you say which is like they&#8217;re taking over. Even if that&#8217;s happening, even if you might be starting to win with quantity, those people who have been there, they actually have a lot of institutional power and they can set up a lot of really conflicting conversations. I&#8217;ve seen that happened.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I did have an experience a little bit like that. It was not at a technology company but I got invited to this diversity and inclusion training, which like a workshop. Being a newer person at the company, the team I was on was pretty diverse. We didn&#8217;t really have discussions about it but it was kind of known that we were trying to get as many different perspectives as possible. But when I went to the training, there are a lot of people who had been at the company for a long time like 20 years and this was the first time they&#8217;d had some diversity and inclusion training. It became pretty intense pretty fast because there were some people who were saying for the first time, experiences that they had had every day that were bothering them, which made other people feel like, &#8220;I&#8217;ve worked next to you for 15 years. Why didn&#8217;t you ever say anything? I thought we had a real friendship. Now, I feel like I don&#8217;t know who you are because I didn&#8217;t know this was even an issue.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I was just sitting there and like, &#8220;Oh, my gosh. What is going on at this company?&#8221; because I can tell that a lot of things like what you said Marco, are kind of deep-seated and they&#8217;ve been around a long time. I think it&#8217;s hard to figure out, how do you scrape that out and start again because they were trying to move in a new direction. They had done a lot of things like make these resource groups for all kinds of different groups of people, different types of populations of people that might work at the company and those groups seem to be functioning.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But I think it kind of had the problem within our little group. There was an LGBT for instance so within that group, then everybody there is fine. But then when you go back to the group that you might work in every day, that hasn&#8217;t really changed. You might feel more comfortable individually in certain circumstances but you&#8217;re not really feeling comfortable talking about this at work or even expressing situations that may arise and how that might not be the best way to handle it. I think it&#8217;s a really big challenge because it&#8217;s not easy when I think is a lot of companies ignore it because it&#8217;s like how do you get to that person who is senior or who has been there for a long time and may not even know what they&#8217;re doing and how what they&#8217;re doing is affecting people?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But then also, how do you get to those people who maybe they aren&#8217;t actually doing or saying the wrong things but they&#8217;re friends with those people and they don&#8217;t know how to think about them now because it&#8217;s a new set of information that you&#8217;re giving them about how to behave and how to think about certain things and they don&#8217;t know what that means. If I&#8217;m friends with this person but they hold these views and they&#8217;ve expressed them before, how do I work with them again?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s really huge. I really appreciate you sharing that. I think it&#8217;s a really big problem. If there&#8217;s something that I&#8217;ve also kind of had to come around to, it&#8217;s the idea that even though a lot of these things are important and need to change, we can&#8217;t take it for granted that people are going to get there soon and this shouldn&#8217;t be hard for them. We can kind of tend to talk about it. It should be obvious or this is just the right thing and people kind of just realize that. It actually is a journey. It takes a long time and there&#8217;s a lot of discomfort that people have to go through.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When you amplify that with working relationships, it&#8217;s going to be tough. I think part of what I heard about what you&#8217;re getting at is this thing where people who have a working relationship and all of a sudden have presented with all these really tough conversations about diversity and inclusion. It&#8217;s their same coworkers who are starting to speak up about these things and admit that they&#8217;ve been made to feel uncomfortable. They&#8217;ve been made to feel like people are using micro-aggressions against them. They feel like they&#8217;ve been held back and there&#8217;s going to be reactions to that like, &#8220;We haven&#8217;t talked about this. You haven&#8217;t said anything to me.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I had that problem for a little while in different context when I started talking about how black people have to deal with being in friendships with white people and I have all of my white friends coming to me like, &#8220;Have I ever done anything that makes you feel uncomfortable?&#8221; and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Probably, yes but we don&#8217;t have to talk about it all the time.&#8221; It&#8217;s not a thing where we have to make it a big central part of our relationship but they were having a lot harder time with it. All of a sudden, they have to contend with the fact that I have not been sharing my full self with them as a way for us to be friends. That&#8217;s what it is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When we talk about privilege and being marginalized, it&#8217;s really that difference in comfort level, where you can bring your whole self into a situation and feel your whole self is going to be accepted. When you&#8217;re on that privilege side, that&#8217;s what you do. You&#8217;re not holding anything back from people because nothing that you could tell people is going to be a problem. Whereas, there&#8217;s a different kind of person, they have to actually be really scrutinous of the things that they are public about that they share with people and they only bring part of themselves into all of your relationships, especially at work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then when the people on this privilege side of this dynamic start to really understand that, then they realize the whole conversation that they&#8217;ve been having with this person now feels like it was wrong. I even had people feel like they feel that they&#8217;ve been deceived like, &#8220;I thought we&#8217;re friends but we&#8217;re not.&#8221; Do you know what I mean?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s a whole journey that I think people have to go on. I don&#8217;t think that it&#8217;s something that we can help with to be honest. But I do think we have to, at least acknowledge it and let people know that we have to provide space for people to go through that if we want to preserve those working relationships, if that makes sense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As somebody who&#8217;s been the white person on that side of the conversation once or twice, I think for me it&#8217;s really important that I try to make sure not to fall into the trap of making my friends take care of me through that process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve had a lot of experiences on that too. I&#8217;ve talked about this before because I&#8217;ve given people advice like, &#8220;If you says something that makes them feeling uncomfortable, just apologize and move on.&#8221; Otherwise, you get this weird reverse situation, where I have to comfort people. My friends will call and be like, &#8220;I feel so bad. I messed up your pronouns again. I&#8217;m such a bad friend. I&#8217;m such a bad person,&#8221; and I have to be like, &#8220;I&#8217;m not mad at you for trying but now, I&#8217;m comforting you because you mis-gendered me and that&#8217;s really tiring.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, or you have to tell them how to do better and give them an impromptu education class like here&#8217;s what you should do, here&#8217;s what you should have done.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like educating people but I like to do it when I feel up to it, not when I&#8217;m on demand for it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, for sure. It&#8217;s tough as a community, especially [inaudible] circles, we don&#8217;t get to talk as much about how this stuff affects persons or relationships. I&#8217;ve been talking a lot about it in the context of politics. There&#8217;s a real rift in people&#8217;s families, where there&#8217;s so much going on right now and there&#8217;s such a sharp divide between people but these are your family. These are your close friends. You can&#8217;t really stop talking to them. You&#8217;re very restricted in a way that you can kind of protect yourself from having to have some interaction with these people and yet, it can be traumatizing. It&#8217;s a real issue.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think we need to talk more about how we can actually start to tackle these things on a personal level because to be honest, I think the wider movement is really, really good and it&#8217;s really, really necessary but we have the most leverage with the people who were closest to. The most actual power to help people understand and to educate them and to help bring them along are the people who are close to them and have that power. Yet, it&#8217;s the most challenging for the person who has to go into that really charged situation. I think there&#8217;s a lot of value to talking more about it but it&#8217;s also tough.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I read something that [inaudible] said, &#8220;Facebook makes you hate people that you know and Twitter makes you love people that you&#8217;ve never met,&#8221; and I think that&#8217;s what you&#8217;re talking about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I saw that. That was great. It&#8217;s really accurate but [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>On that note, if I can flip that earlier question around, for somebody who like me, maybe at the center of the intersection of all the privileges, are there ways that I can help champion people and advocate on their behalf and help educate folks while still staying in my lane? Are there things that you wish somebody might, like me, could have done for you? And I realize that &#8216;for you&#8217; is sort of loaded.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I hear you, like what&#8217;s the right way to be an ally, I think is the conversation that we&#8217;re having in. It&#8217;s not something you take for granted. I think allies are also having a really hard time these days, for better or worse. It&#8217;s a tough space to be in. The stance that I take today, say we&#8217;re picking context and say, we&#8217;re talking about how to advance diversity and inclusion at work. I think the right thing to do is to make sure your voice is heard in support of the people who are trying to push initiatives. The thing that happens a lot is if I&#8217;m pushing an initiative that has to do with trying to bring more people of color into our hiring funnel. I think a lot of times people choose that moment to say, &#8220;That&#8217;s not my lane so I shouldn&#8217;t say anything.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But what that does is create a dynamic where it feels like I&#8217;m the only person that&#8217;s pushing for things or like I&#8217;m the person that has to do all the work to make something happen. That&#8217;s not a great place to be. My goal when I bring this stuff into a company is for it to be a company-wide value. That doesn&#8217;t mean that everybody has to be onboard. There are no company-wide values that every single person agrees with but what I do mean is that I want to know that people across the company are invested in seeing these things happen, because they&#8217;ve been set up as a company-wide value.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think diversity and inclusion is one of those where we fall short because we allow the burden to fall on the underrepresented people like, &#8220;Oh, yeah. They&#8217;re going to do a thing and I&#8217;m just going to stay out of the way and try to not mess it up,&#8221; which is a stance that you can take. But honestly, what I think needs to happen is for everybody to show support in a way that makes it easier for it to actually be a company-wide activity.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That can look a number of different ways. If I say I want to put on an event, to bring in underrepresented people and have it hosted at the company, then it&#8217;s really great for other people who are not me to say, &#8220;That sounds really great. I want to help out with that,&#8221; or like, &#8220;I&#8217;m going encourage some other people to help out with that.&#8221; Use whatever privilege you have to get other people engaged. There’s a thing about letting people drive the initiatives and those should be the people who are definitely centered but we still need help. We still need support and there&#8217;s more than just the spearhead part that goes with it. Just showing up and showing support and being ready to help is really great. That&#8217;s the thing that I think we need the most and it goes back to the conversation we&#8217;re having about having a critical mass of people, it really gives these things momentum. I think there are a lot more people who agree but then feel they shouldn&#8217;t show up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;ll share something I think is a little bit more concrete, which I think was really eye-opening for me. We had a working group at a previous job &#8212; D&amp;I working group &#8212; and there were people who would always express that they appreciate what was happening but they never showed up to the working group meetings and they actually volunteered to help with any of the initiatives. There was a white woman and I went up to her and I feel I had a good enough relationship with her that I could just ask so I asked like, &#8220;Why don&#8217;t you show up to the meetings? Is there a problem? I&#8217;d really like to hear if you feel there&#8217;s something that&#8217;s keeping you from feeling welcome.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I was expecting to hear a number of other things but what she said to me was actually surprising, which she said, &#8220;No, I&#8217;m totally onboard. I totally like it but I feel like as a straight white woman, I have almost the entirety of the privilege that we&#8217;re talking about with one exception so I just feel like I should stay out of it because I don&#8217;t want to take up space where I feel like I have a ton of privilege already.&#8221; She was seeing the group as a place where you come to get resources, rather than one where you come to help and execute and actually make things happen and shows support. I think there&#8217;s definitely a conversation to have about what people think the purpose of these D&amp;I initiatives are and who should be involved. We definitely need people to be involved. There&#8217;s just like, we can have to talk about the right way to do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting. That&#8217;s another line that I have a hard time walking is trying to read a space and figure out whether it&#8217;s a space for mutual support, where if I go in and I&#8217;m deluding whatever&#8217;s happening there versus a place where I can show up and help.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. We had those conversations in the working group. I think it&#8217;s really important to establish the goals and the mission and governance and stuff. It&#8217;s going to feel like work. It should feel like work if you&#8217;re doing it right but I think we try to find the balance. Sometimes it is about being able to have these conversations in a space where people are like-minded but it&#8217;s also about action like it should definitely be results-oriented, which is something that I think people struggle with sometimes. They want to spend more time on the talking because they feel they have a lot to learn and that&#8217;s totally fine. You should do it but it also has to be results-oriented, I think.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If someone want to do get involved in something like that or even start their own working group like that, do you have any advice on a good place to start?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Meaning like what should the group do? Is that what you&#8217;re asking?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, like what&#8217;s a good thing to focus on in the beginning and if you have any advice on how to organize?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It really only takes just having a meeting. I think the way that you socialize, it matters. I think you can connect with people individually who you know to be like-minded and you shop that idea around with them. Then you go to people that you think are allies or that you can, at least trust to have the conversation with. You go to people in leadership and you have that conversation with them to know that they are not going to be obstructive. If that conversation doesn&#8217;t go well, it may be a challenge to start a group. But if they&#8217;re onboard and they&#8217;re supportive, then you can ask about the right way to broadcast so you can tell people like, &#8220;This is happening. It&#8217;s totally optional but show up. We&#8217;re going to have our first meeting and talk about what we want to do.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think the first couple of meetings are just going to be about getting to know why people showed up and what their expectations are and then you can go from there. You&#8217;re going to have a plethora of people show up for different reasons. That&#8217;s okay but start to establish what you think the group is about and what you want to see happen. The primary thing, I think to ask and to go around the room is what do you want to see happen at the company around D&amp;I and that should help drive a lot of things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We mentioned at the top of the show that transition that you&#8217;ve gone through from web developer to director of engineering. I&#8217;m wondering, as you&#8217;ve gone through that journey, how has that informed your approach to how you advocate for a D&amp;I.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s a big shift. I believe that managers and leaders at the organization have the most leverage. They have the most institutional power to make these things happen, to make them acceptable and to really drive action. I think when I became a manager, a lot of my impetus for doing that was so that I could see the things happen that I cared about the most. It&#8217;s not because I really wanted to be a manager. It&#8217;s not because I felt it was a great promotion or whatever. It actually felt terrifying to me and also, I was really sad that I didn&#8217;t get to program as much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It was really kind of bittersweet transition but when I was thinking about it, all these things that I care a lot about like there&#8217;s a moment I think where, if you care a lot about something, you may have to decide that you should do it. If there&#8217;s a problem and you want to see it get better, that might mean it&#8217;s your job. I had to really take responsibility for that and then figure out how to use that leverage as a manager. The thing that changed to your point directly is that I went from advocating for things to putting myself in a position to say yes. That is what you can do that is fundamentally different as a manager is that you actually control resources and that you can be the person to say yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When we&#8217;re talking about companies, a lot of times it is individual contributors who want to see things happen and they are talking to leadership. They&#8217;re talking to the company. I think it&#8217;s great if you can get the executive level people involved. It&#8217;s great to have that buy in at the executive level but they&#8217;re not going to do things. They have a whole job of running a company. They&#8217;re really busy. They&#8217;re not going to actually show up to make things happen. There&#8217;s going to say, &#8220;Yes. This is awesome. Do [inaudible] and I will support it.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think as a manager on my team, in my department or however wide I felt I can stretch my influence, like I show up and just try to say yes to things so that they can move forward and that&#8217;s my direct contribution to making these things happen. The upside of being a manager is that people don&#8217;t tell you not to do things. As I see, you can have all these initiatives and you can try to carry them forward and someone is going to be like, &#8220;I&#8217;m not sure it&#8217;s the right time,&#8221; or they can give you some push back and you learn to recognize that institutional push back.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As managers, we all have that problem like I can do things and I can have other people do things like I&#8217;m telling them, I&#8217;m pushing them forward or whatever. I&#8217;m sponsoring them. I&#8217;m the person who&#8217;s kind of advocating for this. It&#8217;s much harder for people to shut me down. It&#8217;s just a big part of when I tell people how to make D&amp;I work at their company. If you&#8217;re management layer, that middle management layer, above IC but below the executive team, if they&#8217;re not engaged, it&#8217;s going to actually be really difficult to make things happen. I do my part there by showing up at that layer and saying yes to things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is the time of the show when we have reflections and we talk about something that stuck out in our conversation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Way back at the beginning of this show, Marco said that a while ago, he felt he had the right to speak for other underrepresented groups but then, he decided he didn&#8217;t. He can only speak for himself and this illustrates why diversity and inclusion is so hard because it&#8217;s not one thing. You can&#8217;t just like be more accommodating to not white men. You have to be more accommodating to women. You have to be more accommodating to black people and you have to care about LGBT and that&#8217;s not just one group. Diversity is inherently about a lot of people and that is one thing that makes it so hard so I really like the part about, if you start a group about this, start by listening to people, to lots of people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One thing that stuck out for me again towards the beginning of the show, Marco, you were talking about your transition and how you found your lane and you said a couple of things that really stuck out for me, which were making sure I was seen as a person who was having these conversations. Then you talked about being just in it to not be wrong. Both of those are traps that I fall into all the damn time so I&#8217;m really glad to have those named and have a little bit more of a specific label on it than just plain defensiveness, which is the category that I feel that those fall into, at least for me so thank you very much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things that I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot about with this sort of results-oriented approach is this difference between training and teaching and educating about things, versus putting together a working group to actually get things done and supporting that working group to actually get things done. I want to thank you for that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think in general, we need to shift the way we think about education and putting all of these type of things that we do into actionable results-oriented things like thinking about what type of company we want to have, what type of world we want to live in, what type of community we want to live in and what they&#8217;re going to take to get there and how can we start putting working groups in place to actually get us wherever it is we want to be and then support those groups.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One thing that I really took away from this is the idea that it&#8217;s okay to be wrong and that brought up earlier in the context of you can admit you&#8217;re wrong and that&#8217;s okay. But I think there&#8217;s even a flip side of it, where I&#8217;ve been in situations where I&#8217;m so afraid that I&#8217;m going to be wrong that I don&#8217;t want to do or say anything and it&#8217;s just paralyzing like, I&#8217;m going to post something and someone&#8217;s not going to like it. People don&#8217;t have to everything I post and if someone doesn&#8217;t like it and they say something that makes me change my mind about it, I&#8217;m also allowed to change my mind about it. That&#8217;s why I think what both Marco and Sam said about sincerely apologizing being a superpower is really true and I&#8217;m going to think more about that in practice and then maybe I won&#8217;t live in such fear of being wrong.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Just as an aside, it does take practice, like giving sincere apologies actually feels terrible for a while and then actually it feels great so. I definitely recommend practicing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think what I got out of our conversation is how hard it is to be who you want to be or be the person that you think you are in a world where it feels like people are constantly taking sides. You want to speak up, you want to have something to say, you want to support the right people, you don&#8217;t want to just be on the sidelines but then sometimes, maybe being on the sidelines is the right place until you understand what&#8217;s really going on and that&#8217;s hard.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think there&#8217;s a lot of conversation about authenticity and how great it is to just be yourself all over the place and everywhere and not enough recognition of how hard that is to be yourself everywhere and it comes with consequences. Maybe, it shouldn&#8217;t. Maybe, we should be accepting people but I think that&#8217;s kind of why everybody is up in arms because that&#8217;s not the truth of how you live in the world. I think what I get out of that is just because you&#8217;re struggling to deal with that, it doesn&#8217;t mean you&#8217;re doing something wrong because it is hard and that everybody doesn&#8217;t have it figured it out but you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MARCO:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s great. I love it. Thanks so much for having me. I really, really enjoyed this conversation. It&#8217;s really great to dig into some of these things with a smaller group of people, where we can really expand on some of these ideas. It&#8217;s also super helpful for me to hear other people&#8217;s thoughts come together and reflection to my own so I really appreciate the opportunity. I just wanted to say thanks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In terms of reflections, the thing that I think is sitting with me that I&#8217;m definitely going to take with me is the reminder in what we talked about and how these dynamics play out for people who aren&#8217;t fully engaged with the D&amp;I conversation yet. I can be really strident in a lot of ways and challenging people to get better at this and to really learn about it and to do better but I also try to balance that with a certain level of empathy. This is actually a really hard journey to go on for everybody. I&#8217;ve been on it myself in different ways. I have a lot of axes of privilege for myself and I think that it&#8217;s really easy to lose that empathy for the people who are experiencing things changing really rapidly around them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Whether their anxiety comes from the right place is worth talking about but that doesn&#8217;t make it not real. It doesn&#8217;t make it not valid that they have a journey to go on and it can be jarring and difficult for them. I think it&#8217;s just a good reminder because we also have to deal with the consequences if we don&#8217;t acknowledge the importance of that. That&#8217;s why it&#8217;s hard. That&#8217;s why we&#8217;re on opposite sides because we have made things very difficult in a way that is difficult. It&#8217;s harder for people to kind of come along so that&#8217;s just a recipe for conflict.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think it&#8217;s something that I&#8217;m thinking about a lot because there&#8217;s a set of things that are important to me that I&#8217;m not going to back down from and that I&#8217;m not willing to compromise on but at the same time, I&#8217;m really worried about the conflict, both in the wider space and just in the tech community. I don&#8217;t want my life to be kind of fighting with people on the other side like I mentioned before. We have to find a way to find that space. We have to find a way to allow people to go on that journey in a way that it doesn&#8217;t cause them to kind of dig in their heels and entrench.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We still have to be human with each other and that&#8217;s really the goal of it to me is for us to all be learning how to be better humans. I mean, it&#8217;s everybody, not just us. I feel I have some more thinking to do about whether I&#8217;m really living that today but I really appreciate it and it got me thinking.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>All right. Well, thank you very much, Marco for coming on the show. We had a really wonderful time and thanks listeners. We&#8217;ll be back soon.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content like this, please do so at </span></i><a href="https://www.paypal.me/devreps"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">paypal.me/devreps</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.</span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><img class="alignnone wp-image-874" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/velocity_conf_rgb.png" alt="" width="389" height="223" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/velocity_conf_rgb.png 500w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/velocity_conf_rgb-300x172.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 389px) 100vw, 389px" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Build and maintain complex distributed systems.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">We are proud to be partnering with O’Reilly Media. Be sure to check out </span><a href="https://conferences.oreilly.com/velocity"><span style="font-weight: 400;">velocityconf.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> for all of the dates and cities coming this Fall.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The O’Reilly Velocity Conference is the best place to learn about continuous delivery, DevOps, operations, and performance. If you want to build distributed systems and apps that stand up to today’s technological challenges and customer expectations, make plans to attend Velocity in New York, NY (October 1-4) or London, UK (October 17-20). Register with code </span><b>PCGTC</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to save 25% on your Gold, Silver, or Bronze pass.</span></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span><br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Marco Rogers: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/polotek"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@polotek</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Greater Than Code: Like Uber, But For Not Being Shitty” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>02:04</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Background and Superpower</span></p>
<p><b>03:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Outspoken and Dealing with Pushback on Twitter</span></p>
<p><b>04:41 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Staying in Your Lane”</span></p>
<p><b>11:12 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– To Engage, or Not to Engage?</span></p>
<p><b>16:10 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Mixing Social Justice and a Tech Career</span></p>
<p><b>20:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Having Conversations Re: Diversity and Inclusion</span></p>
<p><b>23:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Making Workplaces Inclusive and Changing the Culture</span></p>
<p><b>35:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Educating Others &#8212; But Not on Demand</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-877" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/FB-2-300x210.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="210" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/FB-2-300x210.jpg 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/FB-2.jpg 420w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></p>
<p><b>38:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What is the right way to be an ally? Reading Spaces</span></p>
<p><b>43:59 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Starting/Organizing Wo]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><img class="alignnone wp-image-874" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/velocity_conf_rgb.png" alt="" width="389" height="223" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/velocity_conf_rgb.png 500w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/velocity_conf_rgb-300x172.png 300w" sizes="(max-width: 389px) 100vw, 389px" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Build and maintain complex distributed systems.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">We are proud to be partnering with O’Reilly Media. Be sure to check out </span><a href="https://conferences.oreilly.com/velocity"><span style="font-weight: 400;">velocityconf.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> for all of the dates and cities coming this Fall.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The O’Reilly Velocity Conference is the best place to learn about continuous delivery, DevOps, operations, and performance. If you want to build distributed systems and apps that stand up to today’s technological challenges and customer expectations, make plans to attend Velocity in New York, NY (October 1-4) or London, UK (October 17-20). Register with code </span><b>PCGTC</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> to save 25% on your Gold, Silver, or Bronze pass.</span></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span><br />
<a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Marco Rogers: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/polotek"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@polotek</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Greater Than Code: Like Uber, But For Not Being Shitty” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>02:04</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Background and Superpower</span></p>
<p><b>03:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Outspoken and Dealing with Pushback on Twitter</span></p>
<p><b>04:41 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Staying in Your Lane”</span></p>
<p><b>11:12 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– To Engage, or Not to Engage?</span></p>
<p><b>16:10 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Mixing Social Justice and a Tech Career</span></p>
<p><b>20:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Having Conversations Re: Diversity and Inclusion</span></p>
<p><b>23:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Making Workplaces Inclusive and Changing the Culture</span></p>
<p><b>35:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Educating Others &#8212; But Not on Demand</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-877" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/FB-2-300x210.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="210" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/FB-2-300x210.jpg 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/FB-2.jpg 420w" sizes="(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px" /></p>
<p><b>38:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What is the right way to be an ally? Reading Spaces</span></p>
<p><b>43:59 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Starting/Organizing Wo]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Marco.jpeg"></itunes:image>
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										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/871/048-finding-our-lane-with-marco-rogers.mp3" length="54764965" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>57:03</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>047: Communicating Across Boundaries with Declan Whelan</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/047-communicating-across-boundaries-with-declan-whelan/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 20 Sep 2017 05:00:10 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=850</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Declan Whelan joins us to talk about communicating across boundaries: cross-cultural communication dynamics, adopting practices across teams, and technical debt vs technical health.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Declan Whelan joins us to talk about communicating across boundaries: cross-cultural communication dynamics, adopting practices across teams, and technical debt vs technical health.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Declan Whelan: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/dwhelan"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@dwhelan</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://leanintuit.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Leanintuit</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “I Rolled a Natural 20 For My Agility Check” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:31</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Background and Superpower; Empathy</span></p>
<p><b>09:08 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Cross-Cultural Communication Dynamics</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.agilealliance.org/women-in-agile-2017/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Women in Agile</span></a></p>
<p><b>15:48 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Biases, Understanding Dynamics, and Facilitating as an Ally</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">&#8220;To have biases is to be human.<br />
It&#8217;s not a bad thing.&#8221; <a href="https://twitter.com/dwhelan">@dwhelan</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/902935755533807616">August 30, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>21:02 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Authentic</span></p>
<p><b>25:31 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Is Agile something that you are or something that you do?</span></p>
<p><b>35:37 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Adopting Practices Across Teams</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">“</span></i><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">&#8211; Ralph Waldo Emerson</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">People love consistency. Ask, what are the benefits? then<br />
strive for common outcomes, not common practices. <a href="https://twitter.com/dwhelan">@dwhelan</a><a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/902949956889313280">August 30, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>41:57 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Technical Debt and Technical Health: How do we amplify what we want?</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://codeclimate.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Code Climate</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Strive for common outcomes; not common practices.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Some situations should be taken as a promise for a conversation.</span></p>
<p><b>Janelle: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ask for permission.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Identifying and clarifying outcomes that we want.</span></p>
<p><b>Declan:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Figure out how you can have effective conversations with your teams.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Thank you </b><a href="https://twitter.com/dwhelan"><b>Declan Whelan</b></a><b> for your patronage!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Also, tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, everyone. I&#8217;m Janelle Klein and this is Episode 47 of &#8216;I Rolled a Natural 20 For My Agility Check&#8217; and I&#8217;d like to introduce my fabulous co-host, Sam Livingston-Gray.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Why, thank you, Janelle and because you called me fabulous, I will gently point out that this is, in fact Greater Than Code. I am also very pleased to introduce my recent birthday-having friend, Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Sam. Yesterday, I got to hold three snakes, a scorpion, a tarantula and an alligator. But today, I get to hang out with you all, especially Coraline Ada Ehmke.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hey, everybody. We have a special guest today, Declan Whelan. Declan has been fascinated with technology for a very long time. He hand-soldered his first computer, graduated with the first computer engineering cohort at the University of Waterloo and has been immersed in software ever since. Along the way, he got a new extreme programming in the broader agile movement, where he does coaching, speaking and thought-leadering. Declan is a board member of the Agile Alliance who is particularly proud of co-chairing on agile, the Agile Alliance Online Conference and for helping bring and deliver agile to life. Welcome Declan.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello. Welcome everyone.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Declan, your bio is very interesting. I&#8217;m particularly interested in the fact that you hand-soldered your first computer but what we always like to do when we start out is to get a sense of who you are as a person and we start out by asking, what is your superpower and how did you discover it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a really great one. I sort of have this Canadian modesty thing going where I&#8217;m thinking, &#8220;Do I have any superpowers?&#8221; Maybe I have a lot of strong powers, I think and probably one of them would be around empathy. For various reasons, I tend to be quite good at picking up on where people are at in interactions and looking to make outcomes for training and work be more productive because I&#8217;d feel I can engage people and meet them where they are.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;re Canadian. That&#8217;s really interesting. Does that mean you&#8217;re going to be answering all the questions in both English and French?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, it just means I&#8217;ll preface every response with, &#8220;I&#8217;m sorry, but.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nice. Our fabulous editor will have to edit these &#8216;sorrys&#8217; out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And how thankful I am that we have the prime minister that we do right now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ll trade you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, please.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Join the list. You&#8217;re about 20 up on that list that had said the same thing. But trying times for sure for everyone.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you think you&#8217;re always empathetic person or is that something that you developed over the course of your career?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, I think it&#8217;s something that was in our family. I remember having that as far back as I can remember. I don&#8217;t know if that&#8217;s innate or whether it was something that was fostered growing up when I was very young but I feel it&#8217;s something that I carry with me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Interesting. It&#8217;s easy for me to see empathy as something that&#8217;s fostered. Is there an innate empathetic ability?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s certainly a lack of it, right? Witness sociopaths?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s true.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like to think that empathy isn&#8217;t something that you have but something that you do. I think you have to practice empathy and as you practice empathy, you get better at empathy. It has been demonstrated that empathy can be learned.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Certainly, empathy can be learned although I have not studied it but that makes sense to me. I think it might be, in my case with my family, we weren&#8217;t super expressive so to understand and interact with the family, it was a matter of really picking up on a lot of non-visual cues and so on because we were very low conflict family. I think it was a good breeding ground for empathy because you have to read between the lines on a lot of things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had a question here about this because I&#8217;m listening to this and we have semantics of words like a word has a certain meaning attached to it. When you talk to different people and they&#8217;re describing something they experience and attributing a word to it, I feel like the meaning of what you&#8217;re saying is valid in terms of pointing out this quality that is innate. It&#8217;s just that empathy has this secondary meaning that it&#8217;s more skill-oriented, I think in addition to the innate thing because I&#8217;m thinking like my past and I used to be really hyper sensitive to emotional energy in the room. I felt like going around the school, it feel like there were thousand eyeballs on me and I can feel everything.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then after going through this super tragic experience in my life and getting traumatized and shoving all the stuff down, essentially I spent half my life trying to be who everyone else wanted me to be because I was so focused on what everyone else was thinking that I couldn&#8217;t feel myself. Then I made this transition in life where I flipped and I shut all that stuff down so that I couldn&#8217;t feel stuff anymore and that innate ability thing kind of went away. But it&#8217;s very much attached to empathy. I guess what I&#8217;m wondering is if you were to come up with a different words to describe this thing in your experience, what kind of words or definition would you use to describe the thing you&#8217;re talking about?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe in terms of interactions, which is where empathy would clearly show because you&#8217;re interacting with people, it would be just being in tune. Being in sync with the dynamics that are going on around me in terms of where people are and what they want to accomplish and reading between the lines, that&#8217;s a lot of words. It might not even be &#8217;empathy.&#8217; It&#8217;s an interesting point now maybe it&#8217;s not quite the right word.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Declan, you talked about how in your low-conflict family, you are acquired to learn to read between the lines on a lot of things. That&#8217;s a great skill to have but can you really ask other people to do that? Is that a good expectation to have for people you work with?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There are some downsides to that. For example, I find it difficult to be in high conflict situations but when I talk to other people, they say, everyone does so I have no idea. On my meter scale, is it more difficult for me? I think it&#8217;s neither good nor bad to some extent. I think it just was the way I was raised. I think a higher level would be having the courage and directness to have open and frank conversations when needed. That&#8217;s something that I definitely had to work at, rather than not being sort of anywhere nurtured in my youth.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Those explicit conversations that are open and frank but not aggressive, not attack-y, those are something that we can fall back to because we&#8217;re from different cultures and we didn&#8217;t all grow up living together all the time. We don&#8217;t have to seem interpretations of those subtle cues or lack thereof.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, there&#8217;s a segue here into cross-cultural communication dynamics where as Americans, we value direct forthright communication and we also interact in a very egalitarian way, where we prefer to be called by our first names and other cultures have more highly contextual communication, where somebody will say something that hints at something else and you&#8217;re supposed to have all of this context in your head to be able to interpret that comment correctly. Those cultures can often also be more hierarchical, more formal as well. There&#8217;s a lot of different axes that this goes along.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What do you do when you&#8217;re not naturally in sync with someone else or with other people on the team?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Empathy?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But that&#8217;s totally different from guessing. You don&#8217;t guess with people you don&#8217;t share a ton of contexts with.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right and that&#8217;s why I wanted to point that out. It&#8217;s because everybody tends to think that everybody else thinks the way they do right. But as Americans, we are often totally unaware that there are these other layers of conversation going on, especially when we interact with people who did not grow up in our culture. It&#8217;s incumbent upon us, as Americans, to be aware that there are different cultural communication styles and try to have, at least some idea first that there are different ones and secondly, what they are and how to adapt your own communication style to deal with that, which is why I said, &#8220;Empathy?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Declan, have you been into that in your work where you&#8217;re working with teams, consisting of people from different cultures and how to adapt a communication style that&#8217;s more inclusive of different ways of thinking?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah, for sure. I think it&#8217;s becoming more prevalent. I live in Toronto so it&#8217;s a very high multicultural element to the makeup of society. That happens a lot and it can cut, not only on culture lines but gender lines and power status with any organizations. But specifically about culture, for example, where I have the challenges more with cultures that are more direct, where it&#8217;s expected to say what you really think. That direct conversation is I find to be somewhat challenging, especially if there&#8217;s a lot of people in the room because those people can tend to dominate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I was a thinking that what I strive to be is just authentic. Just showing up as me and cross culturally, I think people get when you&#8217;re being authentic and if people trust you that you don&#8217;t have a hidden agenda, that you&#8217;re being honest and frank, then I think that really helps cut through a lot of cultural barriers. I am not an expert in this by any stretch but I think, a lot of non-verbal cues tend to be more consistent across cultures.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It doesn&#8217;t always work. I noticed when I worked with people from India, they&#8217;ll often shake their head, they&#8217;ll put their head sideways, going side to side when they mean yes. That&#8217;s the signal that they&#8217;re following you. It&#8217;s a subtle yes. I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;ve encountered that. That took a while because they&#8217;re saying yes but your brain is seeing no. That can be interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As Americans, do we have a greater privilege to be ourselves, to express ourselves and be understood because of basically Hollywood. I feel like, especially being from the Midwest, freaking everybody can understand my accent because it&#8217;s the accent that&#8217;s used in television and movies.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, we absolutely benefit from cultural hegemony.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Especially, I think with English as a first language. To me, English first would be huge. I always have tremendous respect for people that are having deep conversations in their second or third language.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I grow up with a Swedish and she puns multilingually which is very impressive.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a Swedish friend and he practices by doing my cryptic crosswords in English. I can&#8217;t do a cryptic crossword in my own language.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sort of go back to talking about with trying to read between the lines, trying to put yourself in someone else&#8217;s position and trying to be aware of the power dynamics that are inherent in some languages, how does that relate to the practice of agile methodologies, which are very rigid and very terse, at least in my experience.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting. I wouldn&#8217;t have been term them that way. I think maybe because things like stand ups had to be terse. Is that what you mean, Coraline?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, in terms of stand ups, where your communication style is very terse but you have very important things to communicate. How can you ensure that you&#8217;re being respectful of your audience and also, how can your audience assure you that they&#8217;re hearing what you&#8217;re saying?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I actually think of agile as being the opposite. To me, you do have the stand ups but they&#8217;re really just nothing of substance of any depth should be happening there. It&#8217;s just more of like, what are you doing today, here&#8217;s what I&#8217;m going to do, what are you going to do and then it&#8217;s like, &#8220;Oh, we&#8217;re having an issue with X. Okay, Well let&#8217;s take that off line.&#8221; The empathetic conversations are likely to happen outside of that terse event. Maybe we&#8217;re into some things like retrospective, which I feel like if we&#8217;re going to do one agile practice, it should be about respective. If you&#8217;re facilitating retrospectives, which I often do, then you&#8217;re really have a responsibility to make sure all of the voices in the room are heard and now, you&#8217;re into a wide variety of facilitation techniques. I think agile actually provides for much deeper conversations because things like user story or a promise for a conversation. My experiences that agile done well is actually a very rich dynamic context for interaction.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think pairing does that for me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, or mob programming even to a wider extent with teams.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We talked about trying to be explicit and having room for larger conversations in order to convey across cultures but those cultures, as Janelle and Sam are pointing out in the chat aren&#8217;t just the cultures you grow up in. They&#8217;re also the cultures you worked in like are you a tester? Are you a manager? Are you frontend developer?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, the classic cross cultural barrier there, of course is tech versus management, which is often very much framed as a versus.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. What might be interesting is I had the good fortune of agile in 2017. I&#8217;m going to an event, which was called Women in Agile. Before the conference, they had a half-day session. They had a keynote, which was sounded awesome. Unfortunately, I missed the keynote and then they had some open space sessions, followed by some lightning talks that were mentor talks. It was really interesting as a man being present there and the dynamic that puts for saving me as the &#8216;privilege&#8217; one in that context. To some extent, I think there were mirrors with that and the tech management role or the cross cultural one where you sit in a privileged position, you&#8217;re working with people that may, for whatever reasons not feel as empowered as you might.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I hosted an open space work session really on how men could become better allies. I think some of those things that emerged from that session would be good insights to human nature that would support, not only gender of diversity but other forms of differences across people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What are some of those?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess &#8212; and I&#8217;m repeating back what I learned &#8212; one of them was &#8212; and it was sort of an insight to me &#8212; just to recognize that we all have biases and to have biases, to be human. It&#8217;s not emphatic. It&#8217;s just is. If you&#8217;re a human, you have biases and being aware as an individual that you may carry those biases. For example, when we started the session, it was named, &#8216;How men can become better allies,&#8217; and then we quickly change the title, &#8216;How everyone can become better allies,&#8217; because it was pointed out that some of the biases that I might hold around, say women in technology, women would might have those very same biases. There could well be a societal bias. That was insightful for me to realize that the biases that I carry might actually be shared by others, including the people that I might feel are in a &#8216;less powerful&#8217; situation here. That was insightful for me to glean that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But there&#8217;s a lots of little things that came up. Some of them just boiled down to good facilitation like have everyone speak as soon as you can in some organized session. Like within the first few minutes, just make sure everyone has had an opportunity to have a voice and to say something with us in a single word or a complete thought and giving room for people to speak soon and early. One that I noticed in the conference, I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;ve ever seen this, I ended up being at a table with a woman who I knew quite well and this very nice guy sat between us and then the three of us worked together on this exercise. I noticed that this guy who I didn&#8217;t know, would actually direct most of his attention and interest to me and what I was saying, rather than the woman. He had no reason to do that because we were complete strangers to him.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I was aware he was probably making some unconscious bias towards somehow treating me as a more credible voice or something, than the woman. What I would continually do in those as interactions is I would look at her, I would ask her for her opinion. If she said something, I&#8217;d say, &#8220;Oh, that&#8217;s a really good insight. Can you tell us more?&#8221; I really try to dial up and try to focus this other individual on the other voice in the room. I think some of this across cultural and perhaps gender diversity is really about being present and watching and understanding, whether dynamic are going and trying to pull other people in and redirect other people to be aware of those other people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because if you&#8217;re present in the moment, then you can notice your own bias and that of other people and here&#8217;s to direct your attention and to compensate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Like you were talking about you also a modeled the behavior that you wanted to see, which I thought was really interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It does take extra brain power to do that. Yeah, thanks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It seems to go back to the initial point to about empathy and authenticity in creating bridges between people. It seems like you could put the same ideas and principles in terms of the things that you learned with your superpowers. do you have any thoughts with regards to how do you see the skills and things that you brought into the table and how you see yourself using these superpower abilities that you learned? Can you relate those things back together again?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m not sure. I guess I would say, as I got to my career, I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;ve experienced this but when I was younger, I would be always tried to be the person that people wanted me to be and I want to be the expert in this or I&#8217;m not good at that or whatever it might be. But primarily, it&#8217;s about trying to look the way that people are expecting you to behave. What I&#8217;ve noticed in my career is that the more truly authentic I can be and pulling those skills in so it&#8217;s truly me showing up, then those generally lead to better outcomes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One thing that I have really learned that has worked really well for me is just asking for permission when unsure. Would you be open to some feedback right about now or would you mind if I jump in on that point because when one challenges an ally, I think often as a male say in gender diversity, &#8220;I don&#8217;t want to be sticking up for people that are more than happy to stick up for themselves. Thank you very much.&#8221; When I feel like the situation demands and I feel like I might want to interject or redirect because of some cultural or diversity, I&#8217;ll often find a way to ask permission from that person because ultimately, I&#8217;m trying to support them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s beautiful. That elevates them into a position of respect just by our example. We talk about authenticity but that it&#8217;s so abstract. What&#8217;s something that you do or say differently when you&#8217;re being authentic versus when you&#8217;re not?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a good question. One thing that I find works well for me is to really show vulnerability because I think people put up a facade and if you&#8217;re able to show, &#8220;I&#8217;m quite technical,&#8221; and if I screw up with some technical thing like I mistype something or made coding error, I just make a joke of it. &#8220;Oh, silly me. Look at that.&#8221; You&#8217;re showing that I&#8217;m not trying to have a facade of being the expert but we&#8217;re all human and we just all here doing our best. I think showing vulnerability, to me has been really effective for people to then and say, &#8220;It&#8217;s okay for me to just be who I am and show up how I choose to show up.&#8221; That would be one example of a practical authenticity.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, so pointing out your own mistakes and not freaking out over them. That&#8217;s one example of authenticity and vulnerability?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yup. I&#8217;m really good at having really bad jokes so I don&#8217;t hesitate to have really bad jokes that people grown over and then my lack of humor becomes another joke and it then becomes infectious and people find it, &#8220;It&#8217;s okay if I say that joke,&#8221; and then a lot of barriers are just dropped and people just acted as humans, rather than fulfilling a role that they perceive a need to in the context.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It seems to me that both of those ways of being authentic are a way of addressing a power imbalance or a power dynamic that you might have. I find that if I&#8217;m pairing with someone with less experience than I have, I actually will intentionally make mistakes to prove to them, to show them that I&#8217;m not infallible and everyone makes a mistakes and they shouldn&#8217;t feel ashamed of making mistakes themselves. I think it&#8217;s important to demonstrate that kind of vulnerability, to demonstrate that it&#8217;s okay not to know everything and it&#8217;s okay to make mistakes and it&#8217;s okay to get things wrong and no matter where you are in your career, those things are going to continue to happen to you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It sounds like something that [inaudible] said once where he was talking about when he joins a new team, he will try as quickly as possible to force the team into a failure mode to make something go wrong because he finds that making something presumably small and trivial go wrong is a good way to build trust in each other and in everybody&#8217;s abilities to pull themselves back out of that failure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Being able to deal with failure is so much more important than preventing it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Failure is inevitable, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, and Declan just pointed out that failure is also a tool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, Coraline. I really resonate with what you&#8217;re saying there about showing vulnerability. I must say, I&#8217;ve done that too. I have manufactured failures to show vulnerability. I prefer not to force it because people might sense that you&#8217;ve actually constructed this scenario. Maybe it&#8217;s ironic. I prefer just to be authentic and if something goes wrong, just deal with it in a moment.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Another example that happened to me a while ago, which was interesting. I was working with a management team and I was explaining something to them and they say, &#8220;How are we going to do this?&#8221; I have no idea, and they were very stunned. &#8220;I thought, you were the agile expert?&#8221; I said, &#8220;No. We&#8217;re cutting some new ground here. No one&#8217;s ever done exactly what we&#8217;re doing so we&#8217;re going to figure this out together. I have some ideas but let&#8217;s figure this out together.&#8221; That&#8217;s another way to show vulnerability is you don&#8217;t have to have the answers to everything.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, say, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know.&#8221; Yeah, that is a good example.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Especially, if you&#8217;re in a situation where you&#8217;re brought in as an &#8216;expert.&#8217; Early on in the conversation, you say, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know,&#8221; that I think opens up and models that we&#8217;re going to figure this out together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It seems to me that this sign of expertise is a willingness to collaborate and learn it and experiment, not expertise being always knowing the answer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, part of our job is to be not afraid to fail.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We talked earlier about empathy and the way I put it in the chat was that there&#8217;s a verb and a noun. I know, empathize is the verb form or whatever. But as I was trying to sketch out my question, I realized that empathy and ally are both words that people think of not necessarily as nouns but as attributes of a person. Rather than verbs, I think we should push people towards viewing empathy and ally as a behavior. I&#8217;m wondering, is the word agile is another one of those that falls into that pattern? Is agile something that you are or something that you do?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think a lot of agile where it does not work well is because it is doing in the sense of following the practices and the cargo cult of agile. I&#8217;m in the US, I can say &#8216;agile.&#8217; in Canada of course, I would say &#8216;agile.&#8217; Certainly, my experience is much more about, maybe it is a lot about mindset in terms of agile, which I do think of as more noun, like present, like the way that you act. But I think going down the superficiality of implementing practice, the acts that would occur in terms of conversations and the way that you plan and interact and pair from that behavioral perspective, I would agree that agile should be more of &#8216;here&#8217;s what we do around here to succeed,&#8217; rather than a set of practices just to distinguish those two different levels of doing, if you see what I mean.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that makes sense so there&#8217;s the behaviors that people think that performing them makes them agile, which are completely distinct from the actual behaviors like learning and adapting to feedback.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m just listening to this and my feathers are ruffling a little bit here because I think one of the problems with agile is the name agile and fundamentally, there&#8217;s this idea from a systems thinking level of this emergent behavior that we&#8217;re trying to describe of agility. If we are agile, if we do the agile things, then there&#8217;s an expectation that these emergence system level properties will un-exist. I see people trying to map this description of the system into a first person dynamic, then they&#8217;re doing all the things and they&#8217;re being all things and agility is an emergent from that particular system. There&#8217;s a huge disconnect.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you think about how most organizations run, it&#8217;s more of like a barge that can&#8217;t steer whatsoever than agile. I feel like there&#8217;s a huge disconnect, not only between the being, doing and as you&#8217;re saying, the two different types of doing but just a problem with a lack of words and ways to describe the system that we&#8217;re trying to create. I don&#8217;t know if that&#8217;s a question. I&#8217;m curious if you have any thoughts on that if that jump in your head.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe, a key part of truly being agile and I say truly with air quotes, is the notion of what is a system that can work for us. Rather than following an agile system, what is the system that we can construct together that&#8217;s going to achieve what we mutually want to get done. The system is in effect ours to build. I think maybe being agile is really being intentional about understanding the system that is and the system that you want and learning and iterating your way to that future state.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love that. That was beautiful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like to think of us not a system builders anymore but system movers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s really true because there&#8217;s always an &#8216;as-is.&#8217; It&#8217;s where we are now and how do we steer towards what we really want.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve heard a distinction made at different companies I worked for where people are kind of apologetic about their agile methodology and they&#8217;ll say something like, &#8220;We&#8217;re not &#8216;capital a&#8217; agile. We&#8217;re a &#8216;lowercase a&#8217; agile.&#8221; I wonder if that&#8217;s an attempt to say, &#8220;We&#8217;re not rigid practitioners. We&#8217;re not cargo culting. We&#8217;re actually trying to adapt to real working conditions,&#8221; although none of those companies actually, I would say demonstrated agility. Why do people make that distinction, do you think?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a great question. Maybe it&#8217;s the same what you&#8217;ve heard, Coraline but I also heard like, &#8220;We&#8217;re not true agile.&#8221; I know if you&#8217;ve heard that. Maybe &#8216;big a&#8217; agile to me is like the doing in the sense of we are doing these practices and to me, &#8216;small a&#8217; agile means we&#8217;re really adapting and the way that we work aligned with the principles of the agile manifesto, like we&#8217;re living and breathing that way. That&#8217;s what I think people mean by &#8216;big a&#8217; versus &#8216;little a.&#8217; To me, for example, start with new team and just do Kanban, rather than say, Scrum and say, &#8220;We&#8217;re just going to put up a Kanban board here to reflect the system that we have and the way that we just want to reflect where we currently are.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We don&#8217;t need to do all of the agile practices but let&#8217;s just start to think of what is our purpose, where we&#8217;re trying to go and how can we improve as we go. To me, that would might be the distinction between &#8216;little a&#8217; agile and &#8216;big a&#8217; agile. Is that what you&#8217;ve noticed, Coraline? Something like that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and Kanban is a great example of that because in my experience, when you do Kanban, you&#8217;re not doing sprints anymore. I just remember this one company I worked for that I think was treating agile methodologies as it was a scar that it grown over in an organizational wound. They had development practices in place that were actually harmful. Their remedy for it was, &#8220;We&#8217;ll adapt agile and all of our organizational problems will go away,&#8221; and they were so rigid about it and they did all of the recommended practices for agile methodology and they didn&#8217;t try to adapt their practices to the organizational culture or more importantly, the organizational culture to their practices. That made a really awful working environment because all these things that we were doing, just felt like an unnecessary process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve seen that too. I think people draw a big equal sign between agile and Scrum. They think, &#8220;We&#8217;re doing agile and that&#8217;s because we&#8217;re doing all the scrums stuff.&#8221; I like to point out people, &#8220;Go look at the manifesto. What specific practices are recommended from the agile manifesto?&#8221; I don&#8217;t think that there are any other than statements like business and developers should work together daily and things like that but there&#8217;s no specific dogma, if you will around practice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then if you go look at, say Scrum, then you can ask people, &#8220;What the Scrum say about our engineering practices?&#8221; Well, it says nothing. If you actually want to go down the dogma route and you go to the original material around that, you find that there&#8217;s very little around specific practice and that&#8217;s more around the principles and the values in how we work. But I think that&#8217;s hard for people to potentially see in the larger context because they&#8217;ve installed the agile. They have their plan and their training program and I think that&#8217;s a problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Where did that even come from? How do these practices get associated with agile when as you pointed, the agile manifesto doesn&#8217;t dictate practices?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s very natural because Day 1, you guys are going to be &#8212; you folks, I&#8217;ll try to get some more gender diverse terms in here &#8212; you folks are now at agile team and you could ask them, &#8220;Start to think and behave and act in a collaborative way,&#8221; and people would look at you, probably with glazed eyes and you say, &#8220;I wish you&#8217;d have a stand up every morning for 15 minutes. We&#8217;re going ask these questions.&#8221; Oh, that&#8217;s sounds a lot simpler. Let&#8217;s do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think in terms of starting down the agile road, I think practices are good because at least, it gets people starting to interact and behave. I think it&#8217;s important that they expose to values and principles but when they actually start, I think people need to start to do. Having guidance around good practice, I think is helpful. I&#8217;m an agile coach. I think maybe the difference might be, if you have good coaching and those coaches don&#8217;t need to be people that have that title, but people who&#8217;ve been there before and are able to guide and so on, if you have those people on your team, then I think your fine just to start with the road practices because in between those practices is where the real agility is going to bear, which you are giving people a frame to work in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The danger is when people start with those frames but they haven&#8217;t had the experience or the insights to really make it work within those teams, then it becomes cargo cults. Especially, if that&#8217;s [inaudible], like all the teams need to behave in the same way, now you are really constraining behavior. I&#8217;m just trying to say, a lot of the road practices can be good to, at least start the teams working in a certain way, hopefully as a stepping stone to something better. The danger is people get trapped into that step one.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really think what you said there about adopting a practice across teams being a warning sign. That&#8217;s what I heard you say, at least. It&#8217;s a very important point because every team develops its own culture, every team has its own challenges and how you respond to this challenges, in a way that makes you productive is going to necessarily be different.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and people really love consistency. If you have 12 teams, it would just be awesome if they all had the same leg sprints and they all measure progress in the same way so people will feel that there&#8217;s a lot of benefit from being consistent. I think there can be and then I say, &#8220;If that&#8217;s true, what are those benefits? Let&#8217;s talk about those,&#8221; and then, if you can move people away from the practice that you want to be consistent and shift the conversation to the outcomes that you want to be consistent, then you can have sort of consistent outcomes. You&#8217;ll say, &#8220;Let&#8217;s try for that,&#8221; and then ask each team, how are they going to achieve those common set of outcomes that we want. For example, reduce time to market or quality or whatever it is. But simply saying, &#8220;We&#8217;re all going to use Jira for tracking our work and that consistency will lead to something,&#8221; then explore that something. I find that that&#8217;s a good way to attempt to cut through that fallacy about common practice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love that. I have to do the obligatory reference quote. Emerson said, &#8220;A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.&#8221; The important word there is foolish consistency. I love what you said about consistency being centered on the outcomes, rather than the process. I think that makes a lot of sense. I wonder if lots of failure on the part of agile proponents of selling agile to management, are they setting unrealistic expectations or are they not going far enough to explain the focus on the outcome, rather than on the process?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think you&#8217;re probably right. I don&#8217;t have a lot of experience at the executive level or with large agile rollouts, if you will. I don&#8217;t have a lot of experience to understand how to do that better. I worked with a consultancy called &#8216;LeanIntuit&#8217; and Chris Chapman, one of my cohorts there keep saying, &#8220;Management goes first,&#8221; which I love, &#8220;Leadership goes first,&#8221; so if you want these teams to be agile, then we are going to start as a leadership team to work in an agile way. Let’s make our work visible. Let’s have daily stand ups, etcetera.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think, there&#8217;s dangers on these agile rollouts where, &#8220;Oh, we&#8217;ll fix up those teams and those people will do the agile and we&#8217;ll just see faster time to market.&#8221; Getting their leadership much more engaged of the purpose and the outcomes and having them demonstrate the behaviors that they want, I think that&#8217;s what is undervalued or missed in some of the larger agile rollouts that I&#8217;ve experienced myself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love this drive for common outcomes, not common practices. I&#8217;m so going to tweet that. What you said about locality about each team having its own culture, that&#8217;s also important. If you had 12 teams and you took the one that you personally find the most productive and want the other teams to be liked and you take their practices and impose them on other teams, then you&#8217;ve just magnified the disparity because those practices work for that team. If you force the other teams to use those practices, it&#8217;s actually a disadvantage for those teams, compared to being able to develop the practices that work for them personally. To me, it works.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, my brother is an architect, not a software architect but a real architect and they had &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; A bricks and mortar kind of a guy and they were doing an exercise around teamwork and they basically had a large group broken up into small teams. Each team had this puzzle. Their instructions were to get everyone back safely and they had to build this lunar thing with Lego and then bring an astronaut who was a little Lego stick figure back and they couldn&#8217;t move their ship until it was completely assembled according to some specifications. There&#8217;s some complexity in this.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Interesting thing was, his group turned out to be the only group that ever successfully completed the mission. The reason was when they divided people up into teams, people just focused on their team and they said, &#8220;We won,&#8221; but the instructions was everyone gets back safely so the exercise was not around trying to complete the task. It was about how you are going to share your information with the other teams so that everyone in the room wins.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think maybe that&#8217;s what I would think about with agile at the team level, rather than saying this team is working really well, you guys should be doing that. It&#8217;s about how do you promote cross-learning across these teams so they can learn from each other. In the same way that we promote pair programming is make sure that luncheon learns or maybe guest pairing or things like that to promote cross-team learning, would be the direction that I would go. I guess it&#8217;s sharing the learning, rather than the practice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s cool. I love that everyone gets back safely of this is not a competition and that gets back to where we started with communication and empathy. There&#8217;s a falsehood that comes up sometimes in some groups, where I&#8217;m talking and four people understand me but two people don&#8217;t or maybe just one person doesn&#8217;t. I&#8217;m like, &#8220;They understood so clearly, it&#8217;s not me,&#8221; but that&#8217;s wrong. As a person trying to share learning, if one person doesn&#8217;t understand, that&#8217;s still on me. Just because those other four happen to be able to read between the lines, maybe we share a lot of our contexts. I&#8217;m the one who has the ability to slow down and add new ones to whatever it takes, like the people with the Legos who had to proactively go and share information.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I agree.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Declan, was there anything else you&#8217;d like to bring up and talk about?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>To take a completely orthogonal tack is this idea that technical health. I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot and working a lot around technical debt. I&#8217;ve found it to be a very powerful metaphor but a metaphor that I think has somewhat trapped us into a way of thinking and that thinking sounds something like, &#8220;I&#8217;m carrying around this big bag of technical debt. We really ought to go and fix up that crap that we built last month or last year and it&#8217;s this albatross or this ball and chain thing that we&#8217;re dragging around with us.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I do want to make one slight distinction. I know people will always ask me and it&#8217;s always good to go into tech. There are definitely context where technical debt is good and I agree with that. I&#8217;m really talking about technical debt that&#8217;s really hampering value delivering where it&#8217;s really crushing the teams. What I&#8217;ve started to do is starts to change the conversation to technical health so how do we build an infrastructure and a way of coding and set of practices that enable us to have a technically healthy organization where we conserve and deliver on well and then technical health becomes the ability to deliver value and technical debt becomes the things in the code that are stopping you from doing that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This is relatively recent for me. I&#8217;ve been thinking about it for a while but I&#8217;ve only been talking about it more recently. I think it&#8217;s a lot more powerful just to have a conversation. for example, rather than talking about going to a CEO and say, &#8220;We really ought to clean up that crap,&#8221; it&#8217;s more like, &#8220;If we really want to be competitive in the future, there&#8217;s some things that we can do to improve how quickly and effectively a software comes out. We should probably invest in that, just like you would invest in making sure that your assembly line is working really well,&#8221; as a as an analogy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think just switching the term from debt to health sort of taps into positive psychology, where if you look at intervening with mental health issues, we all have them either ourselves or within our families, it turns out that when you focus on making the things that are problematic go away be it anxiety or depression and you&#8217;re able to get people through traditional techniques to spot where, &#8220;I&#8217;m okay now. I&#8217;m okay.&#8221; But if you can actually shift to a positive psychology stance where you really trying to dial up what makes people happy, the people come up with far better clinical outcomes. I think something similar can happen within our teams. Rather than focusing on removing this bad stuff, get people thinking about how do we amplify what we want, which is in an agile context, you&#8217;re affecting value delivery.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then it shifts the whole tone of the conversation and we don&#8217;t have to talk about past things or these other people wrote this crappy code or whatever it is. Let’s look forward and how do we build a healthy code base and a healthy deployment pipeline, etcetera. I think that sort of the level one of the difference. I&#8217;m finding that even simply just having conversations is being enabled by just using the term technical health, rather than technical debt. I think it&#8217;s leading to better conversations about what&#8217;s really going on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m really fascinated by this pivot that you&#8217;ve pointed out of when you focus on problems going away, your psychology shifts to this kind of avoidance pattern, this ball and chain of the technical debt that is dragging us back, versus when you focus on technical health and you shifted this positive psychology of how do we dial up what makes us happy, how do we amplify what it is we want. I love the correlation with the underlying psychological shift and how the semantics we choose in perfecting that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Looking at the world through this lens, how do we amplify what we want? I love that question. It’s a really powerful question. If you were to answer that question yourself, looking back across all of your experiences, what are the things that you found to be core to amplifying what you want. Can you even define what it is you want? At one level, value delivery but what is it that we want in organization? What is it that we want in a culture? How do we amplify what we want?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it would be a start with identifying what we want and just being clear about what that is. Having a clear sense of purpose and that purpose can be and it should be, a variety of things. It could be what do our customers expect of us, who are internal stakeholders? But what is just as important to me is what do I want and what do you want as individuals from this work that we&#8217;re going to do together. To some extent, I think step one is sort of having a clear understanding in open dialogue around what it is that we want.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think the conversation gets a little bit easier than if you got clarity around that, you can ask things like how can we measure that? What I really like to put into place with teams is team happiness. How happy are we working here and where would we like to be and talk about that? Then when you see things like our happiness is at a three and we really prefer to be at a four out of five, then what can we do next week to dial up that happiness. I don&#8217;t know if there&#8217;s any prescriptive thing but I guess I would say, just be clear about what you want and retrospect regularly on how you&#8217;re doing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like that technical health, instead technical debt. You can think of it as debt when you&#8217;re choosing whether to take it on but after that, don&#8217;t feel bad about that sloppy code. Then you don&#8217;t have to fix it just because it&#8217;s ugly. Fix only what&#8217;s getting in your way because it&#8217;s not about measuring the debt. It’s about moving forward.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That brings to mind one of the tools that a lot of companies uses, at least in the Ruby world is something called Code Climate, which assigns a letter grade code and somethings end up being an F. I think they automatically cross [inaudible] technical debt like Jessica said, it&#8217;s not in your way if it&#8217;s not code that gets executed much or gets touch much, leave it alone. That&#8217;s not really what standing in the way of progress and that&#8217;s really not withstanding the way productivity.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I couldn&#8217;t agree more. The reason why I like the health metaphor to some extent is it gets our brain thinking about it in a different way. Back to the Cold Climate example, if you&#8217;re not all A&#8217;s, then you sucked. That’s in a very superficial that some could take of those metrics. But then if you think about health and think about people, like my father who is 83, his definition of good health is going to look far different than a world-class marathon runner. They both care about health but in their context, being healthy means very different things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Rather than having an absolute number, you start to think what&#8217;s health for us and the fact that we have an F on this code module, who cares if we haven&#8217;t changed it for 18 months. It&#8217;s not slowing us down. It doesn&#8217;t mean that you have to be all A&#8217;s. Maybe where your team is are because you got some legacy code. Maybe that code metrics sort of sucked. But that&#8217;s where and how do we get healthier. It’s more about the progression to health as a continuum, rather than some absolute number which is an ABCD implies.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really like this focus on what are the outcomes that we want and what do we need to do to get there. For me the thing that&#8217;s coming up is the idea of the campsite role, which is this practice that whenever you touch a bit of code, you leave it at least a little bit better than it was when you found it and that&#8217;s a nice incremental way of dealing with the technical debt that&#8217;s actually in your way, on your way to technical health, without really stopping and focusing on every single thing that&#8217;s wrong with it, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, definitely, as a technical coach, that&#8217;s my number one mantra, is the Boy Scout role or the Cub Scout role. The other level that I&#8217;ve been thinking about with technical health is when I first thought of it, I am working with an issue that the Agile Alliance, by the way so this idea of technical health came out from really a group discussion. I happened to be the one that talks most about it on my group. When I first thought about it, we thought it was just being this positive psychology switch like, &#8220;Let&#8217;s just make technical health be the inverse of technical debt.&#8221; I, now think of it more nuanced. I think of it as technical debt is something that we can measure in terms of looking at the code but technical health is probably something more of our capacity to deliver value and meet our purpose.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When you start to look at things from a technical health perspective and then you&#8217;re able to look at technical debt as an artifact, you can start to say, &#8220;We have this measure and I have things in my team or my organizations that are either increasing or decreasing that technical debt and now I can apply for the systems thinking to the dynamics that&#8217;s happening in my organization.&#8221; I&#8217;ll give you a concrete example. I think that one of the biggest contributors to technical debt that I&#8217;ve seen has been project planning horizons, where you&#8217;re bringing in teams to work on code for, say three months and then they&#8217;re off and they&#8217;re no longer accountable for the code after they&#8217;ve delivered their three month deadline. but the best to the organization has to live with that code for years down the road but nothing in their system is actually taking that into account because all of the budgeting and resourcing, which is the word I hate but assigning people to work is all done with a very short horizon timeline.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The technical debt problem is not those damn coders who just keep writing crap. It’s actually a systemic issue with the way the organization plans and budgets and organizes people around the work. That’s the root cause. You can have the clean-up of the code as a go as a great practice but if the systemic issue is this project-driven mentality for building products, then you&#8217;ll never really get what you want. Unlike in the technical health, it really allows us to bring the systems thinking view to our organizations and using technical debt as a measure of the effectiveness of that system.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re doing something pretty interesting [inaudible] right now. This is a new thing we&#8217;re trying out. We put together what&#8217;s called the sustainability and stability team and that team, every larger team within your organization devotes 20% of its people [inaudible] team and their charge is to increase the stability of systems and to make the code more sustainable. It’s not really a matter of addressing technical debt but rather, looking at what the pain points are, like one of the pet projects we&#8217;re undertaking is getting off the list-shared database.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That’s not something you can really do incrementally and it&#8217;s not something that stop the world but fix all of these things practice either. But it&#8217;s a way of addressing system health that I think is a pretty interesting approach to solving that problem. The people who are on that team rotate out. You’re on a six-week rotation so there are goals that the team sets but the people are implementing it rotates in and out. I&#8217;d be curious to hear your thoughts about an approach like that or if you’ve seen that before or if you have alternate approaches to how dev organizations could take on that kind of work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m going to write that down because that has not come up in my experience the way we talked about. Actually, I would expect that that would work really well. It sounds like a really powerful way to work to me from how you describe it. How this actually work, Coraline?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s a fairly new practice so it&#8217;s too early to say whether it&#8217;s successful or not. But I think it&#8217;s a really interesting idea and I&#8217;m really hopeful that it does work out. One of my teammates [inaudible] actually pitched a proposal to RubyConf to talk about this particular approach and I&#8217;m really hoping that her talk gets accepted because I like to see some conversations around that. I&#8217;ve seen a different way of handling in the past where a team will say, &#8220;We&#8217;ll spend 15% of our sprint on fixing technical debt,&#8221; and that seems a terrible way to solve that problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That just never happened.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, it really doesn&#8217;t.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I have seen things like that or we take one ticket per week or the other practice I&#8217;ve seen is we&#8217;ll take these hardening sprints or something like that. We’ll have a sprint at the end devoted to technical debt. I think each of those work. I&#8217;ve worked with a lot of smaller companies so they don&#8217;t have this issue of having multiple teams and dealing with, perhaps some common challenges but what I like about what you&#8217;re saying is whatever you&#8217;re bringing the knowledge of the real pain into that support team and then bringing it back out again. My prediction would be that you would see a lot of value from that because it&#8217;s explicit knowledge movement across those team boundaries by swapping people in and out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One thing I&#8217;m curious about with everybody doing six weeks stints and presumably, people rotating in and out on different timelines, I&#8217;ll be really curious to hear about how continuity gets maintained on that team. I would have imagine that there&#8217;s going to be a lot more focus on providing or building and maintaining artifacts like a ReadMe or a document of principles or some sort of project plan. I&#8217;m curious to see how that shakes itself out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There are some overarching goals that the team has in place. Getting off the shared database is a very long process and no one team of people in the six weeks stint is going to accomplish that. The team has the overarching goals but I think the interesting thing is with rotating people in and out, they&#8217;re addressing different areas of the codebase that maybe have been raised to a certain level of awareness or attention within the greater engineering organization. They&#8217;re bringing their local knowledge of particular aspects of the codebase to bear and saying, &#8220;Fixing this issue here, fixing this code here or assigning the system here,&#8221; is going to contribute to the overall health of the greater codebase.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that ties in to what Declan what saying about big management first. Someone in a situation like that does have to set the goals and someone does have to create the project plan and someone does have to commit to 20% of the people on the team doing an endeavor like this. That’s not going to happen from the bottom up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I would have agree. Technical debt in larger organizations is such a huge impediment. I look for simple measures with teams like how happy are you working with the code? That’s a good measure. And how much is the code slowing down now? Then you can optimize on that. I also have other questions, how much of your time do you spend building new value versus dealing with troubleshooting or defect tickets?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m sometimes shocked when I hear it. I worked at one team where I calculate effectively their value delivery was 4% of what their capacity was because they were spending so much time fighting production fires and they asked me if they could go five times faster if the code was well-factored. Now those are somewhat not scientific measures but it certainly it gives you a sense. If the team says the capacity basically is 4% to deliver any value, that&#8217;s a serious problem and it warrants a strong response from the organization.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There is one way to measure that and I&#8217;ve done this at a company before, where you look at pull requests and if the pull request is referencing an issue, assuming you&#8217;re doing good issue tracking, you can actually say, &#8220;We got five pull requests in the sprints and three of them were no fixes for issues and measure value delivery that way.&#8221; I think that&#8217;s a really good measure as developer productivity and happiness in health and codebase health is how much value is being delivered within X period of time because probably, if your developers are frustrated, if the codebase is resisting efforts to change, that&#8217;s going to impact that metric and it&#8217;s not a developer problem. You can&#8217;t say, our developers are not being productive enough. That points to a larger system issue.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Also, a few minutes ago, Janelle was asking what do we want to achieve and what will make us happy? You can look at it that way. What technical changes could I make that would make me more excited to come to work in the morning?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>At the end of every call, we like to wrap up with reflections, which can be something that stood out to us as particularly interesting, something that we&#8217;re going to take and carry forward or it can be a call-to-action for our listeners. Anything along those lines. Since I haven&#8217;t thought of mine yet, how about Jessica, you go first.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sweet. The biggest thing for me is strive for common outcomes, not common practices. That’s so healthy. Instead of, &#8220;Use this framework,&#8221; it&#8217;s, &#8220;Support this API.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was really struck by a side comment that you made, Declan about how some situations whether be a user story or something that someone says and stand out should be taken as a promise for a conversation. I will be thinking about how we can be more explicit about that. I often hear corporate speak of, &#8220;We&#8217;ll take that offline,&#8221; and I think that it&#8217;s just a way of deferring a conversation that maybe will never actually happen. But if we can be explicit about making a promise to have a conversation that impacts so much productivity in terms of not developing the wrong thing or developing the wrong context, as well as happiness because you get the sense that your concern is being addressed and you&#8217;re being heard. I&#8217;m going to think about how to be more explicit in promises like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve been thinking back on this conversation we had about this power imbalance and with culture and leadership through modeling. One thing that really stood out to me was this idea of asking permission. because of this power imbalance that it&#8217;s there in leadership, I&#8217;m thinking about some mistakes that I made when I probably should have ask for permission and I didn&#8217;t and I ended up causing all kind of problems and relationships blowing up because I didn&#8217;t ask those questions. That’s like dissonant blowing up in my brain right now is those regretful decisions that you wish you could go back and do things differently, if you&#8217;d do all over again.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the things that I&#8217;ve learned as a leader is being a leader in a way makes you blind in a way that you don&#8217;t think you&#8217;re going to be blind until you go and you make mistakes because you don&#8217;t realize that you have power in this relationship dynamic. one of the things that happens because that relationship dynamic is often disrespect on the other side of the wall, on the &#8216;us versus them,&#8217; and one of the ways that you can correct that if you&#8217;re on the side of power is to ask permission and what that does is it elevates the people that you&#8217;re talking to position of respect.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I talked earlier about the difference between attributes and behaviors and I think that&#8217;s an important one. Certainly, it&#8217;s important for me to remember in my personal life as well as development. But at the risk of copying Jessica, I do think that that focus on identifying and clarifying what are the outcomes that we want is really possibly the most important thing we&#8217;ve talked about today, at least for me. I noticed as well that this works for team practices and that&#8217;s what we were talking about. that&#8217;s the context we were talking about it in. but it&#8217;s also really one of the fundamental things that makes agile development work and be worth pursuing as well because you&#8217;re focusing on what are the outcomes that you want for your users and the value that they&#8217;re getting out of the system. I always like finding those principles that work in multiple contexts. That seems like a new one for me so thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Reflecting on this conversation was for me, really was because the first thing I came to mind is like my mind was expanded. I really try to listen and really understand where you were coming from. I think you&#8217;ve really enrich as a group so my understanding or help me clarify my thinking around some things and particularly around empathy and behavior. Maybe what I&#8217;m getting at is a call-to-action for teams that are out there, how could you have conversations similar to the ones that we&#8217;re having with your teams? Whether it&#8217;s around empathy or diversity or common outcomes, how can you have more effective conversations with your teams? Could you plan a retrospective to talk about common outcomes or technical health or diversity on your team? That’s really what I would like to say. How do you take these conversations and translate them into actions on your team?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So your call to action is figure out how to do that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. Can you plan a retrospective that could cover some topic that may have resonated with you on this podcast and bring that conversation back to your team and organization?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Now is the time when we remind you that Greater Than Code is a listener supported podcast. We like to do a Patreon shout out. Our newest patron this month is Declan Whelan. Thank you, Declan for contributing at a $10 level. The important thing though is if you contribute to our Patreon at any level, then you get access to our Slack team. It’s my favorite Slack team. Everybody is super nice. I highly recommend. While listeners support, let us do more shows. Currently we&#8217;re doing three episodes a month. We would love to do four.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Jessica, if someone wants to be a patron, how can they do that? Is there a site on the internet they can go to?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, it is &#8216;IRolledANatural20OnMyAgilityCheck.com.&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode but I appreciate your enthusiasm all the same. Declan, thank you so much for joining us today. We’ve had a lot of fun in what it means to be agile and I learned a lot from the conversation. Thank you so much and I look forward to continuing the conversation on Slack.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DECLAN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you very much for having me. I really enjoyed learning from all of you and I felt really welcome. Thank you.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
<p><em>To make a one-time donation so that we can continue to bring you more content like this, please do so at <a href="https://www.paypal.me/devreps">paypal.me/devreps</a>. You will also get an invitation to our Slack community this way as well.</em></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Declan Whelan: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/dwhelan"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@dwhelan</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://leanintuit.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Leanintuit</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “I Rolled a Natural 20 For My Agility Check” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:31</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Background and Superpower; Empathy</span></p>
<p><b>09:08 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Cross-Cultural Communication Dynamics</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.agilealliance.org/women-in-agile-2017/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Women in Agile</span></a></p>
<p><b>15:48 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Biases, Understanding Dynamics, and Facilitating as an Ally</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">&#8220;To have biases is to be human.<br />
It&#8217;s not a bad thing.&#8221; <a href="https://twitter.com/dwhelan">@dwhelan</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/902935755533807616">August 30, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>21:02 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Authentic</span></p>
<p><b>25:31 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Is Agile something that you are or something that you do?</span></p>
<p><b>35:37 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Adopting Practices Across Teams</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">“</span></i><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">&#8211; Ralph Waldo Emerson</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">People love consistency. Ask, what are the benefits? then<br />
strive for common outcomes, not common practices. <a href="https://twitter.com/dwhelan">@dwhelan</a><a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/902949956889313280">August 30, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>41:57 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Technical Debt and Technical Health: How do we amplify what we want?</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://codeclimate.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Code Climate</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Strive for common outcomes; not common practices.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Some situations should be taken as a promise for a conversation.</span></p>
<p><b>Janelle: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ask for permission.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Identifying and clarifying outcomes that we want.</span></p>
<p><b>Declan:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Declan Whelan: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/dwhelan"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@dwhelan</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://leanintuit.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Leanintuit</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “I Rolled a Natural 20 For My Agility Check” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:31</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Background and Superpower; Empathy</span></p>
<p><b>09:08 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Cross-Cultural Communication Dynamics</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.agilealliance.org/women-in-agile-2017/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Women in Agile</span></a></p>
<p><b>15:48 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Biases, Understanding Dynamics, and Facilitating as an Ally</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">&#8220;To have biases is to be human.<br />
It&#8217;s not a bad thing.&#8221; <a href="https://twitter.com/dwhelan">@dwhelan</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/902935755533807616">August 30, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>21:02 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Authentic</span></p>
<p><b>25:31 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Is Agile something that you are or something that you do?</span></p>
<p><b>35:37 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Adopting Practices Across Teams</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">“</span></i><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” </span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">&#8211; Ralph Waldo Emerson</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">People love consistency. Ask, what are the benefits? then<br />
strive for common outcomes, not common practices. <a href="https://twitter.com/dwhelan">@dwhelan</a><a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/902949956889313280">August 30, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>41:57 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Technical Debt and Technical Health: How do we amplify what we want?</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://codeclimate.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Code Climate</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Strive for common outcomes; not common practices.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Some situations should be taken as a promise for a conversation.</span></p>
<p><b>Janelle: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ask for permission.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Identifying and clarifying outcomes that we want.</span></p>
<p><b>Declan:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"]]></googleplay:description>
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					<itunes:duration>01:06:09</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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					<title>046: Specialization vs Collaboration with Aria Stewart</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/046-specialization-vs-collaboration-with-aria-stewart/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 13 Sep 2017 05:00:16 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=831</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[In this episode, Aria Stewart reflects on how specializing in one area of software development can lead to contemptuous behavior between people, teams, and company culture.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[In this episode, Aria Stewart reflects on how specializing in one area of software development can lead to contemptuous behavior between people, teams, and company culture.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aria Stewart: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/aredridel"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@aredridel</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “The World is Upside Down. Can DevOps save us?” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:07</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Background and Superpowers</span></p>
<p><b>09:22 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Diagnostic Troubleshooting: “Expert Intuition Effect”</span></p>
<p><b>14:23 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Understanding Entire Systems vs Specializing in One Area</span></p>
<p><b>17:15 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Isolation Leading to Contempt</span></p>
<p><b>28:42 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The DevOps Movement and Culture Change</span></p>
<p><b>34:45 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Contempt Towards Processes</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a5gUS649t0"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein: A Programmer&#8217;s Guide to Humans @ SeleniumConf UK</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Having a holistic approach towards Software Development.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Why specialization leads to contemptuous behavior between teams and how to solve it for early career developers.</span></p>
<p><b>Janelle: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Inside of us, we all have a soul.</span></p>
<p><b>Aria: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Start telling new stories about the people who build fantastic products and tools.</span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to Episode 46 of the &#8216;The World is Upside Down. Can DevOps Save Us?&#8217; I&#8217;m here with the lovely and talented, Astrid Countee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Coraline but I think I should remind you that our show is actually called Greater Than Code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You think I would know that by now after 46 episodes?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We all working on it. I have empathy for your struggle, Coraline.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m also here today with my great friend, Janelle Klein.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi and I&#8217;m here to introduce Aria Stewart. Aria is an unschooler, performer, queer activist, avid cyclist and theater nerd, originally from the mountains of Colorado. Now, living in Somerville, Massachusetts with her husband and two cats. They started their own internet service provider, worked in web development for companies large and small and consult on diversity and development process. Welcome, Aria.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, thank you. It&#8217;s nice to be here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We normally start the show asking a few questions about just your background, your story and where you came from and how you turned into the person you are today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome. That&#8217;s kind of tough to trace because I&#8217;ve been around this industry a long time and how I got here is a lot of little details.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Don&#8217;t be shy. Tell us everything.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was born in Denver. I grew up in the suburbs for the first 13 years of my life. I had access to computers and at school, computer labs occasionally. I was unschooled after fourth grade. I didn&#8217;t actually go to school at all but until that point, I was in and out the public school system. My parents want to fight for me to get access to things so I could access the computer labs before and after school. I had computers at home. I had a lot of interest and I was kind of the quintessential 80s nerd kid in a lot of ways.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right there with you?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Which is interesting in the way that played out later on in my life but as part of my unschooling, I ended up taking a part time class of high school on computer programming and the teacher sent a few of us to a computer programming contest sponsored by HP and they gave some sort of coding challenge for four hours to complete, that kind of a thing. We didn&#8217;t placed. Turns out that we were all stymied by the fact that none of us had a calendar for reference and the task involves date math so we could not check our work and this was in the days before computers had calendars built in so we literally could had no way to check our work with the stuff available and we weren&#8217;t allowed to leave the room or use outside references. We ended up not placing because we can&#8217;t check our work but we got a participation t-shirt, which turned out to be one of the most important objects in my life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When I was 13, we moved to this little town up in the mountains of Colorado called Ridgway and the same month that we moved there, an internet service provider opened up. This was 1995. We were just getting settled in there. I&#8217;d had internet access through local libraries and things in the Denver area but when I moved out west, there wasn&#8217;t much in the way the internet service or anything like that so an internet service provider putting up was a big deal.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I marched over there one of the first days, asking if I could sign up for an internet service and I happened to be wearing the t-shirt from the computer programming contest and I got offered a job on the spot. I&#8217;m this 13-year old boy walking into a little tech company in the mountains of Colorado and I get offered a job. I&#8217;m a non-schooler so I actually have afternoons free. I don&#8217;t actually have classes and things that I have to be attending so I start working nearly full time when I&#8217;m 13 years old. Some of the weeks, it was 20. Sometimes it was 30 hours a week and sometimes it was a full 40-hour week, doing tech support like, &#8220;How do I get my email? How do I set up Netscape Navigator? What is the Trumpet Winsock thing and do I need it? I was cleaning up my desktop and threw it away and now my internet doesn&#8217;t work.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This was in the days when getting on the internet at all was kind of a miracle. Computers are cantankerous, modems were unpleasant and when I started, the entire town was connected to the internet via a single 56kbps leased line. The entire town was sharing 56k, not too long after we accreted to T-1 but even so, by today&#8217;s standards, you have faster data service on any given cellphone in the middle of nowhere. T-1 is no longer fast internet and we&#8217;ve seen interesting experiments. That company was kind of unique in a unique place so we played by doing internet service by wireless. We end up going up on the side of the mountain and placing wireless internet down into town and I&#8217;m facing down into this service provider and people out in the valley know the town would get these expensive devices and antenna pointed at the side of the mountain. We ended up getting high speed internet people in 1995 or 1996. A town of a thousand people in the mountains of Colorado, about six hours from Denver.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I had high speed internet in my home a full five years before [inaudible] Denver to get it. It was a really an interesting place and time to grow up and I had a lot of opportunities being in this weirdly small place. But the way it started into my web career was, a couple of years later, my boss put one of those O&#8217;Reilly&#8217;s books with the animal on the cover and [inaudible] in my desk and says, &#8220;Can you learn this?&#8221; and I flip through a little bit and the book is CGI with Perl and flip through the book a little bit &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had that book.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. It&#8217;s a little quintessential books of the era, that and the HTML Guide and a couple of other standard references that every web programmer ended up with on the desk. The part of O&#8217;Reilly gotten popular as they did was they were the ones producing these books at all.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> He slaps it down on my desk and says, &#8220;Can you learn these?&#8221; Yeah, I think I can figure this out, and there was my career built as a web programmer and I&#8217;ve been doing it ever since. I actually hit 21 years in the industry this summer, which is absurdly long time for someone who&#8217;s in their 30s but it&#8217;s because I got started at age of 13. When I got into the internet service business and web programming, I was 15.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Aria, I have a very similar background as you by the way. Out of that experience, did you developed any super powers and if so, what are they?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think the biggest thing I learned in all of that was diagnostics. Back in those days, there was no such thing as a frontend developer. There was no such thing, even as a web developer. You were just a software developer. I had to figure out Netscape Enterprise Server at the same time I was figuring out JavaScript, at the same time I was figuring out how to use vi on this old Solaris server so there&#8217;s no part of the stack that is unfamiliar anymore. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Web programming has gotten so complicated and so large and we use this incredible stack of tools and yet, I was there through the development of all of these. Even so, you come back to the server today and it&#8217;s like, &#8220;This is familiar. I&#8217;ve used things like this. I&#8217;ve used a dozen things like this.&#8221; The first time I came across server-side JavaScript was not when Node.js came out in 2010. I&#8217;d use server-side JavaScript in 1997.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>They had a special name. It was Rhino or something like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This was back in the days of Netscape Enterprise Server. This was actually the SpiderMonkey engine was embedded in their server, which is the same JavaScript engine that Firefox used for a bit long time, which is the original JavaScript engine. That&#8217;s what Brendan Eich wrote originally. They didn&#8217;t just stuff it in their web browser. They stuffed it in the server, they stuffed it everywhere so this JavaScript kept popping up in all these weird little places, even back in the 90s. I went to some server-side JavaScript programming all the way back then and it was terrible.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Error messages just didn&#8217;t work when things didn&#8217;t work. Syntax error, you might get the words &#8216;syntax error,&#8217; and that was the only clue you had. You had no idea where and what file and what&#8217;s going on. But we figured out a lot and I developed some kind of super power debugging skills now so when something goes wrong, I can tell where in the stack it is and what kind of bug it is. It&#8217;s like, &#8220;I&#8217;ve seen that before like 15 years ago,&#8221; and we just now come around again to the same kinds of bugs because now we&#8217;re doing things that way again. Only computers are faster now and then software are better so it make sense to do it that way and it didn&#8217;t at that time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a feeling that people who do have the kind of level experience of 15 or 20 years of experience, who basically started their careers before there were specialization, I think we have a different approach to problem solving because we&#8217;re able to visualize the entire ecosystem for a given app, in a way that people who have focused on backend or focus on devops or focused on frontend. They haven&#8217;t fully developed yet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think that&#8217;s something that&#8217;s interesting as we start teaching and as we start passing knowledge on to other, to newer generations is that keeping in mind that the context we operate it in is so very, very different. Despite a lot of the same skills applying, we really have to work hard to listen to what people&#8217;s actual experiences are and listen to where they are placed and give them advice that makes sense in that context and not from high orthodox-y sort of mindset that so many older programmers have had, where they grew up with the one true way, on the one true system and now, we&#8217;re just replicating that. We operate in fundamentally different ways. We&#8217;re doing a lot of the same work but in very, very new ways with different team structures and the way the knowledge have spread across our teams and through our ecosystem is very, very different.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a question for you there. I&#8217;ve been thinking about as I&#8217;m listening to you, in terms of diagnostic troubleshooting, you mentioned this expert intuition effect where a system becomes really intimately familiar and then it&#8217;s this ideas that you see an error and you have that intuition about the system that&#8217;s broken. But at the same time, you learn the art of diagnostic troubleshooting itself. You seemed very self-aware. I would love to hear you describe your meta thinking process as you go through troubleshooting a problem. I know that&#8217;s kind of an abstract question &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Most of it ends up being in eliminating possibility because you&#8217;re starting off with anything could be wrong here and we don&#8217;t know what it is and you need to hone in on what the actual problem is. Sometimes, that involves things like a binary search of the code. What happens if you just delete the last half of the code? Do you still have the bug? And so, you can reduce your search space by mechanical like try this part and this part works, then the bug is at that part. If the code doesn&#8217;t work, there you go, you&#8217;ve narrowed it down a little bit.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> You also get this idea of trying to eliminate systems. Can you replicate the problem without one of the pieces at all? If it&#8217;s a frontend bug in a piece of JavaScript, can you eliminate the server? Can you run the test case down? Can you shrink it down so that the other part of the system is never involved? Or can you dig under the hood and make the same [inaudible] the JavaScript is and break it down that way? But then at the same time, there&#8217;s this holistic mindset you can do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of my favorite tools to reach for is actually TCP or [inaudible]. Type a word into a web form and have [inaudible] set up to see if it can even spot that on the network. If I hit submit, did the thing even leave the browser? Looking at the system as a whole, did the data make it from end to end before it eliminate parts based on what you see there? I tend to alternate from this like trying to hone me in sort of actions to the whole system, &#8220;Can I observe it the whole way through?&#8221; sort of things. Alternating those two mindsets and talking about them has been really good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It feels like sizing things both horizontally and vertically and being able to hone in on a right direction and it&#8217;s an interesting process because they teach you a little bit more information that lets you make those intuitive leaps and also explain those intuitive leaps of, &#8220;Well, hold on just a sec. Here&#8217;s a very simple but powerful tool.&#8221; If we look for this one specific thing, we know is going to be true but the hypothesis for testing is true, let&#8217;s just check out real quick and we can eliminate these hypotheses very, very quickly by alternating those two mindsets.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How do you even begin to teach that? I have a lot of trouble with early career developers that I mentor and I can&#8217;t even teach me to read a stack trace.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You have to have the desire to do your job well and you have to have the feeling that you’re connected. Doing those things actually does your job well. Quite often, people get pushed into parts of their job that they don&#8217;t love, don&#8217;t enjoy or don&#8217;t find valuable. In particular, women get shoved into all kinds of these side roles, project management and all of these things and a lot of developer culture being built on contempt of other roles, contempt for other specializations, has led people to really not want to seek what&#8217;s outside the box of their current experience. It really isolates and separates us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Getting people to want to learn things is getting them the psychological safety to explore outside their box and reward them for doing so because while specialization has let get far, far, far more productive, it has also had some really interesting other effects that it has isolated us. One is to try to enforce strict boundaries between jobs. No, that&#8217;s the designer&#8217;s job to decide whether or not that should be 10 pixels or 12. No, that&#8217;s the frontend engineer’s job to validate that form. Never mind that the backend engineer also has to validate the form because networks are not to be trusted.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We really have to work on it. We should have an overlap in our skill sets and overlap in our communication. We have to work with people on the next layer in the stack down so our frontend engineers have to sit with designers, not just receive orders from but sit with designers and work on things. The frontend engineers need to sit with the backend engineers and talk through the problem and say, &#8220;We just got this large request,&#8221; or, &#8220;We found this bug and we were thinking of solving it this way,&#8221; and they&#8217;ll write five pages of code and the backend engineers says, &#8220;We just didn&#8217;t see that in first place. How could that happen?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A lot of these things would end up with a lot more cohesive development culture. It would let people find and learn those skills a lot more easily. We have a frontend engineer here at work and she&#8217;s quite brilliant but doesn&#8217;t particularly like backend work. But also, keeps getting handed tickets that isolate her from the backend work. We need to start dividing the work better in a way that will let her dive in just a little bit and be successful in that backend work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This whole conversation is really fascinating to me because as somebody who is newer to development, I think that would tends to happen is you hear the opposite that you need to not think more broadly. You needs to be very focused on something so that you can build up your expertise. But I have found that that&#8217;s a struggle for me because of the same things that you&#8217;re talking about, Aria of like wanting to understand how the system works, wanting to do my job well so that I&#8217;m not just only good at one thing. What would be your advice to people who are trying to get good at their job but also want to be able to understand more about the entire system and not just one particular specialization? </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>They&#8217;re not separate but you have to realize that nobody can know everything about everything. Our world is too large and too complicated so it&#8217;s okay to seek things out in relevance first order. If you&#8217;re a frontend developer, learning about the parts that are relevant to a frontend developer, how HTTP works, what latency and bandwidth are and how they relate to each other, those aren&#8217;t important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Learning the details of TCP/IP and what [inaudible] is aren&#8217;t going to be as interesting or as relevant so it&#8217;s completely okay to start digging down and understand how the next layers down relate to yours and figure out that the other layer exists, that it is distinct and then what the interface and boundary between your layer and their layer is. Then know a bit about the other side of the fence but you don&#8217;t have to know over the other fence, on the other side of their field.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A web developer is very rarely going to have to know the details about CPU architectures or things down into the machine. Our world is isolated from them. We work on phones and tablets and computers with the details of CPUs are so completely abstract and distant that we don&#8217;t care. We really don&#8217;t care.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a friend who takes exception to that actually and she talks about having empathy for the machine for actually thinking about the impact that the code that we write has on the hardware. Are we making people&#8217;s laptops spin up and overheat? Are we putting undue pressure on servers such that devops has to keep adding hardware because of inefficiencies in our code? She posits that it&#8217;s, of course important to focus on end users but it&#8217;s also worth considering the impact that our code has on the middle.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think there&#8217;s a tension there. While web developers don&#8217;t need to know the details of CPU architectures, we do need to know what is spending time on the CPU and what is spending time drawing and what isn&#8217;t. We phrase it differently. We&#8217;re thinking about frames per second quite often or smoothness of animations but it turns out that those are the same thing so we do care about some part of it but we don&#8217;t have to care about what the instructions set is. We have to care about how much memory we&#8217;re allocating but we don&#8217;t have to care about pointer sizes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I got this question that&#8217;s been burning on my mind. Something you say about how isolation ends up leading to this cultural effect of content. That&#8217;s a pretty strong statement and I&#8217;ve certainly seen that happening all around me within the context of the organization but also very much in this context of this tribal splitting that we&#8217;re seeing happening all around us right now. What you see is a rise in contempt and shaming and things that are really disturbing in our culture. I&#8217;m wondering what kind of things that if you were to think about systems that are driving that kind of behavior, where do you see this connection with isolation leading to contempt. I&#8217;d love to hear your answer to that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think there&#8217;s a particular kind of isolation, where we abstract humans into roles. Often in development and in our jobs, we&#8217;re busy so we efficiently try to divide task up so that we can do as much as we can at once, so each person will be using their full output. The system of extraction, that is our modern business world, is trying to get the most out of things and those things are good for people. We put an abstraction there. This person is the project manager, you make requests to them by filing a ticket in JIRA and they will tell the developers what to do. The developers can take tickets from JIRA but they have to do it in priority order and talking to the PM directly is an exception.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In a healthy team, that&#8217;s probably a frequent exception but even so, the structure is that we want to reduce the unneeded communication. That&#8217;s what we&#8217;ve done. We&#8217;ve created an abstraction. The project manager as a person is now operating as the project manager role and in trying to be as efficient as possible, we lose a little bit of the humanity. Sometimes that&#8217;s needed because getting a task done isn&#8217;t being full human in the moment. We have the rest of our lives.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We can&#8217;t be all things all times so we can&#8217;t wear many hats but there&#8217;s a place where it become pathological where somebody is seen only as the role. We see it in companies of 60s, 70s, 80s and this is one of the failures of corporate. The corporate world is that people who are not in the same room more often get reduced to their role: the finance person, the marketing guy. We reduce people to just roles and I think this plays out in our broader culture too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The people nearest us, our family [inaudible] people hopefully, if our families are functional. We see their opportunities and trajectories of growth. We see their fears and things but the waiter at the restaurant or the waitress or the barista at a coffee shop, we might see a little bit of their attitude or their style but we don&#8217;t see their hopes, their dreams, their fears and we don&#8217;t see how they want to grow and change as people and the people even further from us, the ones we don&#8217;t interact with on any kind of day to day schedule. Our society is super segregated.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I live in one of the most segregated cities in the United States. I don&#8217;t see people who aren&#8217;t white nearly often enough. I see non-queer people on a relatively frequent basis but a lot of non-queer people in my life, I&#8217;m quite often the only queer person that they see in any kind of regularity so I am always unknown. I am, in a lot of ways, play a role. I play a role of clown or weird outsider. If weird outsider is a role, I&#8217;m always been very comfortable but even so, it&#8217;s a role and it&#8217;s easy to get hidden behind that role. It&#8217;s not far stretch from there to go from relatively benign roles to ones where there are fear and contempt. We ended up with stereotypes and some really negative labels and people says really hateful things because they de-personalize those people into their roles, the roles that they play in the world around them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It can be very terrible and one of the ways to fight that is to work together. One of the longest studied ways to reduce the amount of hate in the community is to get people to work together, where you have a shared goal and a common task, sitting down and working on it together. It brings people together, unless you have something driving the contempt at that point of, &#8220;This work is stupid,&#8221; or, &#8220;I don&#8217;t want to be working on this.&#8221; There are other factors there but people who actually want to work on the same things or who work to want to achieve the same goal working together, they very often become friends. It&#8217;s one of those things that is almost inevitable given that setup.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like corporations are trying to address that by adopting corporate values or setting like, &#8220;Our quarterly goal is X,&#8221; but it feels to me like in my experience at GitHub, plays into this brother companies too. There&#8217;s a disconnect between stated goals of an organization and the actual goals of the individuals doing the work. As a software developer, I may not care about a 5% uptick in revenue. Of course, it affects me but that&#8217;s not really tied to my goals in that role. I have an impact on it through the software I create but my goal might be to get this application out the door or develop skills in swift or I have so many varied goals. It feels like corporate goals, in an attempt to get people to work together and breakdown this barriers but they fall short for some reason.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a bunch of factors there. Corporate goals are quite often too broad. They&#8217;re not tangible or if they are, they are not meaningful to the people. They are abstract. They are far off. They are quite often capitalist. We live in a culture where that&#8217;s how we fund businesses. We live in a way where you have to make money as a business. That is the goal, that is the purpose and you care about revenues but if they don&#8217;t have material effect to people, they&#8217;re not their goals.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But on the upside, humans can have multiple goals. It&#8217;s okay to be working toward increased revenue for the company, even if you won&#8217;t feel that goal deeply. But if you&#8217;re going to align people&#8217;s personal goals and their team&#8217;s goals with the company&#8217;s overall goal, that&#8217;s when you end up being successful. Sometimes, it can be very oppressive when we try to force people&#8217;s personal goals into a narrow shape. You get a lot of corporate mentorship programs, a lot of things like that. You end up erasing people and trying to force their goals to be aligned with the corporate world. I think this is where a lot of discrimination are coming from. This is where people start feeling like they can bring their whole selves to work because if they admit that they have goals separate from the corporations, they are pushed aside.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But then also, a more mindful company, a more humane company may find more clever ways to align those goals because there are a lot of places where it&#8217;s a win-win, where to stage in development of our culture, where a lot of the easy wins have been found. Finding win-win scenarios where everybody wins instead of somebody winning at the cost of somebody else, they&#8217;re getting harder to find. Competition is fierce and quite often that means then that if you do want something, you&#8217;re actually going to be taking away from another company, that&#8217;s where competition is or maybe you&#8217;re just extracting it from your employees. Maybe you&#8217;re winning at the cost of your employee’s health or happiness.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Pushing for extreme efficiency is really dangerous but it&#8217;s also where we&#8217;re at in our culture right now. It&#8217;s a joke among some people but also serious that that&#8217;s what late stage capitalism is. The easy wins have been made and now it&#8217;s eating ourselves.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Aria, you&#8217;ve talked about the walls that we built between each other and how people start being perceived by the role that they played instead of as whole human beings. I remember when devops was new. It seemed like one of the founding principles was that there should not be this barrier between a developer and a sysadmin that the responsibility should be spread or smeared across. What had been really strong organizational divisions before that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Part of this comes from the transition into cloud computing too. It used to be that system administrator, they had a culture of keeping things up all of the time. You buy expensive computers that last forever, very durable, very reliable and you protect them like you worked very, very hard to control access. You don&#8217;t want to rebuild and they&#8217;re not replaceable. The servers, like the ones I grew up with the ISP, these little servers by today&#8217;s standards, a cellphone is more powerful. They cost $20,000 apiece. These were the entire capital investment in a system for the year while they replace servers. They were incredibly expensive. Replacing hard disks was in the thousands of dollars. It was an absolutely gargantuan expenditure so the way we ran systems was very, very protective. We form an entire team to protect them from the developers, to protect them from the users. Then that grew into our modern system administrators and security professionals.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The sharp division of that role comes from the expensive hardware. If you have this $20,000 piece of hardware, you share it with all of the other users. Then if you break a $20,000 piece of hardware, not only have you broken the hardware, you&#8217;ve also caused an inconvenience for those other users. You set up a lot of mutual distrust and that created the old guard of our culture.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then with cloud computing, that changed. Computers are now infinitely replaceable. The hardware is virtualized and abstracted. It&#8217;s sitting in a server room somewhere in Northern Virginia or Oregon or San Jose and when you want a new server, you just type a command into an API and it builds a new one and you can throw away the old and it will be recycled for somebody else&#8217;s use. Multiple tenancy, sharing the system is done at a very high and abstract way. As far as you&#8217;re concerned, you&#8217;re operating on a computer that nobody else uses and you&#8217;re in complete control of. That capability changed our culture.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But even so, we had a culture setup previously of protecting servers. Sysadmin is a separate role and developers and sys administrator had been pitted against each other in any organizations. The [inaudible] the system administrators and they were very, very stingy about handing them out to developers. You have to prove you are worthy to use this machine in an unrestricted capacity because when we don&#8217;t, somebody breaks it and it causes an outage for everybody.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Devops came along and the devops mindset was really trying to spread that out because the old reasons for being, have no longer existed. This is the thing we see time and time again in the industry, the old recently did a thing, no longer applies because technology has changed, because our culture has changed, because the economics have changed quite often.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Servers are cheap, even the hardware is cheap but we are in a period of increasing cultural change in a lot of places. But actually, development culture is not one of those, I don&#8217;t think. This is a case where development culture piled up on itself but as one of the only ones. The other one, we have this massive continuity back to, at least the dawn of the UNIX era. We have a huge cultural continuity all the way back there. Other parts of our field aren&#8217;t quite so continuous. The web was a bump but development itself has a very long continuity.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But I thought that the devops movement was supposed to be like a catalyst in culture change.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When it works, right it is and actually, we betray ourselves whenever we talk of devops as a role. A frontend person, a backend person and a devop person, that&#8217;s not the way it was originally conceived. There&#8217;s a reason for that. They came out of the same shops that extreme programming was coming out of, where whole teams would work together on a project, blending roles pretty seamlessly and these were small companies and mostly consultancies. I think Pivotal Labs is working in teams of eight, at most. They would roll it out on the server. There would be some developers that do that, that they didn&#8217;t have a separate system administrator type of role and they really encouraged blending that together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But then you try to apply some of these practices to a larger company that has an existing and entrenched systems infrastructure. It&#8217;s a lot easier to take your system administrator and say, &#8220;Instead of being on the system admin team, we&#8217;re going to take two of you and put you on to this development team and the other two of you on this other development team, we&#8217;re going to draw a line to the new place,&#8221; and you still end up with this ops skill set separate from the developer skills set. We betray ourselves whenever we think of devops as a role and not a practice that a lot of us can participate in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Frontend developers participate as well. We push our changes live. We learn git. We learn version control. We learn a lot of the systems architecture stuff. We may not be [inaudible] but we are using this infrastructure in a way that it is our infrastructure. It&#8217;s not separate from us. Devops has always been about breaking down, not just barriers between teams but barriers between goals. Good devops culture doesn&#8217;t just about getting things to [inaudible] servers. It&#8217;s about getting people to work together through the whole stack and think about the operations all the way from beginning to end as a whole team.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That means that developers have to be involved in the planning and the designers have to talk to the developers. Some of this comes out of agile process too. We don&#8217;t need to write a full specification in advance, when we could just talk to each other. That has worked for better or for worse. Sometimes that also mean that therefore, we can skip on the prep work, which is deeply unfortunate but &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The side effect of agile is that we threw the baby out with the bath water when we [inaudible], I think.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes to some degree. As much as those are things that we ever did purely. It&#8217;s much more a spectrum and not a strict division between the two. Waterfall has always been a strong mandate of agile practitioners have held up as, while we don&#8217;t do it this way. Nobody, except maybe NASA has ever done an all-design upfront. Just implement the details afterward. Even in places that try to do that, it never actually happened. You always have the circles and loops in the process, where the developers come back and say, &#8220;That&#8217;s not possible. Not with the constraints we&#8217;ve got. Let’s rework this.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I remember my consulting days where we did [inaudible] front design and had requirements. We realized that something wouldn&#8217;t work or we have an idea how to do differently or if the stakeholders change their mind about something. There was this whole process in place called change requests. It was a formal document that you wrote up to say, &#8220;The specification says X but actually, we need to do Y and here&#8217;s the impact of that and here&#8217;s the impact on the timeline and here&#8217;s the new set of requirements and is very high friction.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But the upside of that, of course change was really difficult to affect in a waterfall process but developers did documentation and requirements were relatively well understood. I don&#8217;t see that happening really with agile methodologies, where we&#8217;re at now we have this idea of architecture decision records, which I think is a step in the right direction and it takes the conversations the people have and the collaboration that we do outside of a documentation process and says, &#8220;Here are the things we discussed. Here are the things we considered and here&#8217;s the decision we made about how to address this and why,&#8221; and that provide some context for the people who come after when they&#8217;re trying to wrap their heads around how system comes together and they asked the inevitable question of like, &#8220;Why is X there? Why did they do X in this particular way?&#8221; I think having some kind of record of those conversations, a record of the context where much decisions were made, it can be very, very valuable.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. I think that actually come back to contempt. A lot of agile methods have contempt for documentation, have contempt for planning, have contempt for anything done upfront or anything that is more durable than necessary, which may be from a marketing organization, where you have the ability to throw away, that&#8217;s great.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Maybe if you&#8217;re building a prototype, where you&#8217;re just exploring a space as quickly as you can, sure. A lot of us are working on software that last years. I&#8217;m working on a system that was built in 2011 and right now is being rebuilt. I&#8217;ve worked on systems that were built in the 90s and are just now being rebuilt. Having contempt for planning documents has left us with no planning documents to refer to, when they go to do this rebuild. We don&#8217;t know what the feature set of our system is. Nobody knows it and it&#8217;s sad watching that play out. It&#8217;s really easy to get caught in those contempt things because it&#8217;s one of the easiest tools we&#8217;ve got for shaping culture.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it happened a lot too with MVPs and that process gets thrown out the window when you&#8217;re building an MVP. But if you&#8217;re MVP is successful, it is now the heart of your system. No one ever says that an MVP is throwaway. It becomes the core. Those rash decisions or those undocumented decisions or the edge cases that lead to certain decisions are all lost and the people who come after, just sort of mop up the MVP, are living with the consequences of things that they have no understanding for.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, very much so.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You mentioned before that contempt could get assigned to a process like documentation or planning, something that was just like this, &#8220;Oh, that thing. Don&#8217;t do that.&#8221; Then you&#8217;ve got this emotional attribution to this thing. Then if a person, a human is in a certain role and that role carries out that process, they&#8217;re carrying out that thing that we carry contempt for and then if that role gets assigned contempt, then the human essentially gets assigned contempt and the same distancing effect that you&#8217;ve been talking about before, where we reduce people to an object and this contempt toward process can kind of come together and it seems like to just cause this isolation contempt effect in our culture, in business.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, absolutely. I think that we are now reaping the result of that, having been contemptuous of a lot of these things in the past. We&#8217;re now seeing agile processes that fall apart and people who don&#8217;t feel that they fit in and alienation in developers and then documenters and testers, are one that we have widely hope contempt for agile processes. We don&#8217;t need testers. We write automated tests.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I fairly recently did a keynote at SeleniumConf and it was the first time ever I&#8217;ve been immersed in a culture that was just all the tester people. What I realized being coming from the world of the engineers or the developers and then you walk in to the tester world and it&#8217;s almost like a group therapy session for all of these people that are just been stomped on a horrible way. It was mind-blowing and sad and made me feel awful for the way that because of this role and how people are seen as less than human.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then we have this reduction of, &#8220;What is your output level and your cost as a resource. Oh, you&#8217;re not as important as these developer people because we don&#8217;t have to pay you as much,&#8221; kind of thing. That association, as well as manual testing contempt to the process, all gets attributed to the people and then you see more and more of this distancing effect going on and I just saw these people hurting. I was like, &#8220;I had no idea what it was like on the other side of the wall.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yep. Contempt management and contempt strategy at conferences have that group therapy aspect. Project management conferences have that, management conferences have that. Developer conferences don&#8217;t have that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think the other place that&#8217;s missing is in InfoSec but ironically, I have a friend who does InfoSec recruiting and InfoSec has this very elitist attitude and they&#8217;re [inaudible] and lead us in contempt but I learned surprisingly that InfoSec people don&#8217;t get paid. I assume they would get paid more than developers but they actually get paid significantly less.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Very much so.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love to see the same kind of thing happen with security that happened with devops.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. I think devops mindsets can lead that way but we need to identify why we push that away and how to integrate those skills into our teams. One of the things that we run into now is that we&#8217;re running into teams scaling limits. Teams can be no bigger than 12 people. Generally speaking, functional teams are smaller than that. It takes immensely more organization to build teams bigger that than. It&#8217;s not linear growth as teams has scale.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Past four or five people, you are starting to have communication dominate the team size and as you scale up to the ten or twelve people on the team, communication has to be formalized or else, it will completely override any ability to do work. You&#8217;re in meetings all the time. What we need to do is get better and having consultants, whether paid consultants or not, whether they&#8217;re just employees that flip between teams and consults and have a consulting relationship that way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We need to get better at that because it means that we can actually have these people who are experts in these things available to us, rather than having to be the all-singing, all-dancing developer-documenter-commenter-tester-devops person and deployment engineer. I think that&#8217;s going to be hard because that means that we have to eliminate contempt and restructure how we think about teams and that means that a lot of people have to change their attitudes and their practices and that&#8217;s going to be very difficult.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Developers are an interesting bunch because being put on this pedestal, being the cream of the industry, the ones that everybody are seeking after are in a place where if we started acknowledge those places where we&#8217;re contemptuous, we started acknowledging the problems in our culture. It feels like it puts us in precarious position. It doesn&#8217;t. It makes us better at what we do but it feels like we&#8217;re undermining ourselves. There&#8217;s techniques to fight that &#8212; framing things in terms of uplifting others, instead of in terms of knocking down yourself &#8212; various things like that help a bunch. But what we do to fix these things is going to take some work and takes some cleverness too to make that happen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>At this point in the show, we start out talking about our reflections and some of the things that struck us or stood out during the conversation. I can start. In the beginning, in your origin story, Aria you talked about how you found opportunities in a really small place when your family moved to the more rural part in Colorado. Throughout that conversation, I kept thinking about what you said because you were describing your introduction to the industry and how you started to really love software development as a whole.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> You said that you had a holistic approach to it. In what we just discussed, it seems like that might be a solution to some of the issues that we are talking about or some of the culture problems that we see. A lot of times when we are describing ways that we might be able to make a difference, we&#8217;re thinking about these big macro problems and how to solve them. But there might be actually a better plan to start in a really, really small place and use that opportunity to try to think a little bit differently and think outside of our boxes and make an impact there so that that can be spread.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was struck by the part of the conversation where we talk about specialization. Now, specialization can create boundaries between people in teams and lead to the contemptuous attitude toward other people in other teams, I actually think about this a lot, as a journalist, I know I have a different set of skills and a different way of approaching problems and a different way of working with other people. I do worry about over specialization and I think how we teach new developers to your point, Astrid we do encourage specialization because you have to rapidly develop skills that make you marketable. I&#8217;m going to be thinking about how we can solve that problem, especially for early career developers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think I just had my head in the clouds this whole time. Software seems so small now compared to just what is going on around us. Humanity right now is frightening. I think we all feel that and it&#8217;s so easy to label people as criminals or label people with these negative words that allow us to turn people into objects, into roles, into clowns. It&#8217;s the same kind of thing. It creates this context of interaction that allows us to disable empathy in our brains and to push people as distanced away from us as possible to feel disgust and contempt for other people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But the other thing that happens is developers are blind to their contempt. Developers don&#8217;t feel it. Developers are the ones that are sitting on top and if you take that same metaphor and look what&#8217;s happening, it&#8217;s interesting because you see these people that are in pain. You see these people that see themselves as victims that are afraid and lost in that and their solution to their pain is to see other people with contempt because it gives them an outlet for all that pain inside them to have some way for that to go. It&#8217;s so easy when people commit atrocities to forget that there is humanity inside them. As problems raised around us, I think the thing that we all have to remember is that inside of us, there is a soul. Inside of us, we all have a soul and it would be good for us to remember that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, very much so.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Aria, what are your thoughts out of our conversation?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was kind of struck by just how solidly contempt connects to everything, how much it has driven so much of our culture and how little we talk about the things that worked well. It kind of caught me off guard that that&#8217;s where things stayed so much. Many developers who are actually joyful in what they do and they love teaching and there&#8217;s a whole new model that we don&#8217;t talked about nearly enough. We talked about the failures of the old model a little bit but there are some people who are very, very successful in building successful products and build fantastic tools for the people and really love what they do and makes me want to seek them out and start telling new stories, start telling stories of the people who are doing it wonderfully.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you very much for being on the show today, Aria. It was a great conversation. We really enjoyed having you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to remind people that if you like the kinds of conversations that we have on Greater Than Code, you can support us materially by going to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. All patrons, regardless of their pledge level, get access to our patron-only Slack community, where you can have conversations with other members of the community and panelists and guests to continue talking about the topics that we talked about on the show. Please consider giving to us through Patreon.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also, we&#8217;re looking for corporate sponsors so if your company wants to support these conversations. They are definitely welcome to do so. Go to GreaterThanCode.com/Sponsors and we will talk to you all in a couple of weeks.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aria Stewart: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/aredridel"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@aredridel</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “The World is Upside Down. Can DevOps save us?” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:07</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Background and Superpowers</span></p>
<p><b>09:22 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Diagnostic Troubleshooting: “Expert Intuition Effect”</span></p>
<p><b>14:23 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Understanding Entire Systems vs Specializing in One Area</span></p>
<p><b>17:15 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Isolation Leading to Contempt</span></p>
<p><b>28:42 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The DevOps Movement and Culture Change</span></p>
<p><b>34:45 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Contempt Towards Processes</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a5gUS649t0"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein: A Programmer&#8217;s Guide to Humans @ SeleniumConf UK</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Having a holistic approach towards Software Development.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Why specialization leads to contemptuous behavior between teams and how to solve it for early career developers.</span></p>
<p><b>Janelle: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Inside of us, we all have a soul.</span></p>
<p><b>Aria: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Start telling new stories about the people who build fantastic products and tools.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to Episode 46 of the &#8216;The World is Upside Down. Can DevOps Save Us?&#8217; I&#8217;m here with the lovely and talented, Astrid Countee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Coraline but I think I should remind you that our show is actually called Greater Than Code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You think I would know that by now after 46 episodes?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We all working on it. I have empathy for your struggle, Coraline.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Tha]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aria Stewart: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/aredridel"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@aredridel</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “The World is Upside Down. Can DevOps save us?” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:07</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Background and Superpowers</span></p>
<p><b>09:22 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Diagnostic Troubleshooting: “Expert Intuition Effect”</span></p>
<p><b>14:23 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Understanding Entire Systems vs Specializing in One Area</span></p>
<p><b>17:15 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Isolation Leading to Contempt</span></p>
<p><b>28:42 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The DevOps Movement and Culture Change</span></p>
<p><b>34:45 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Contempt Towards Processes</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0a5gUS649t0"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein: A Programmer&#8217;s Guide to Humans @ SeleniumConf UK</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Having a holistic approach towards Software Development.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Why specialization leads to contemptuous behavior between teams and how to solve it for early career developers.</span></p>
<p><b>Janelle: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Inside of us, we all have a soul.</span></p>
<p><b>Aria: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Start telling new stories about the people who build fantastic products and tools.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to Episode 46 of the &#8216;The World is Upside Down. Can DevOps Save Us?&#8217; I&#8217;m here with the lovely and talented, Astrid Countee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Coraline but I think I should remind you that our show is actually called Greater Than Code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You think I would know that by now after 46 episodes?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We all working on it. I have empathy for your struggle, Coraline.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Tha]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Aria.jpg"></itunes:image>
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					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
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					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>46:13</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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							<item>
					<title>Special Edition: Innovation Amidst a Disaster with Jeff Reichman</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/special-edition-innovation-amidst-a-disaster-with-jeff-reichman/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 06 Sep 2017 20:19:49 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=854</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[This episode stars, Jeff Reichman, who talks about how the Houston tech community came together to help people through Hurricane Harvey and the aftermath, the technology opportunities in disaster response, the harvey-api that they developed, and how tech devs need to be side-by-side with relief efforts, while responding to tech needs right away.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[This episode stars, Jeff Reichman, who talks about how the Houston tech community came together to help people through Hurricane Harvey and the aftermath, the technology opportunities in disaster response, the harvey-api that they developed, and how tech]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jeff Reichman: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/fileunderjeff"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@fileunderjeff</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://januaryadvisors.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">January Advisors</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="http://sketchcity.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sketch City</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In this special edition of Greater Than Code, we talk to Jeff Reichman, a technologist living in the Houston area who co-founded Sketch City, a non-profit community of 2,500+ people who apply technology and data to public problems.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode talks about how the Houston tech community came together to help people through Hurricane Harvey and the aftermath, the technology opportunities in disaster response, the harvey-api that they developed, and how tech devs need to be side-by-side with relief efforts, while responding to tech needs right away.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Resources:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://sketchcity.herokuapp.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sketch City Slack Channel</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://github.com/sketch-city/harvey-api"><span style="font-weight: 400;">harvey-api</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://reportyourhours.com"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Report Your Hours</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.codeforamerica.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Code for America</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://sunlightfoundation.com/2017/08/31/how-houston-is-using-open-data-to-handle-hurricane-harvey/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">How Houston is using open data to handle Hurricane Harvey</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://swamplot.com/the-best-way-to-find-out-which-hurricane-harvey-shelters-near-you-need-help-and-what-they-need/2017-08-29/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Best Way to Find Out Which Hurricane Harvey Shelters Near You Need Help and What They Need</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://harveyneeds.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Harvey Needs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Using temporary projects as a means for helping people during emergency situations.</span></p>
<p><b>Jamey:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> People showing up, wanting to help, and being motivated to help others. </span></p>
<p><b>Janelle: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">There is light in the world even when we are drowning in darkness.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Creating cultures of respect where you have respect and empathy for everyone doing their jobs in a way that allows everyone to contribute fully.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello everyone and welcome to Greater Than Code. I&#8217;m Jamey Hampton and I&#8217;m here with Coraline Ada Ehmke.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello everyone. I&#8217;m also really happy to welcome Astrid Countee to the panel today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Coraline and I would like to also introduce my friend, Janelle Klein.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And I&#8217;d like to introduce Jeff Reichman. Jeff Reichman is a technologist living in the Houston area. He graduated from Temple University with the BA in English and an MA in creative writing. He&#8217;s a principal at January Advisors and in 2016, he co-founded Sketch City, a nonprofit community of 2500 hundred people who apply technology and data to public problems. It&#8217;s very awesome. Welcome, Jeff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you all very much. Appreciate to being here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the ways we like to start off this show is by getting a little background on your origin story. Could you tell us a little bit about your special power and how you acquired it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have moved across the country for most of my adult life. I grew up in Philadelphia, I lived in Santa Barbara, California for a while, Washington DC for a little bit. I moved to Houston about eight years ago and I love it here. This is my adopted hometown. I can&#8217;t imagine living anywhere else. Over the last eight years, I&#8217;ve gone from introvert to extrovert and started going to meetups and meeting people in my neighborhood and in my community, just gotten to know folks. If I have a superpower, it might be just meeting lots of people and understanding the power that happens when you unite them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How can you go into from introvert to extrovert and making that shift because I&#8217;m sure like a whole lot of the listeners are very far on the introvert camp? What was the process of making that transition?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love reading books. I got two degrees in English and I love spending time alone and what I realized is it&#8217;s more about how long I can be around people. I have a particularly high threshold where I can really be on, so to speak for about five hours a day. Then I need the rest of my work time to think and reflect and respond and strategize and whatnot by myself so protecting that balance in my work life has been really helpful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I also decided back in 2011 that I was going to go to meetups. I was going to go meet people. I don&#8217;t care who I was going to meet up. I was going to shake people&#8217;s hands and hear about their stories and learn about them. What ended up happening, especially in a place like Houston, is you meet the most amazing people and you get really into their stories and where they come from. You learned to really love people in a particularly human level. I&#8217;ve been doing that now for about seven years and it&#8217;s just taken on a life of its own, especially with these relief efforts.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I used to be really, really shy. Especially when I go to a conference, I would just feel overwhelmed by the press of people. I start to play a little game with myself, where I would say, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to walk through the room and talk to the person with the most interesting shoes.&#8221; I&#8217;m going to find the person with a red shirt and I&#8217;m going to talk to two people with red shirts and that really helped me to come out of my shyness. Eventually, become a lot more gregarious.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a great game. I actually did something a little bit similar when I was nervous at a conference recently. I took a selfie of myself and posted on Twitter and tag it with the conference and I was like, &#8220;If you can find me, come talk to me and give me a sticker,&#8221; or something like that. Dozens of people are like, &#8220;I saw you on Twitter. Here&#8217;s a sticker.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s really cool. Jeff, how did you make the transition from being an English major &#8212; I was an English major too but I didn&#8217;t finish &#8212; to being a technologist?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was really fortunate that I grew up with the computer. I&#8217;m enough to earn years now and I had a computer in home as a very little kid. I&#8217;ve always been familiar with technology, my brother and I would take it apart and put it back together. I love books and I was an English major but when I needed to get a job, I got a job with a technology startup in California because I could write proposals and we did business with governments. I had just started picking up and doing what was necessary. I got interested in coding. I realized that it wasn&#8217;t as hard as I thought it was going to be and I could get a lot done with some very basic skills.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Any time I have the block of time to dedicate to it, I try and get my skills a little bit better and it just was a natural transition a couple of years ago. Because I&#8217;m able to work for myself, when I decided what kind of projects do I want to work on, I really made a conscious decision that I never want to lose those tech skills. I always want to be refining them and that&#8217;s been awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I looked at the ReadMe for one of the projects which we&#8217;re going to be talking about today and I think for the Harvey API, we really demonstrates the value of being able to write and being able to communicate clearly and how important that is in a software product.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wish there were more writers involved in tech teams who can help document and market and communicate so that developers and designers can be left to their job and left alone by people who are constantly knocking on their door saying, &#8220;I got to get this to this person. I&#8217;m talking to the press. What&#8217;s this?&#8221; English majors are the glue that holds it all together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Totally agree.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Jeff, you mentioned that the job you have, the startup had something to do with the government. Can you talk a little bit more about how you got started working on projects related to government issues?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We were a small startup that provided parking software: parking permits, parking enforcement, parking tickets and that kind of thing. I was a sales rep for part of my time there so I would sell to local governments. I respond to RFPs, I get to know how the purchasing process works, understand how to verify vendors and things like that and I got really interested in how local government works because they do a lot. If you work in parking, parking is an auxiliary service. It makes money. It&#8217;s something that people pay for and then that money goes somewhere else. It doesn&#8217;t go back into parking. It&#8217;s vitally important. If parking fails, everything else fails. If you can&#8217;t park your car, your experience is ruined so it&#8217;s a critical front line customer service function of the city and it gets very little respect. Yet, it processes tons and tons of money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I really got insight into the types of people who work in positions like that, these really good people who take their jobs really seriously. That kind of spidered from there a few years ago as I started to work with the City of Houston and really started to take that mindset of understanding the types of people who work in government and how hard they work and respect for them. That&#8217;s helped me worked with teams to uncover new things that we can all work on as a community.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It seems like elected officials get all the attention but like you said, there are a lot of hardworking and very dedicated people who are actually doing the work of government and it&#8217;s really interesting in that, you got to spend time with them and empathize with the jobs that they&#8217;re doing too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. They work really, really hard. Elected officials deserve a lot of credit. It&#8217;s an impossible job, you have to shake hands with everybody all the time, you have to be nice to everybody all the time, even on your trolls. You have to watch everything you say and do and be really careful. Win a popularity contest every once in a while. Those people are really important and powerful for spreading a message and setting of the tone, of values and agenda but they&#8217;d be nowhere without the thousands and thousands of other people who fill the potholes and answer the 311 calls and do the daily work of government. At least for the City of Houston, it does so much that we just take for granted. The fact that our garbage is getting picked up after the largest rainfall in American history a week later is amazing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Jeff, I&#8217;m curious about how your experience working with these government people affected when Harvey first hit and your reaction and how you wanted to step in and do something about that? How was that related in a way?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In any working relationship, you have to build trust and trust comes with time and with successful delivery of projects. I think that our community, the Sketch City community has built up a lot of trust with government. We have a lot of people who are collaborating with government officials on projects. We have City of Houston, taking some of our projects and embedding them into their own infrastructure. We have a really good working relationship with them and that&#8217;s helpful because what we want are ideas for things that are going to make an impact.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Right now, the people who know what&#8217;s going to make an immediate impact to the people working for the city and working for all the relief agencies and the relief efforts so having that trust existing for several years, it makes it a lot easier to simply sit down at the table next to them, watch what&#8217;s going on and start coming up with ideas for how we can help. Then we&#8217;ve got this huge tech community, both Houston and the globe but especially Houston, that put everything aside, their power stayed on, no water gotten their house and they said, &#8220;I&#8217;m fine. What can I do to help?&#8221; And I&#8217;m sure the rest of the world is seeing these stories. It&#8217;s true for the tech community too, where the fourth largest city in the country got a ton of people and it just came together beautifully.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What is Sketch City, Jeff?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sketch City is a local Houston nonprofit community of technology and data people, who believe that tech and data play a role in public decision making. All too often, elected officials, department directors, agency heads aren&#8217;t necessarily thinking through the data end of things or they don&#8217;t have the data or they&#8217;re not trained on real time data or modern data methods for analysis and we seek to advance that and educate them and do work alongside them to help give them the best information they have to make a good decision.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve been listening to you talk about this kind of theme that&#8217;s emerging about what it means to respect for you. I&#8217;ve recently been emerged in this kind of CEO investor club culture, which is very different from hanging out with engineers. It&#8217;s like the world looks like on the other side. I can&#8217;t help but think about all these parallels between the community and government and respecting the people that do all the things and the same kind of dissonance of us versus them that we have in our organizations with our business leadership versus engineering culture in that same us versus them clash. I&#8217;m curious what kind of parallels do you see because you&#8217;re so involved on both sides. I&#8217;d really love to hear your perspective.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that parallel definitely exists in government. You have lots of silos, you have people who say, &#8220;That&#8217;s not my job. I&#8217;m not curious about this technology thing. The tech people handle that.&#8221; Those same silos exist but I work with a lot of entrepreneurs and I talk to a lot of new entrepreneurs who want to start a software company and they said, &#8220;I just need a coder. I just need to get some money and hire a coder.&#8221; I kind of look at them and say, &#8220;One, if you&#8217;re doing this full time, just teach yourself to code. Figure out a way, give yourself a budget of $100 and get yourself to a prototype. How would that work?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There really is this ability for some people who have an inner disciplinary background, even just very basic technical skills like I&#8217;ve built a website before so I know the process of thinking about what I want and then learning how to do it or adapting a theme or a template. Just going through the very basics of building those tech muscles gives you respect for that intricacies of the job and how detail oriented it is. I think what&#8217;s great about the City of Houston is that we have a mayor who is a worker. He&#8217;s a lawyer. He&#8217;s a legislator. Now, he&#8217;s an executive and he has deep respect for all of his employees and has a genuine interest in how the job gets done and how to make it better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that type of intellectual curiosity, it naturally leads to respect. You can sit there and say, &#8220;Their job is just to be a garbage man and pick up the garbage.&#8221; When you start thinking about, &#8220;How are they doing that? What’s their process look like? How physically taxing on the body is it to do a route? How do you route the trucks? What is dispatch look like? How do you keep them safe?&#8221; All the things that go into that, you start to realize that this is a pretty well-oiled machine and there&#8217;s a lot of those machines. Just to get back to your question, I think those silos exist because of ignorance around how hard a particular job is and once you just pick up a shuttle and start shoveling for a little while and your shoulder start to burn, that gives you a respect for people who do that all day long.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It kind of reminds me of what the onboarding process at my current job is. I&#8217;m on a team that supports warehouse associates and for the first entire week of my job, we actually went to the warehouse and did various jobs in the warehouse so that we would understand their needs and understand what their working life was like and be able to create solutions that would make life easier for them. I think that comes down to the theme that&#8217;s emerging here of respect for people who do the work and how important that respect is. Do you think executives don&#8217;t have respect for people who write code or do you think that it&#8217;s just this mysterious black box for them? Does that lack of respect go both ways?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it can. In government especially, respect is one component of it but just the way the bureaucracy is set up, you have to have elected officials say, &#8220;I want my bureaucratic people &#8212; the people who are going to work here when I&#8217;m gone &#8212; to take risks and to be rewarded for taking risks. If they fail, that&#8217;s okay.&#8221; Ultimately, it comes down to the leader setting the tone to say figure out a better way to do this. Otherwise, people who work in government are risk averse and they&#8217;re not going to try something new if something already works.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> What we&#8217;re seeing now in Houston is unprecedented scale of disaster and needs and things that these people who already have full time day jobs, now have full time night jobs too. It has gotten really complicated and in times of crisis, that forces a type of innovation like it. If it fails, that&#8217;s fine. At least we got it out there and we&#8217;re trying and we&#8217;re supporting and we&#8217;re getting better. Because in emergency situations, you fail. You fail constantly and it&#8217;s terrible, awful feeling to know that you can&#8217;t hit home runs every time you come to the plate because there&#8217;s real stakes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think when you&#8217;re in an environment like that, it gives you some freedom to innovate technologically that you otherwise might not have. Those innovations do two things: number one, they prove that tech innovation exists and that it can be done and that it can be done quickly and cheaply in a way that highlights new solutions, and number two, it proves that technology should have a seat at the table, that if you&#8217;re thinking about citywide housing relief, there&#8217;s ways in which low tech temporary solutions can really help. What the City of Houston in its wisdom does is it make sure that they pull in people from all of this different areas and there is a seat for technology at the table.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really like this talk about innovation and I&#8217;d like to dig into that a little bit deeper. Can you tell us about some of the innovations that you&#8217;ve been seeing and that you&#8217;ve been working on in the wake of Harvey?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. We have been working with a lot of different organizations that have been coordinating crowdsource dispatch and crowdsource verification of information. When you&#8217;re displaced, when your house floods, you go to a shelter and that shelter is going to feed you, it&#8217;s going to give you some fresh clothes, maybe, it&#8217;s going to give you medical supplies and the shelters are ad hoc. It&#8217;s a church basement. It&#8217;s an elementary school gymnasium. These are places that are run by volunteers that don&#8217;t have experience handling hundreds of people coming through their door so everybody kind of makes do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> People generally will start organizing through Google Forms and Google Spreadsheets but there&#8217;s limitations to that, especially when you&#8217;re at the scale of a disaster like Harvey. What we ended up doing was linking with all of those teams that were coordinating the dispatch in the Google Sheets and we built an API. It&#8217;s called the Harvey API and it covers the full gamut from rescue to shelter to the needs of the shelters to ordering the products on Amazon to routing them to particular organizations.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> You can pull from different components of that API as necessary. If you wanted to launch a real time shelter map because the shelter map of the city isn&#8217;t very good, you could build one that&#8217;s 10 times better drawing from the same data. The biggest concern in an emergency situation is that wherever you get your data from, it&#8217;s up to date and it&#8217;s accurate. That&#8217;s why we&#8217;ve honed in on that API and we&#8217;re already starting to put it to use for the preparatory efforts for Hurricane Irma.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Jeff, one of the things that you said was that emergency situations showed that technology does need to have a seat at the table. Can you talk a little more about some ways in which technologists can be helpful because it may not occur to some people that during an emergency, we might want to tap into your local technologists as well?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Totally. There&#8217;s a couple of ways. I&#8217;ll give you a simple and easy example and then kind of a crowdsource example. Forgive me for getting wonky. This happens when we talk about governments stuff but the city of Houston is engaged in a bunch of different ways to get FEMA reimbursement. One of those things is volunteer hours. If you log your hours for volunteering for Harvey relief efforts, the city can verify that and submitted for reimbursement. It&#8217;s done all on paper so we created a digital form in a website called ReportYourHours.com. It&#8217;s a prototype but that was a need that was brought up in a meeting and we were able to turn it around in a couple of hours, send it through the approval channels and get it out there to people who have been volunteering all through the holiday weekend. It&#8217;s Wednesday now. This past weekend was Labor Day weekend. We wanted to capture that as soon as possible, especially for people who maybe weren&#8217;t part of a coordinated relief effort at one of our shelters or with one of our NGOs that&#8217;s running those things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Just by being at the table and hearing this is a big need, it could mean millions upon millions of dollars in reimbursement for the city. It&#8217;s hugely impactful. Here&#8217;s a paper form, figure out the logic, get a site out there. You draw a little bit from backend database development, a little bit from frontend form management and a little bit from marketing and you get something turned around quickly. I think the tech having a seat at the table enables that to happen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But beyond that, the second example I would give is called the Texas Muck Map and that was a team of developers that built a map that as soon as the water recedes, you have to pull out the carpet, you have to cut out the drywall as fast as possible so that mold doesn&#8217;t grow and what not and that&#8217;s called mucking. There&#8217;s a lot of people who are in their 70s. There&#8217;s a lot of people who are disabled or have disabilities that don&#8217;t allow them to do that work right away so we created a map basically, &#8220;I need you to muck me out,&#8221; or, &#8220;I here to muck,&#8221; that worked really well over the course of the weekend. It was a need that the community had, the government platform really wasn&#8217;t mobilized yet, it was just getting started so we were able to get something out of the community that they could use and then the platform absorbed that data and we merged with them. Being able to have tons of people talking about solutions together and not duplicating efforts and then coming up with things that can serve as interim solutions, I think is really, really helpful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m curious how you organize a group of 2500 technologists without running into problems with egos or with bikeshedding or with platform arguments.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s tough. We have those things. There&#8217;s room for everybody. We&#8217;re open. The leadership team of Sketch City are the best people in the world. These are people that I think so highly of and you attract flies with honey, so to speak when you set a tone as particular way, then I think you attract the right people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We’re platform independent. We don&#8217;t make recommendations about particular technologies. We just want to connect technologists with real public problems and policy people who can explain the nuances of it. I think policy people and tech people have a lot in common, that they live in the details and if you don&#8217;t work in policy or if you don&#8217;t work in tech, no one wants to hear about those details but the two can share details with one another.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The community management is a little chaotic but the teams know how to self-assemble. The people in our community are incredibly capable, they&#8217;re project managers, they&#8217;re CEOs and they&#8217;re senior developers in real life and they come in and they flex their muscles and execute. We&#8217;re lucky in the sense that the people in our community are so capable that they don&#8217;t really require a ton of management. We just play traffic cop and connect them to people and resources.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m really interested in one of the things you said that struck me as counterintuitive and that is that disaster opens opportunities for innovation. I would think that in a disaster situation, people would want to fall back onto the familiar, even if that&#8217;s less efficient. What do you think that is that those sorts of situations open the door for innovation that otherwise, maybe wouldn&#8217;t happen?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think having lived through a disaster now, it changes you. It&#8217;s only been a couple of days, I&#8217;m still in the middle of the adrenaline field, sleepless night, 24/7 work but there&#8217;s too much to do. There&#8217;s just too much to do. There&#8217;s too much for people to handle. The infrastructure set up to handle this kind of volume of need is not there. Even as much as we try, it&#8217;s not there. We have hundreds of organizations coming together and that gets into a process and the government is really good at organizing that process but there&#8217;s inefficiencies across the board.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When you have trust with your friends and neighbors and government officials, those things that they can&#8217;t get to, where there&#8217;s a potential technical solution, they&#8217;re willing to give it a try. They&#8217;re willing to cut through bureaucracy to get it out there because time is essential. There&#8217;s too many people in need. I don&#8217;t quite know how to describe it other than there&#8217;s too much to do and too few resources to do then. Naturally, people are going to look towards technology to make it more efficient. Even if it&#8217;s imperfect. Even if it doesn&#8217;t quite work right. We want to support it but it doesn&#8217;t have to be a perfect solution. It just has to be out there in helping people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As someone who&#8217;s pouring their heart and soul into this right now, how do you keep yourself from just feeling overwhelmed? I kind of almost hear that in your voice. How do you get past that and focus on doing something really meaningful, which is what you&#8217;re doing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s overwhelming. You&#8217;re in a constant state of being overwhelmed but I think that there&#8217;s a certain zen that comes along with that. I watched incredible leaders, people who are leading efforts far larger and more important than anything that I&#8217;m doing and I see how efficient they are. I see how they&#8217;re thinking things through. I see their flaws too. You can tell in my flaws are magnified as well in situations like this but it goes through phases. You have an emergency phase, where it&#8217;s completely overwhelming. You have a relief phase, where the volume and the scope becomes clear and then you have a rebuilding phase.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I was really lucky that people from Occupy Sandy, people who work for the city for Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans, they jumped into the Slack and they pulled me aside and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Hey, man. Take some time, try and get some sleep. Here&#8217;s how it&#8217;s going to go. In a week, it&#8217;s going to be like this. In a month, it&#8217;s going to be like that.&#8221; That kind of guidance is invaluable. Too many people to name that offered that kind of guidance and it&#8217;s really helpful and it keeps you from being overwhelmed because this is a marathon now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Jeff, one of the things that you mentioned early on was if you start working with local government, how you can make a huge impact, which I think is something that doesn&#8217;t occur to a lot of people. What would be your advice for somebody who is looking to make that impact for them to get started working with their own local government?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would definitely join your local Code for America brigade. If you don&#8217;t have a Code for America brigade, start one. If you don&#8217;t have an idea where to get started, reach out to Code for America. It&#8217;s CodeForAmerica.org and they&#8217;ll help you. It&#8217;s helpful to have a person in government who also believes in what you&#8217;re doing and wants to help that you can partner with and they can run the internal circles of legitimizing what you&#8217;re doing and you can run the external community building stuff. Together, if you are able to start a long term relationship, it&#8217;s magical.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I watched from the very beginning a gentleman named Seth Etter, who&#8217;s a community leader in Wichita, Kansas. I used to up to Wichita to facilitate Startup Weekends. I watched him make a decision to take his development community organizations skills and apply it to civic tech. He started Open Wichita, which is their civic hacking group. He got a job with the OpenGov Foundation and his leveraging best practices from across the world to his group and from scratch, created a thriving civic tech community in Wichita, Kansas. If he can do that there, you can do that anywhere.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s so inspiring. The community just really stepping up and seeing problems that are like, &#8220;All right. How can we solve this?&#8221; You&#8217;ve got this community filled with all these fantastic engineers. They can see problems and come up with solutions and then with tragedy happening all around you, it seems like one of the consequences of that is you&#8217;ve got this well of energy of wanting to help and you just need someone to direct all that energy and people are willing to jump in and code and help chip in and make a difference with the skills they have. There are so many different things we can do with tech, you know?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. When we start pollinating the government with people with a community tech background or when somebody studied computer science and then got a master&#8217;s in public policy and it&#8217;s now an innovation analyst at a city or something like that, that&#8217;s where this is going to take root. I&#8217;m a consultant by trade and that&#8217;s how I make my money but this should be a core government function. This should be within government. Forward looking cities and forward looking states are starting to do this. I&#8217;m thrilled that the City of Houston is taking huge leaps forward to be in the top flight class of cities innovating.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you think that every city should have a chief technology officer?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>They do but the chief technology officer function is really to oversee the hundreds of applications that the city supports. They have permitting systems. They have routing systems. They have GIS infrastructure. They have a zillion things. That&#8217;s a huge organizational lift and that&#8217;s hard to do. The city has an innovation office that they just created, directed by Jesse Bounds and Jesse&#8217;s amazing and his staff: [inaudible] and Steven David and Myja Lark. They&#8217;re amazing. They&#8217;re able to fill that role, consultant plus technology product manager and as that team grows, I think the city will begin to transform even more.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things that really struck me is this idea of the knowledge being coupled with how to make things better and what the problems are, being coupled with the people that do the work. From one perspective, we talked about the importance of the leaders respecting those that do the work. It also sets a precedent in disaster situations and what we need to innovate in really all the time, we had to find ways to push decision making toward the people with the knowledge, the people who are doing the work. I&#8217;m curious as to what kind of ideas you might have in terms of how we ought to run things differently to facilitate that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Everything I learn, I learned it from Hackathons. This is like a real, big, long hackathon. I think that being involved in your civic hackathon as a participant is really helpful. Being involved as a government official is really helpful in getting to know one another and coming out of city hall and meeting tech people, where they live and where they are, I think is really helpful. Then knowing how to scope out a project, scope out a need, build a prototype, test it, stay up all night and get something done, I think hackathons are the best training you can get. That&#8217;s a superlative. It&#8217;s probably not the best training you can get but if you&#8217;re a tech person and casually, you just want to prepare for something like this, your civic hackathon is the place to do it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m curious, Jeff. I think that when the disaster strikes, a lot of people are motivated to help in any way they can. Through organizations like Sketch City, there&#8217;s a structure in place to allow them to help but how do you maintain that enthusiasm for helping local governments be more efficient when the disaster is not present? How do you motivate people to help in the communities when it&#8217;s a regular day?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was really great. If you&#8217;re a sales person, you want to sell something that people want to buy. What&#8217;s great about this is that people want to help. The community that we&#8217;ve grown is this community of people who opted in and raised their hand and said, &#8220;I got these tech skills. I&#8217;m curious about local government.&#8221; They&#8217;re usually not the people who are protesting every day. But they are the people who say, &#8220;You know what? I can make a difference in this particular way.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m particularly passionate about environmental issues and criminal justice issues and education issues. My passions grow more than I do work in those fields but I would gladly volunteer my weekends every weekend, all weekends for the foreseeable future, when environmental data causes like that, that just is so necessary. I think about that instinct and I know that thousands of other people have that same instinct. It just needs to be given a channel to be expressed in some way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> To your point, I don&#8217;t think we have to keep people motivated so much as we do keeping people delivering stuff that can be helpful. With each win, more people come in and more people see what&#8217;s possible from their volunteer time and the winds just keep coming as people motivate themselves.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;ve been talking a lot about what&#8217;s been done reactively, as a reaction to a disaster but what do you hope maybe could be done in the future proactively, maybe in Houston or even something that could be passed on to other cities, to kind of get things set up in case something like this happens again. Hurricane Irma potentially heading again right away, which is just terrible and scary. What are your thoughts on putting things into place to be more ready in the future?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Our team is already working with Code for America brigades in Florida and all the volunteers over there. We&#8217;ve put together a document of best practices from our own experience so far and help set things up over there so it didn&#8217;t have to reinvent the wheel. From a technical perspective, I think the Harvey API is pretty powerful. Oftentimes, people want to build the frontend. They want to build a website, a central source of information and that&#8217;s good and we need that. But my passion is really around a central source of data truth. There&#8217;s so much data that&#8217;s collected. It needs to be real time. Sometimes, it&#8217;s official data. Sometimes, it&#8217;s crowdsource data.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If we can provide a backbone for that, in an API that can serve it up into whatever front facing website you want to build &#8212; you want to build the map with leaflet, you want to build a map with Esri, I don&#8217;t care &#8212; as long as it shows the right data. That&#8217;s really where our efforts are concentrated and that API is open source. It&#8217;s on the Sketch City GitHub organization.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Now, Jesse Wolgamott is the primary architect along with [inaudible] and about 11 other contributors. Those folks are tired. They&#8217;re exhausted from this. What I&#8217;m really hopeful that we can do, just hand over our best practices on organizations so far and have them build on it but also let them leverage our technology as much as they want to. My hope is that people develop on Harvey API and that becomes either that or some future iteration of that becomes a central way of managing multiple data sources.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Jeff, earlier you were talking about handling the overwhelming stress that comes with an event like this. The thing that you said was that the calmness in the storm comes from clarity and understanding the storm, as opposed to conquering it. When you get people together and they have a plan and they&#8217;re executing, the relief comes from that clarity instead. I see that same thing happen in technology too, where you&#8217;ve got chaos happening because essentially, not clarity in the plan so it&#8217;s always like hyper-stress. I&#8217;m wondering if some of these skills and ideas that you&#8217;ve learned in the context of the community have potentially helped you in consulting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe. I think that it&#8217;s just so overwhelming the amount of adrenaline that goes through your body for days and days on end &#8212; I&#8217;m not a scientist and I don&#8217;t really know. I&#8217;m guessing it&#8217;s adrenaline &#8212; that I don&#8217;t quite know how to articulate it but you kind of have to adapt and get to a new level of normal and know that you can&#8217;t operate in this frenetic pace and this feeling like things are out of control at all times. I guess, it&#8217;s kind of yoga in the sense that you have to find your inner peace and people respond to how you respond to things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you&#8217;re frantic, you can agitate them. Have you ever been in a meeting where people are cutting one another off? I&#8217;m not into meetings like that. I don&#8217;t like meetings like that. I don&#8217;t operate that way and I don&#8217;t like being dragged into meetings like that. I like structured and efficient. I guess the point is that I don&#8217;t stress out that easily to begin with. I&#8217;ve got some good mental tools for distressing and not getting stressed out. But in a situation that&#8217;s completely and totally overwhelming, you have to trust that people around you are working as best as they can and everybody tries to dial down the amount of stress.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> You have to take breaks for mental relief. You have to cry. You have to release physically the agitation that you feel so that you can get back to work because we&#8217;re ahead of schedule in getting people out of shelters. The needs are not as overwhelming just yet and we&#8217;re preparing for that next phase but there&#8217;s just a lot going on so you can&#8217;t waste time getting stressed about that stuff anymore than you&#8217;re naturally going to be stressed. I don&#8217;t know if that answers your question or not but I&#8217;d like to think that practice back in my regular life and feel stress-free all the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It sounds like what you said, which is what I heard you say is that when everything is crazy but you can know something and you can actually do something about what you know, that gives you something to focus on, as opposed to being focused on everything being crazy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. It gives you some control. It helps you control what you&#8217;re doing. Something that I know a lot of us felt immediately after Harvey stopped raining was we felt out of control. We wanted to do something we didn&#8217;t know what to do. We felt powerless and helpless as we watched our neighbors and our friends drown and that&#8217;s terrible. I think that getting some control over the situation in whatever small way you can, whether you&#8217;re helping the Cajun Navy with dispatch or you&#8217;re organizing food relief or you&#8217;re building a website or you&#8217;re just hanging out with your friends, brainstorming ideas, that&#8217;s a really good way of dealing with what&#8217;s going on and finding your direction as fast as possible and figure out where you can best help. It&#8217;s incumbent upon you. There&#8217;s lots of volunteers who show up and say, &#8220;I&#8217;m ready for something. Give me something to do,&#8221; you&#8217;ve got to figure it out yourself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We like to end each show with a reflection on the conversation that we&#8217;ve had and calls to action.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things that came out the conversation that I thought was really interesting was the idea of using temporary projects as a means of helping. A lot of times when we talk about technology, especially if you&#8217;re trying to do some tech for good, we&#8217;re thinking in a much bigger longer term way. What I thought was a good thing to takeaway is that it may become actually more important to have the ability to very quickly come up with something temporarily to get you to the next week or to the next month so that you can make it to those long term projects. That&#8217;s just as important and maybe, possibly even more important, especially when it comes to some sort of emergency situation or disaster situation because that&#8217;s usually where a lot of things are falling apart and it would be great to be able to have a community that is ready to do something.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For me, this whole conversation was very emotional and kind of an emotional roller coaster in a lot of ways because seeing all of the destruction and everything bad that&#8217;s happening on the news has been really tough during this disaster and in general. I think that it&#8217;s very easy for the news to focus on these bad things and have them feel overwhelming.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> To talk to Jeff today and hear, particularly what he was saying about people coming and showing up and wanting to help and Coraline&#8217;s question about how to motivate people, when he was talking about where people are already motivated because they want to help, they want to be able to do something for their community and give back and it&#8217;s important to people and the fact that he has met and worked with all of these people who all feel similarly to him about that and knowing that there&#8217;s a lot of people like that out there, is a really good thing to hear and a healthy thing for community and also for everyone to be aware of our community, I think when things seem very grim. The emotional roller coaster for me that there&#8217;s a very hopeful lining with all of these people working to help so I felt really good about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that after disasters like this, we get an outpouring of support that&#8217;s really impressive and I&#8217;ve seen a lot of sentiment from people about how in a way it&#8217;s kind of sad that we have to wait for some disaster to happen in order to bring people together like this. I can see where they&#8217;re coming from in that way but to me, I see it more as now that we have these people together working on things, we have to take that blessing and continue running with it in order to make it not sad and a really worthwhile thing that just happened to [inaudible] out of a tragedy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s sad that people think that people don&#8217;t do this. I think there are people who are doing this and don&#8217;t get attention. With the disaster and then [inaudible], I think it&#8217;s actually hopeful that you&#8217;re not alone, that there&#8217;s a lot of people who are like you who want to do something good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think you are totally on point about people who want to do something just needing a way to channel it. It&#8217;s situations like this that provide the catalyst for that channel, not the catalyst for people wanting to help.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think my reflection is as listening to this conversation, I&#8217;ve just been so inspired by just seeing how much light there is in the world. Even when we seem to be drowning in darkness, there&#8217;s all this beautiful light in the world around us of people coming together and people pitching in to help. The thing that ends up holding people back is the simple stuff of like, &#8220;I didn&#8217;t realize that this was a place I could channel my energy,&#8221; and if this minimal amount of structure is set up to tie people together, to partner people with the right people, we can channel all that energy that is already out there in the world and start solving these problems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We’ve got all these engineers with all these amazing problem solving skills. If we set up a channel to say, &#8220;Let&#8217;s sit down at the table and talk about how we can solve these problems,&#8221; things just start happening. Maybe, if we started knocking down some of those barriers and just making that first step to get involved and connect it with the right people, maybe that&#8217;s all it take to shift direction.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was really struck by the underlying theme of today&#8217;s conversation and creating cultures of respect and how creating a culture like that where you have respect and empathy for everyone doing their jobs and for the system that&#8217;s doing its job can lead to real solutions and can lead to bringing people together in a way that makes everyone able to contribute fully and open opportunities for innovation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that&#8217;s something that each of us can take with us into our work life and our home life and hopefully, also channel into doing some greater good in our communities. I&#8217;m curious, Jeff if people want to donate your effort, either time or money, how would they go about helping Sketch City?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>They can just go to SketchCity.org. There&#8217;s a Slack, a Meetup, a GitHub. We appreciate all of our contributors from all around the world but first and foremost, check out Code for America and get connected with them so that you can bring civic hacking to your community.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I hope that our listeners are also inspired to take what they learned from this conversation and apply it and do some good in the world and volunteer and give money, if you can&#8217;t volunteer. I think the conversation that we had today is really, really important, especially not just thinking in terms of disaster relief but in terms of how each of us can contribute to making our communities better and safer and healthier. We feel very privileged to be able to have the guests that we have on the show and to be able to share these conversations with you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you would like to ensure that conversations like this continue happening, you can support us on our Patreon at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. We&#8217;re also looking for per show and long term sponsorships that companies and individuals and conferences can take advantage of. If you are interested in a sponsorship opportunity, go to GreaterThanCode.com/Sponsors. Thank you so much Jeff. This has been great.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JEFF:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Appreciate it.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jeff Reichman: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/fileunderjeff"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@fileunderjeff</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://januaryadvisors.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">January Advisors</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="http://sketchcity.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sketch City</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In this special edition of Greater Than Code, we talk to Jeff Reichman, a technologist living in the Houston area who co-founded Sketch City, a non-profit community of 2,500+ people who apply technology and data to public problems.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode talks about how the Houston tech community came together to help people through Hurricane Harvey and the aftermath, the technology opportunities in disaster response, the harvey-api that they developed, and how tech devs need to be side-by-side with relief efforts, while responding to tech needs right away.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Resources:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://sketchcity.herokuapp.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sketch City Slack Channel</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://github.com/sketch-city/harvey-api"><span style="font-weight: 400;">harvey-api</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://reportyourhours.com"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Report Your Hours</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.codeforamerica.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Code for America</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://sunlightfoundation.com/2017/08/31/how-houston-is-using-open-data-to-handle-hurricane-harvey/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">How Houston is using open data to handle Hurricane Harvey</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://swamplot.com/the-best-way-to-find-out-which-hurricane-harvey-shelters-near-you-need-help-and-what-they-need/2017-08-29/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Best Way to Find Out Which Hurricane Harvey Shelters Near You Need Help and What They Need</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://harveyneeds.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Harvey Needs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Using temporary projects as a means for helping people during emergency situations.</span></p>
<p><b>Jamey:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> People showing up, wanting to help, and being motivated to help others. </span></p>
<p><b>Janelle: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">There is light in the world even when we are drowning in darkness.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Creating cultures of respect where you have respect and empathy for everyone doing their jobs in a way that allows everyone to contribute fully.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via <]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jeff Reichman: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/fileunderjeff"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@fileunderjeff</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://januaryadvisors.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">January Advisors</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="http://sketchcity.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sketch City</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In this special edition of Greater Than Code, we talk to Jeff Reichman, a technologist living in the Houston area who co-founded Sketch City, a non-profit community of 2,500+ people who apply technology and data to public problems.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode talks about how the Houston tech community came together to help people through Hurricane Harvey and the aftermath, the technology opportunities in disaster response, the harvey-api that they developed, and how tech devs need to be side-by-side with relief efforts, while responding to tech needs right away.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Resources:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://sketchcity.herokuapp.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sketch City Slack Channel</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://github.com/sketch-city/harvey-api"><span style="font-weight: 400;">harvey-api</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://reportyourhours.com"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Report Your Hours</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.codeforamerica.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Code for America</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://sunlightfoundation.com/2017/08/31/how-houston-is-using-open-data-to-handle-hurricane-harvey/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">How Houston is using open data to handle Hurricane Harvey</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://swamplot.com/the-best-way-to-find-out-which-hurricane-harvey-shelters-near-you-need-help-and-what-they-need/2017-08-29/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Best Way to Find Out Which Hurricane Harvey Shelters Near You Need Help and What They Need</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://harveyneeds.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Harvey Needs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Using temporary projects as a means for helping people during emergency situations.</span></p>
<p><b>Jamey:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> People showing up, wanting to help, and being motivated to help others. </span></p>
<p><b>Janelle: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">There is light in the world even when we are drowning in darkness.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Creating cultures of respect where you have respect and empathy for everyone doing their jobs in a way that allows everyone to contribute fully.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via <]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/jeff-2.jpg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/jeff-2.jpg"></googleplay:image>
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					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>46:45</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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					<title>045: Sexual Assault and Project Callisto with Lynn Cyrin</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/045-sexual-assault-and-project-callisto-with-lynn-cyrin/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 06 Sep 2017 05:00:28 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=830</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[In this episode, we talk to Lynn Cyrin, a developer on the Project Callisto sexual assault reporting application. In this episode, we talk about institutional betrayal, the importance of keeping survivor information private and the technology behind the app.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[In this episode, we talk to Lynn Cyrin, a developer on the Project Callisto sexual assault reporting application. In this episode, we talk about institutional betrayal, the importance of keeping survivor information private and the technology behind the ]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>This episode is sponsored by </b><a href="http://upsd.io/2wmwtFp"><b>Upside</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-785" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png" alt="" width="1000" height="128" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png 1024w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-300x38.png 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-768x98.png 768w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-600x77.png 600w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo.png 1382w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Bundle your flights and hotel. Save money. Earn gift cards.</b></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Content/Trigger Warning: This episode discusses sexual assault.</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/coralineada"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lynn Cyrin: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/lynncyrin"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@lynncyrin</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://lynncyrin.me/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">lynncyrin.me</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Fullstack Activism” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:22</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Lynn’s Background Story and Superpowers</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.firstlegoleague.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">FIRST LEGO League</span></a></p>
<p><b>11:34 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://www.projectcallisto.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Project Callisto</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">: Reporting Sexual Assault and Dealing with The System</span></p>
<p><b>17:57 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Institutional Betrayal and Keeping Information Private</span></p>
<p><b>20:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Chain of Command: How Project Callisto Works</span></p>
<p><b>22:17 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Reticence When it Comes to Talking About Sexual Assault</span></p>
<p><b>26:04 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Staying in Your Lane”</span></p>
<p><b>27:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Matching Reports</span></p>
<p><b>29:33 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Technology Behind the App</span></p>
<p><b>34:14 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Evaluating Features</span></p>
<p><b>38:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Contributing to Project Callisto</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://joinfundclub.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Fund Club</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.projectcallisto.org/donate/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Donate to Project Callisto</span></a></p>
<p><b>41:54 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Open Sourcing the Project</span></p>
<p><b>44:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Code Sharing</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Coraline: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Empathy and developers putting the psychological safety of their users first.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369Jw"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Brené Brown on Empathy</span></a></p>
<p><b>Astrid:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Building technology for the greater good.</span></p>
<p><b>Jamey: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">If you don’t like what someone else is doing, you can do your own thing and make it happen.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Believe survivors.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.ashedryden.com/the-risk-in-speaking-up"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ashe Dryden: The Risk In Speaking Up</span></a></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b><i> [This episode is brought to you by Upside, one of the DC&#8217;s fastest growing tech startups. Upside is looking for innovative engineers wanting to disrupt the norm, and they&#8217;re always hiring. Check out Upside.com/Team for more.]</i></b></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Welcome everyone to Episode 45 of &#8216;Full Stack Activism&#8217;. I&#8217;m here with my great friend, Jamey Hampton.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, Astrid. Just a reminder, we&#8217;re still Greater Than Code here, even though that is what we&#8217;re talking about today. I&#8217;m here with my great friend, Coraline Ada Ehmke.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, everybody. It&#8217;s wonderful to be with you today. I do want to give our content warning for more sensitive listeners. We will be discussing sexual assault today. If this is a topic that you might find triggering, you might want to skip this episode. I&#8217;m happy to introduce my friend, Sam Livingston-Gray.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello, thank you and it&#8217;s my great honor to introduce today our guest. Lynn &#8216;Cyrin&#8217; Conway is a full stack developer, project manager and activist. She&#8217;s also a black poly translesbian. She does most of her work with connections and community, the queer trans community in particular. Lynn, welcome to the show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi. It&#8217;s good to be here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We always like to start our show with superhero origin stories. What is your superpower and what freak accident caused you to acquire it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The very, very slow motion of freak accident that caused my superpower was just my parents making me do way too much stuff when I was little all the time, like [inaudible] and also [inaudible] every day and also makes you clean the whole house and [inaudible] four brother and sisters who need their help with homework too. By that time, I hit college and stuff. It was nothing. I could just write Python [inaudible] I was straight and it was like a cake walk as opposed to trying to take care of the whole house. I like to say that I&#8217;m just phenomenally driven, which sounds like one of those things like, &#8220;What is your greatest weakness?&#8221; It&#8217;s actually the strengths but no, I just kind of work through everything all of the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, that is totally a superpower. I&#8217;m glad you were able to pull that from that experience.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Lynn, you talked about going to college. Where did you go to school and what did you study and did you finish?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I did this thing which is probably fairly standard for web developers, at least. I went to college for one year each in mechanical engineering, material science and then astronomical engineering and the last one is why I got to work at NASA for a bit which I did for six months. In astronomical engineering, I have to say that work at NASA for the rest of my life, kind of work but as of the NASA thing, I think I was working on some Python code for something, like some Python simulation of some bots that&#8217;s planning and the Python was actually more interesting than the works that NASA planning [inaudible], which is weird because satellites but truly, Python was more interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I stopped [inaudible] there. It wasn&#8217;t obvious to me at a time like, &#8220;I was going to go and learn Python on my free time,&#8221; instead but it just sort of slowly happened over the next year or so.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And do you still write primarily in Python?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was just posting about how much I want to improve it like 20 minutes ago &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s the Python package manager?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s kind of my whole life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How long you&#8217;ve been doing open source work?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have this thing about&#8230; I don&#8217;t know, I&#8217;m just naturally take into radical openness. I have this thing where if someone can&#8217;t see that I wrote code, I don&#8217;t feel like I wrote it. Actually, I first started coding while I was homeless coincidentally and all of that is still on GitHub. If I deleted it because it&#8217;s trash. It&#8217;s been six years and I try to post all of my stuff in GitHub and GitLab because politics and stuff like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve heard from some early career developers that it&#8217;s really helpful for them to see more established developers have their beginner projects so their learning projects and their toy projects on GitHub for a couple of reasons. It demonstrates that there is a learning path that even more experience developers have followed to get to where they are and they can see themselves in that learning path. Have you ever gotten feedback from anyone about some of your early projects or your toy projects or your learning projects like that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Not specifically interestingly. I tend to present myself so strongly. Even just now, I&#8217;m being attacked and I did that, where people take me at my individual point that I&#8217;m at right now and just kind of marvel of it. I don&#8217;t get a lot of people being like, &#8220;How did you get here? You’re so hardworking. You&#8217;ve been doing this for years.&#8221; I don&#8217;t get that. I never really thought about it, you know?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Fair.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Lynn, when did you first actually start writing code because I know that you mentioned that you did it in college but were you doing it before?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I did the very standard, basic college student thing like this little league robot thing, which is really cute. Much of like really basic UI programming. I try to take APCS for a little bit but got bored because it&#8217;s C and Java, which is so dramatically different from the Python and it was a bit of ease now. In college, I had a bit of some Python and some Perl and some Java and some MATLAB because it was mildly relevant to the real subject matter. I didn&#8217;t really start writing code on my own accord until I&#8217;ve got to San Francisco and was homeless. I was like, &#8220;What do I do? So I just go and write code? I guess so.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can you tell us more about how did you got to San Francisco?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>At the same time, I was about in my 3rd year college and I was doing all of this really cool stuff, I&#8217;ve started realizing that I was weird and trans, as cool as the whole Python to NASA satellites being was. I would rather have just been really gay and a girl. I was doing that [inaudible], which is not terrible but it wasn&#8217;t great and I was kind of like, &#8220;I&#8217;m a prisoner of [inaudible].&#8221; I just kind of Google and search online the good places to be gay and San Francisco is usually near the top of that list so I ended up there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I told my parents, I was like, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to college in San Francisco,&#8221; but really, I was going to San Francisco and be gay and live life and then I&#8217;m in a homeless shelter and not knowing what the hell I&#8217;m going to do. I think I bump into someone who is doing a homeless queer youth thing. I bump into [inaudible] and I haven&#8217;t thought about coding for [inaudible] but I&#8217;ve written Python before and I was there and I had nothing to do so I started getting into it. I&#8217;ve been writing code a little bit in my whole life but it didn&#8217;t really lead into it until I was in San Francisco.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Was there a program that you&#8217;re in to get your career started or was it just the individual efforts of the people that you mentioned?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[inaudible] it was my activist-y mindset so I leaned myself to that direction. That plus as I want to work all the time, combined with I really like putting everything open source. I would do the thing where other people at Mozilla in particular in San Francisco and when I was at [inaudible], there was a lot of that, where people will just kind of let themselves be available for new coders. I would talk to them and the thing that I notice to the people I meet nowadays that I am really receptive to. I&#8217;m really aware of when I&#8217;m talking to a new coder or someone just getting started, whether in [inaudible] I talk to them I see them doing a lot of work but [inaudible] was homeless and I really love GitHub and open source so I would like to talk like an engineer at Mozilla about blah-blah-blah code and then after the conversation, I would just push some random beginner level Python code every hour for the next four days.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that sort of helps with this visibility [inaudible] where I was talking to people who like code, but also kind of activism and I just kept doing things all of the time. It wasn&#8217;t very formal but it was very structured on my part. I had meetings with people who did PR stuff and I was like, &#8220;What things have you been tweeting about because I have a Twitter account and I post my GitHub to my Twitter.&#8221; If that&#8217;s too spammy, how should I be connecting with people and I did a lot of that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s really amazing. I really respect your &#8216;let&#8217;s just do this&#8217; attitude that I&#8217;m getting from listening when you talk. While you&#8217;re kind of in that zone talking to people and getting the kind of advice is there any particular piece of advice that really stuck out to you and really affected how you did things that you remember that you might want to share with other people?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can&#8217;t think of anything specifically. This wasn&#8217;t an advice per se as something I was just really inspired by. In my very early days of hangout at [inaudible], I forget who I ran into first, is it Ashe or Shanley. Oh, Ashe then Shanley came and it was when they were starting up UltraConf and Model View Culture respectively and that was the first time I&#8217;d run into someone like being in an existing industry with a lot of existing infrastructure and just being like, &#8220;You know what? I don&#8217;t like all of the rest of your stuff. I was going to start my own from zero. I don&#8217;t like your thing. My thing is better and I&#8217;m going to do it myself,&#8221; sort of that mindset, I hadn&#8217;t encountered before personally as I was like, &#8220;I can just do whatever?&#8221; Like I do look at the thing, say it you don&#8217;t like it and then do something else and then people respect me. As I get this thing nowadays of people like, &#8220;How do you plan all your path?&#8221; And you do a lot of programs and what was the structure and really, it was just having a lot of energy and being shown that I can just do whatever and I&#8217;m proceeding to do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting. I&#8217;ve run across this idea in writing that you have some million words of crap inside you and you need to just get them out as part of the process of getting better at what you do. It sounds like you&#8217;re already set up to do that but you&#8217;re also in this environment where you&#8217;ve got access to a lot of feedback so you&#8217;re able to make the most of that phase of your development as well. Does that sounds about right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I had a really interesting time when I was first starting out. I had a lot of people who were very like, &#8220;This is a new coder. I&#8217;m going to criticize them on Python syntax arbitrarily every 30 minutes or a week,&#8221; and then a lot of people who is talking to me about culture and visibility and how to get myself out there at that time when I was really driven to self-improve.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really appreciate what you&#8217;re saying about seeing other people stuff that you don&#8217;t like and making your own. I think that&#8217;s a really good segue to bring us into this project that you&#8217;ve been working on. I really to hear more about &#8212; Project Callisto. Can you start to give us the background on that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The way I like to describe it to other people is it&#8217;s Google Docs for sexual assault reporting. The main hook there is that in the absence of Callisto, the usual thing that you have to deal at a school to report sexual assault is that you have to go to a physical office in person and usually recount the story one to three times verbally, which as a millennial, I just kind of die inside every time I have to convey that information as opposed to just filling out a form online.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>On the Project Callisto website, there are some really chilling statistics. It says that survivors of sexual assault wait an average of 11 months to report their assaults to authorities, less than 10% of survivors will even report their assault at all and that up to 90% of assaults are committed by repeat perpetrators. The thing that I find really striking is that the project website says that an estimated of 20% of women, 7% of men and 25% of trans and gender nonconforming students are sexually assaulted during their college career. I definitely understand how difficult it would be for a survivor of a sexual assault to go to a physical office and make that report and have to relive it multiple times through the retelling. What this project was set to differently to address that difficulty?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s really basic to say that just putting up a form online is such a dramatic difference from having to say it in person. There are some other things that we do that are very specific to the impact that we have. We&#8217;re very much about the survivor. I&#8217;m having a very clear idea of what the system is doing and how the information that they are providing to the system is impacting the surrounding, news being communicated to. Think about that in sharp contrast like you tweet something on Twitter and you had no idea about who is going to or you&#8217;re posting on Facebook but actually Walmart is reading it. Like the radical opposite of your information isn&#8217;t encrypted at best and only you can see it until you explicitly say that you want to send it to your school reporting source.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Lynn, how does that process of keeping your information private while you&#8217;re recording it change what happened for the survivor and how they navigate to the system as opposed to going and having to say it verbally and then not knowing what happens with that information?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s almost like a large psychological shift in how you think about the information that I&#8217;m not even sure I could describe it. There are differences one to one. I talk to a lot of psychologists and psychologists are mandated to report it. I have had some issues that we need to be mandated to report in my life and I am talking to psychologists but the psychologists help me but I know they&#8217;re mandated to report it and I have events on my life that would need to be managed to report and I couldn&#8217;t say that that hasn&#8217;t happened to me. I really honestly could not say.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I almost can&#8217;t even conceptualize with a contrast the idea of I&#8217;m on a website like Twitter, Google, Facebook, which you say something and the whole internet knows it and they want to sell you something with it. Going to a website, that is so explicitly not that. It&#8217;s almost like my private journal but on the internet with a password. I think we get that with our physical private journal. I never own a journal with lock on it and that&#8217;s kind of essentially what this is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It&#8217;s something that I feel very comfortable with what I&#8217;m working on. I&#8217;m working on it and whenever I&#8217;m just passing variables around and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;This variable is actually literally what verbatim happened to you during your assault,&#8221; but I can&#8217;t access it. I couldn&#8217;t pull it out unless we&#8217;re in that little middle bit right before the encryption sets in. I&#8217;m going ask someone&#8217;s data by having a typo somewhere. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For me as a developer, whatever I&#8217;m going and do the form writing, I sort of have a very [inaudible] make it. I have a very strong understanding of how does the security pattern comes to play and so the psychological issues that we consider for the flow of the site and the structure. I don&#8217;t feel like I&#8217;m going to suddenly have carpet swept from under me and have a [inaudible] as I exit a room, which I feel like when I&#8217;m talking to psychologist because I&#8217;m just at my computer. It could be 2AM and I could be in Canada.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My partner has done a lot of domestic violence and sexual assault work for a long as we&#8217;ve been together so I have a second hand education in this and my understanding is that if you&#8217;ve just been sexually assaulted, you&#8217;ve experienced this massive violation, not only of your physical person but of your autonomy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Everybody experiences this differently. I&#8217;m not telling my own story because I don&#8217;t have a story of this but my understanding is that for many survivors, the experience of going and dealing with the system can be re-traumatizing because like I said, you&#8217;ve just experienced this violation of your person and your autonomy and then you go and you give your story to somebody else and then they have their own rules about what they&#8217;re going to do with it, how they&#8217;re going to react and you lose a lot of control once you give your story to the official system.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We’re talking about a lot of on-campus survivors so if you go to tell the story, there&#8217;s a risk of them expelling the person who assaulted you. It&#8217;s a small risk, unfortunately, statistically speaking but that could have consequences that you don&#8217;t want. There&#8217;s also the possibility that no one will believe you and that could be a consequence that you don&#8217;t want. I feel like giving the survivors the control over their own information, literally gives them control which is something that they desperately need at that point in their lives.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. There&#8217;s an entire set of design considerations within Callisto about addressing institutional betrayal, then you have a lot of bits in a design, not necessarily to have dramatic implications but sort of inform how the backend communication information of other people, where there&#8217;s this idea that if my [inaudible] and you never send it to someone unless explicitly say so, it&#8217;s also quirky like frontend bits, where there is an absolute minimum of institutional granting on the Callisto site. Your school logo is in the bottom left so you can know you&#8217;re on the right website but aside from that, it&#8217;s all Callisto branding. It&#8217;s all Callisto servers. We are very clearly a third party who was not your school.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can you explain more about the institutional betrayal because I&#8217;m not aware what that is and what happens?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I subjectively describe it as the idea that if I, as a fucking black trans polyamorous, kinky, mostly lesbian kind of bi, I have a whole lot of axes on which, if I report a sexual assault to any person, for any reason, there&#8217;s a variety of ways that the institution that I&#8217;m reporting to can handle that in a way that is actively harmful to either to me, the person who did the assault and the way that [inaudible]. That&#8217;s sort of one of the example that illustrates the core concept of institutional betrayal.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you have agreements with the schools and universities that Project Callisto is wired up to address that kind of issue?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The idea behind the Callisto is that we are providing a service usually to schools, to have the very beginning of the reporting process, be more effective for a survivor, for the most part. This is something I talk to people out in the interviews I was doing recently for another backend engineer where there was more imperative inabilities to great impact in the second the report hits the reporting school or like the [inaudible] usually. At that point, all of the standard methods, institutional betrayal that you would experience in any institution of any size or just start kicking in, there are days where I think about how I wish that there was a sub-bit in Callisto contract that you can&#8217;t make schools explicitly ask if they are going to report sexual assaults to authorities if someone with an endangered immigration status is involved. But there&#8217;s nothing like that. We provide them a website and then from there, we help them get the report and everything else is up to the institution to fix their own impact.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m really curious about the chain of command like how the app works. Can you walk me through who would suggests to someone that they use this website and then what would happen to their information after they&#8217;ve put it? I&#8217;m just trying to understand the whole flow.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Step 0 is that we have &#8212; I don&#8217;t do it personally because web developer &#8212; a lot of [inaudible] is advertising like bathroom leaflets and little tear-out stickers and tiny presentations that we let schools give during sexual assault events, then all of those sorts of things. Ideally, if someone goes into assault, they have this idea of a website that they can report it on in their head prior. Then it happens and then they can go to the website.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The website itself has a few steps to make sure that the people who are reporting are from the school that their reporting to. From there, you fill out your report and at the very end of the reporting process, which is the whole Google form, you&#8217;re just filling up and immediately after that, there&#8217;s a page that is like, &#8220;If you would like to report your assault, we&#8217;re going to encrypt it with GPG and we&#8217;re going to send it to these [inaudible] officers and their email addresses,&#8221; right after you double confirm that this is what you want to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wonder why we still don&#8217;t know enough about sexual assault, what&#8217;s happening to victims because it&#8217;s something that it feels like it&#8217;s getting talked about a lot that this is happening. Coraline read those statistics that are on your site about it but it also feels like that the people in general know very, very little about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There are strong organizational self-preservation instinct that kick in for people who work for colleges because they want to minimize those sexual assault stats because they make the school look bad. They might result in reduced funding or reduced interest in students coming to their school. They don&#8217;t want to be perceived that there&#8217;s a sexual assault problem at their school so they want to pretend that it doesn&#8217;t happen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then for individuals who are privileged enough not to have experienced sexual assault, those people don&#8217;t want to think about it. It&#8217;s not a pleasant thing to grapple with and if you&#8217;re not directly motivated, if it hasn&#8217;t affected you or somebody that you know, it&#8217;s not like most people are going to go out and just research this on their own so it has to be outreach but there&#8217;s not a lot of funding for outreach. Frankly, there&#8217;s not a lot of funding for any of it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So it&#8217;s like a self-perpetuating silence, essentially?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This isn&#8217;t necessarily an institutional problem. It&#8217;s something that I dealt with a lot personally. I have to say that I spent a lot more time digging in Python than I do in [inaudible] because I have [inaudible] the subject matter where I work on day-to-day. For example, the stats that Coraline read earlier, I know the developer who put those on the site but I&#8217;m going to put those on other site in the next few weeks and I promise you that I won&#8217;t read them, as I&#8217;m actually doing it because it&#8217;s so hard to parse when I am trying to like, &#8220;I&#8217;m trying to write Python and the Python I&#8217;m writing says that 30% of people who are sexually assaulted do blah-blah-blah,&#8221; and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Nope. I&#8217;m not reading it.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s a weird feeling reading the statistics, I think for a lot of people, whenever I read statistics for about anything bad really, I feel like I&#8217;m at risk group that I&#8217;m in. I get this feeling, especially recently I have an experience like, &#8220;This percentage of the trans community has experienced this terrible thing,&#8221; and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Wow, that&#8217;s a lot of my friends,&#8221; and it feels like I&#8217;m waiting for a shoe to drop. This hasn&#8217;t happened to me so when is this going to happen to me. Looking at numbers can feel very weirdly personally over-alarming that way, I think.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a very informal band on anyone reporting about balance numbers on transwomen of color if the person themselves is not a transwoman of color. I have personally chewed out many, many white transwoman for conveying the black transwoman of color like the black sex worker transwoman of color at assault and balance rates with [inaudible] depression. That&#8217;s not you. Stop it. I can&#8217;t deal with this. It&#8217;s weird like they&#8217;re in love with empathy, but first empathy is when someone say something bad, you want to help them. But I&#8217;m several steps removed from that where this is bad, it doesn&#8217;t affect you, it affects me more than it affects you and also talking about it, it doesn&#8217;t really help me so please stop. It&#8217;s a very hard. It&#8217;s something that I had to personally parse when I&#8217;m working on the frontend with a lot of specific content that I personally parse on daily basis.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Lynn, that ties into something I&#8217;ve learned through my own activism &#8212; this concept of staying in your lane. There are issues that I feel very strongly about but there are people who are doing work to address those issues and I see my role as someone who&#8217;s maybe not directly affected and I&#8217;m thinking here maybe reproductive rights or definitely is what you said, the violence that transwomen of color that sex workers face so I try very hard to amplify those voices and support the people doing that work without getting in a way. Do you think that Project Callisto could have been created as well or be successful if it was created by someone who is not themselves a survivor of sexual assault?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, not even vaguely. There are competitors at Callisto that&#8230; I don&#8217;t know. I don&#8217;t look at them in depth because I&#8217;m not a CEO. I know that our organization is coincidentally 100% women right now because who&#8217;s going to have good information on the effects of sexual assault and a lot of us had PTSD from various kinds of trauma and this is the organization that I want to be solving the problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We don&#8217;t want to minimize the experience of male sexual assault survivors. They are a small but definitely present minority.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, there&#8217;s a very specific thing that we do on the website on various places where there&#8217;s certain things that women just do culturally that necessarily don&#8217;t make women a lot more comfortable but they all push away men really aggressively. It&#8217;s not something that they think about on daily basis because [inaudible] women, I can&#8217;t. But every once in a while, we&#8217;ll do a content appraisal of like, &#8220;Will male survivors will have a really hard problem with this?&#8221; I don&#8217;t know. I&#8217;m not the designer so I just assume it is basic things like too much pink. It&#8217;s a consideration that we yield through.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s another stat on the site that I found interesting, which is that you match reports and you allow people to report only if another survivor names the same perpetrator. You say this is because up to 90% of assaults are committed by repeat perpetrators. I&#8217;m curious, is this something that helps survivors report because they feel like if they are not the only one, there&#8217;s a much better chance they&#8217;ll be believed?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s about cultural reasons and psychological reasons why we do that. I think the way I describe it subjectively and referencing my own experiences are there are certain things that I only feel talking about if I know that they happened more than once or to more than one person. We have a technical set up that reflects that emotional feeling of, &#8220;This can happen to me as bad, but I don&#8217;t really care and talk about it but it happen to other people,&#8221; and we have code that does essentially that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The Project Callisto website says that during the 2015 to 2016 pilot program, the reporting rate quadrupled on partner campuses. Why do you think it had that kind of impact?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Me, personally as someone who&#8217;s 25, I would also be three or four times more compelled to report a sexual assault if I can do it on my laptop, in my room as opposed to in a physical office with someone who I&#8217;ve never spoken to before. I think that speaks to the core fundamental impact of Callisto as a website where you can report a sexual assault. It itself being very impactful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to talk about the level of technology involved. My perspective on this is that I used to work on an Android app for an NGO in Africa that was doing a similar thing actually, where it was taking data from sexual assault survivors. In their case, the idea was people would go to doctors and get medically checked but then not feel comfortable going to law enforcement and there was a disconnect with people who felt comfortable with medical and people who comfortable with law enforcement so the idea was if the doctor that they&#8217;re already seeing can take this information in a format that they can just pass on to law enforcement with consent, rather than making them go through a traumatic experience again, as we were saying earlier like getting checked out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But one of our big things that was a huge focus in the Third World, which is where this app is doing was keeping it as low tech as possible. Even though it was at an app, we train the doctors to use it and the survivors never had to do anything on a computer or a phone and they could just let someone else do it for them, then not have to go through that technological stress.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m listening to you talk about this with college students and talk about the exact opposite. I love that. It&#8217;s really interesting with this idea like I don&#8217;t want to talk to anyone. I don&#8217;t trust anyone to do it for me. I want to do it all in technology. I guess I don&#8217;t really have a specific question but I want to sink my teeth into that concept that people who are comfortable with technology or not, doing things in a way that is most comfortable to them. Does that make sense?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. The other day, actually my [inaudible] call on me and have a conversations with them about whether of good formal definitions of cutting-edge in high tech because I think a few days ago, I was tweeting about how I&#8217;m using beta versions of npm, Travis and some GitHub features. This feature was released in the last two or three months and usually I personally noted those and I&#8217;m watching their commit logs and I&#8217;m doing this for the sake of pushing Callisto to sexual assault survivors better. I haven&#8217;t done this yet but I have a bunch of patches to [inaudible] and to Django and Python, that I could trace all the way back to if this patch gets in, it&#8217;s going to serve special assault survivors in this way. Also, it&#8217;s changing a thing for a millions of people because I would be patching the Django.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I like to drill down on that very specifically. I think it&#8217;s something that helps my personal impression of my impact. Because we&#8217;re a big organization, there&#8217;s a larger conversation to happen in respect to like, &#8220;Lynn, you spending a month adding Angular.js in record form so async really help a lot of people.&#8221; I don&#8217;t know but I love Angular.js and I could use npm when I&#8217;m doing it and also, people who use async forms will think it&#8217;s really nice. Those are the things that I think about with respect to Callisto&#8217;s tech.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When I found out we were going to be talking about this, it was really excited and one of the things that occurred to me was that looking at it seems this should be a fairly bog standard webapp but were there any other aspects of the technical implementation that were particularly interesting?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For the most part, it&#8217;s a very basic Django app. It has a few views that have a few forms on it, basic Django forms. It could be better but in ways that would be better for all of the Django had once. The only thing I feel that is very specific to Callisto and implementation is the fact that we have integration with Python&#8217;s GPG library, which I&#8217;m not super used to describing this in depth but it&#8217;s the same tech that underpins TLS and [inaudible] and SSH and all those other sort of things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We have the Google form thing and there&#8217;s that repo and right above that repo, there sits another repo that takes all the data that are going to Google form process with and GPG encrypts it before we send it to the client school. We have another process where we actually take all of [inaudible] officers doing GPG key setup process, which if you&#8217;re a web developer, it&#8217;s something you&#8217;ve already done a few times already but [inaudible] officer is totally new and it&#8217;s a whole new type of password. Public-private key encryption is a concept that you have to introduce them to but it&#8217;s fundamental to how the tech of Callisto works.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Lynn, you talked about looking at beta versions of various tools and evaluating or seeing like this features going to really help us with Project Callisto and therefore, help survivors. Is that information in context that you tend to share with open source maintainers? If so, what kind of reaction do you get from them?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I share in [inaudible]. I love it. It&#8217;s one of my favorite things. I&#8217;m going to someone&#8217;s repo and I&#8217;ll have a thing that I think the most recent time I did it was there&#8217;s a Django migration test case library that runs migrations forward and backwards in a test context so you can see if the migration is failing. One day, that repo was only really set up for minor migrations forward and I want them to run the migrations backwards. I laid on in layers, where I have an initial issue and I was like, &#8220;It&#8217;d be cool if you could run migration backwards.&#8221; It has this open source thing that the developer was like, &#8220;Oh, it&#8217;s cool.&#8221; I don&#8217;t even need to work on it and then a few weeks later, I was like, &#8220;I&#8217;m working on a sexual assault record form. I think that if a survivor has a specific data and then I remove that field, I need to be able to write a test to explicitly say that data is remove because it contains sexual assault data.&#8221; That had a really good end user impact on survivor and that feature was in three days. That&#8217;s usually how it goes but sometimes, when I don&#8217;t even have to do that, I just say Callisto and they Google it and things happen around me. It&#8217;s really nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that speaks well of their Django community for an app like yours has that kind of credibility and clout.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had all totally positive experience with Django community. Amazingly I had this thing where the way I like to submit patches to open source projects really creates against the Django itself, just me versus Django. I had this thing. Since I started working on Callisto, either something about how I totally shift myself for the content that we working on Callisto, when I make issues the Django people don&#8217;t yell at me anymore and that&#8217;s nice. Because I&#8217;m kind of shit-head about it and it help sexual assault survivor so they deal with it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a good reason.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. It&#8217;s basically always been the case that when I&#8217;m talking about things, I don&#8217;t know how the whole [inaudible] core team has it to shoot me out because I talked so much shit about [inaudible] on Twitter. But I feel like if they were to start, they would see Callisto in my [inaudible] and be like, &#8220;Okay, never mind.&#8221; That sort of how it goes usually.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think actually that kind of great because not only you are getting a positive reaction from project maintainers but I think that as software developer, we tend to not think about the impact necessarily of technical decisions that we make or the tools that we create and we don&#8217;t think about the fact that there are real people doing important work on the other side. Our users are doing really critical work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think too often we might think, &#8220;In the enterprise, this will have this effect,&#8221; or an organization of a certain size will make a developer spend 5% less time running test when in reality, there&#8217;s very important work like the work that you&#8217;re doing that relies on stability and performance and flexibility of the tooling that we&#8217;re creating.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s nice to remind people of that every once in a while. I can almost see it between comments and a GitHub issue, when they realize that the GitHub issue that I just made isn&#8217;t for making take out gets in my house two minutes faster. It&#8217;s for helping someone reports sexual assault and you can just feel how much more serious and driven they get in between two comments when they realize that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Out of curiosity, is it feasible for newcomers to contribute to Project Callisto?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>To a degree of feasible that I work every day to make it more feasible. I come from a context where previously the Callisto, I was working on Bundler and Ruby Gems, which the projects themselves like to be very accessible but the actual code for Bundler and Ruby Gems are almost comically inaccessible. I focus a lot on using the standard Django pattern on things and our resource repos so that is if someone is coming from another Django project, they don&#8217;t have to deal a lot of Callisto quirks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I have a bunch of really aggressive mentors. I&#8217;m always on a search for if I can add a new linter and it doesn&#8217;t take me an hour to fix my current [inaudible], I will. I love it. It&#8217;s so much fun. Those are the things that I like to think that help new project contributors. I think it could be good. It&#8217;d be amazing at some point when we&#8217;re much larger to have someone who is on your core job competencies as helping Callisto open source profiles so that more people can be using it to solve sexual assault and more nuance ways.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Lynn, is there any way for people who are not programmers to help contribute to Project Callisto?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I might be corrected on this later but as far as I know, the only portion of Callisto as an organization is it&#8217;s entirely significantly open to general public feedback is few of Django repos so it&#8217;s very programmer-y in that sense. Even then, there&#8217;s not a lot of translations or documentation in the open source repos. It&#8217;s mostly Python. Presently coming from a context of open source everything and Bundler and all that stuff, I really want that to get better but in the meantime, how Callisto be a Python developed or get your foundation to donate a million dollars so we can figure out what&#8217;s [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Have you worked with Fund Club?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Not in the context of my individual organization but I know five or six organizations that have been founded by Fund Club and I&#8217;ve watched their impact before and after.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We had a very positive experience with Fund Club. It&#8217;s definitely worthwhile.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I could see a thing where I could get money for Fund Club not necessarily in the same nonprofit way that Callisto usually gets money. It&#8217;s a very operations-y but I use it any more specifics technical contracts of like I get Fund Club money for open source at different part of Callisto and I have a junior programmer working on it for a little bit and I pay them with the Fund Club money. I could see that being a thing. I think it&#8217;s an interesting avenue to explore, simply because Callisto as an organization is very standard nonprofit. We have a very standard nonprofit fundraising and I never thought about the wide network of tech in front of me that I&#8217;m also connected with.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that ties into something that Sam was saying in chat. A lot of people don&#8217;t have the time or the energy or don&#8217;t want to get in the way of the project would be very, very happy to contribute money knowing that it was being put to good use.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I don&#8217;t interact very much because web developer. There are campaigns we do about individual giving. What I&#8217;m hearing about it is like operations talking about individual giving but subjectively for the person hearing about that, it&#8217;s like giving $5 to help support a sexual assault survivors. That&#8217;s nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For our listeners who may now be inspired to donate, we&#8217;re going to drop a link to the Project Callisto donation page in the show notes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m curious about the decision to have Callisto as an open source project. I know that you were talking earlier about how you really to be open and transparent and I really respect that and I wonder what went into that decision to have this as an open source project and if there are any worry in security and how you mitigated that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m not sure I can really give an answer to that that isn&#8217;t very focused on how open source does it better, particularly the security thing. If I think about any system that could possibly think of and I subject it to open source scrutiny, for a certain level of scrutiny like if you get five people looking at it, the security is getting better because five people will have five opinions about how to make it more secure, that they wouldn&#8217;t be able to give if that would be close source.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That’s one of the fundamental tenets of open source and security that I like to spit off whenever I need to. The fact that Callisto is open source is very chicken and egg for me because I like to, recreationally license a lot of my personal projects as AGPL. Then the person who is hiring for Callisto at the time was like, &#8220;Would you like to work here?&#8221; And I was like, &#8220;Let me look at it. Oh, my god. You license AGPL on sexual assault platform?&#8221; I love it. I love it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s already here. This is amazing. I did this personally myself too and it was really funny actually because I had a personal conversation with the hiring manager at that time and he had the same like, &#8220;We know that lots of close source developers hate AGPL so I like to license it explicitly and put it out twice, just so you know, we had this here. We don&#8217;t care that you are annoyed that you can&#8217;t use our code in [inaudible] because we don&#8217;t want you to.&#8221; Callisto itself is only for US schools so we have a lot of plans with places where Callisto itself couldn&#8217;t really be effectively deployed for those who&#8217;d like user open source repo. They have their own impact. I don&#8217;t know the extent to which those plans are public yet but that&#8217;s another thing that being open source helps that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Lynn, is there anything particularly exciting about how you have done this that we haven&#8217;t talked about that you&#8217;d like to?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had a call recently [inaudible] non-school client but I am not certain [inaudible] who it is. They asked me very poignantly about to extend Callisto and share on all of sites and the code is the same and blah-blah-blah. That&#8217;s my favorite topic because I&#8217;ve spent the last six months going from a really standard basic copy and paste [inaudible] process. This thing, where we have 13 clients schools but one Heroku app and we have Heroku pipeline setup. We try to build stages and smoke test and all those kind of automated deploy that kick off every hour. It’s hard to conceptualize that impact on survivors but when we&#8217;re talking to clients and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;How often do you update your code? Is our code the same as everyone else&#8217;s?&#8221; and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Yes and every three hours minimum, probably. I think that&#8217;s really cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>At the end of every show, we&#8217;d like to take a moment to reflect on the conversation that we&#8217;ve had. I want to share a couple of things. I do a lot of thinking about empathy. I&#8217;m writing a book on empathy in software development. I think this is an excellent example of developers putting the psychological safety of their users first and thinking about the way the tools that is going to be used and how that impacts the real people on the other side of the screen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Lynn, I think you&#8217;ve done an amazing job in really bringing that empathy to bear in every step of the development process and the deployment in how you are presenting it to the world and how you&#8217;re working with partner campuses. I think that&#8217;s absolutely amazing. I also wanted to share a video that I came across recently. Someone did an animation for a talk by Brené Brown on the difference between empathy and sympathy. I think everyone should watch it but one of the really poignant things that stood out to me is that when you were listening empathetically, you never used the words &#8216;at least&#8217; and that&#8217;s a big difference between sympathizing with someone and empathizing with someone. I&#8217;ll put a link to the video in show notes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When we were talking about your process, Lynn for how you get new features added by talking with open source community, explaining how if this was here and be much better for the users, it was really inspiring to me because I know that there&#8217;s a lot of discussions the people have about how to use technology for good or how to be more involved with things that people really need and not just build technology for technology sake. I feel like that is a great example of when you are thinking about people and you are really focused on what the outcome of what you&#8217;re using or what you&#8217;re building is going to be.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There are a lot of great developers who are ready and hoping that what they do can make an impact. I think it&#8217;s nice to hear that there are people out there who are thinking in that way and who are willing to put an extra time to get that done so that you can have a future available within a few days, especially, since a lot of what we hear is about how many developers are very selfish and very obsessed with their own technological growth. It&#8217;s nice to know that there&#8217;s a bigger community out there that doesn&#8217;t get talked about as much that is working on behalf of trying to help other people too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>On the day to day, I almost wish I had more really small apps of the open source libraries that we use. Whenever I realize that I haven&#8217;t issuing Callisto that can make it really good, GitHub issue that someone to fix in a day and I am like, &#8220;Oh, yeah. I can do this thing again.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>To me, this whole conversation has been really inspiring to me and I think it&#8217;s all coming back to thing that was said at the beginning about if you don&#8217;t like what someone else is doing, you can do your own thing and you can make it happen. I&#8217;m feeling very inspired by that right now. I&#8217;ve been thinking about this already a little bit lately. I saw a thread on Twitter earlier this week kind of in the wake of the Google memos and stuff and all of this that&#8217;s been going on in our industry. Someone was like, &#8220;You know, you can start your own company. You don&#8217;t have to work for a company that&#8217;s going to treat you badly. You can start your own company and you can make the rules and you can hire people and you can treat them well and there&#8217;s nothing stopping you from doing that, in theory. Hopefully, you could really be making a difference if you decided to do that,&#8221; and that was very inspiring for me to read and I think that ties into what we&#8217;re talking about here too, like you don&#8217;t have to tag along on someone else&#8217;s making a difference. You can make your own and I&#8217;m really inspired by you, Lynn in everything that you&#8217;ve been working on but I also love the idea that other people could go on and do other great things that are inspired by it, that are touching other parts of our community.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LYNN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had a sort of natural reaction to, I think you specifically referencing the really misogynist Google memo and I had a very naturally dismissive reaction because my dev team is entirely female and it&#8217;s me and I&#8217;m great.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m really happy that that&#8217;s how you felt about it. I feel really good about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was actually contacted by a young woman that I used to mentor. My initial reaction was this is just typical of Silicon Valley bro-grammers but she reached out to me and said that she was actually very emotionally affected by it because it made her question how her peers that companies that she&#8217;s worked at or working at currently think about her and the biased and unspoken sexism and how that&#8217;s affecting her career and her career choices. I did tweet about this but just as a call to action, if you know people who are early career, if you know people who are feeling very vulnerable, don&#8217;t assume that they react in the same nonchalant way or the same sort of, &#8220;Yes, we&#8217;ve seen this before,&#8221; kind of way to things like Google memo. Reach out to them and see how they&#8217;re actually being affected.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>All right. I have a call to action for our listeners today and some of you may be inspired to go and try to contribute to Lynn&#8217;s repository and that&#8217;s great but there&#8217;s something that every single one of you can do and that is fucking believe survivors. Astrid wrote a really great piece probably four years ago now called the risk in speaking up and I&#8217;ll drop a link to that in the show notes, which she talks about all of the various forces that might keep somebody from disclosing that they were a survivor or that they survived an attempted sexual assault.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The tl;dr is there&#8217;s a lot of reasons not to say anything so if somebody does disclose that to you, the very least you can do is believe them. Of course, for that to happen, you also have to be the person that somebody feels safe disclosing to. I&#8217;ll leave that as an exercise for the listener. That&#8217;s it, really &#8212; fucking believe survivors.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Lynn, thank you so much for coming on our show and talking about your work and thank you, more importantly for the work that you are doing and the impact that you&#8217;re having on a very, very vulnerable part of our population. Thank you so much for that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This has been a difficult conversation for a lot of us on the panel and it&#8217;s probably a difficult conversation for some of our listeners to hear but we feel like it&#8217;s a very important and it&#8217;s important to talk publicly about these kinds of issues and about how people in our community can make a difference.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b><i>[This episode is brought to you by Upside, one of DC&#8217;s fastest growing tech startups. Upside is looking for innovative engineers wanting to disrupt the norm and they&#8217;re always hiring. Check out Upside.com/Team for more.]</i></b></span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Upside is our first corporate sponsor but we&#8217;re looking for more so that we can continue bringing you great episodes like what you&#8217;ve heard today. If your company values diversity, inclusively and the kinds of in-depth conversations that we have here in Greater Than Code, please talk to them about sponsoring the show. A prospectus is available at GreaterThanCode.com/Sponsors. Thank you.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>This episode is sponsored by </b><a href="http://upsd.io/2wmwtFp"><b>Upside</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-785" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png" alt="" width="1000" height="128" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png 1024w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-300x38.png 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-768x98.png 768w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-600x77.png 600w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo.png 1382w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Bundle your flights and hotel. Save money. Earn gift cards.</b></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Content/Trigger Warning: This episode discusses sexual assault.</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/coralineada"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lynn Cyrin: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/lynncyrin"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@lynncyrin</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://lynncyrin.me/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">lynncyrin.me</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Fullstack Activism” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:22</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Lynn’s Background Story and Superpowers</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.firstlegoleague.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">FIRST LEGO League</span></a></p>
<p><b>11:34 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://www.projectcallisto.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Project Callisto</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">: Reporting Sexual Assault and Dealing with The System</span></p>
<p><b>17:57 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Institutional Betrayal and Keeping Information Private</span></p>
<p><b>20:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Chain of Command: How Project Callisto Works</span></p>
<p><b>22:17 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Reticence When it Comes to Talking About Sexual Assault</span></p>
<p><b>26:04 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Staying in Your Lane”</span></p>
<p><b>27:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Matching Reports</span></p>
<p><b>29:33 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Technology Behind the App</span></p>
<p><b>34:14 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Evaluating Features</span></p>
<p><b>38:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Contributing to Project Callisto</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://joinfundclub.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Fund Club</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.projectcallisto.org/donate/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Donate to Project Callisto</span></a></p>
<p><b>41:54 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Open Sourcing the Project</span></p>
<p><b>44:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Code Sharing</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Coraline: </b><span style="font-weight: 400]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>This episode is sponsored by </b><a href="http://upsd.io/2wmwtFp"><b>Upside</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-785" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png" alt="" width="1000" height="128" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png 1024w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-300x38.png 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-768x98.png 768w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-600x77.png 600w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo.png 1382w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Bundle your flights and hotel. Save money. Earn gift cards.</b></p>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Content/Trigger Warning: This episode discusses sexual assault.</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/coralineada"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lynn Cyrin: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/lynncyrin"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@lynncyrin</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://lynncyrin.me/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">lynncyrin.me</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Fullstack Activism” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:22</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Lynn’s Background Story and Superpowers</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.firstlegoleague.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">FIRST LEGO League</span></a></p>
<p><b>11:34 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://www.projectcallisto.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Project Callisto</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">: Reporting Sexual Assault and Dealing with The System</span></p>
<p><b>17:57 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Institutional Betrayal and Keeping Information Private</span></p>
<p><b>20:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Chain of Command: How Project Callisto Works</span></p>
<p><b>22:17 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Reticence When it Comes to Talking About Sexual Assault</span></p>
<p><b>26:04 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Staying in Your Lane”</span></p>
<p><b>27:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Matching Reports</span></p>
<p><b>29:33 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Technology Behind the App</span></p>
<p><b>34:14 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Evaluating Features</span></p>
<p><b>38:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Contributing to Project Callisto</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://joinfundclub.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Fund Club</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.projectcallisto.org/donate/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Donate to Project Callisto</span></a></p>
<p><b>41:54 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Open Sourcing the Project</span></p>
<p><b>44:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Code Sharing</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Coraline: </b><span style="font-weight: 400]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Lynn-2.jpg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Lynn-2.jpg"></googleplay:image>
										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/830/045-sexual-assault-and-project-callisto-with-lynn-cyrin.mp3" length="51321835" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>yes</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>Yes</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>53:28</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>044: Lazy Perfectionism and Performative Diversity and Inclusion with Shanise Barona</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/044-lazy-perfectionism-and-performative-diversity-and-inclusion-with-shanise-barona/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 23 Aug 2017 05:00:40 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=821</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[In this episode, we talk to Shanise Barona about the terms "lazy perfectionism" and "performative diversity".]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[In this episode, we talk to Shanise Barona about the terms lazy perfectionism and performative diversity.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span><a href="http://twitter.com/@therubyrep"><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Mandy Moore</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Come to <a href="http://www.catskillsconf.com/">Catskills Conf</a> and meet Mandy &amp; Jamey! Stay for the experience.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Shanise Barona: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/shanisebarona"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@shanisebarona</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://shanisebarona.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">shanisebarona.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Plant Parenthood!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>02:19</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Shanise’s Background Story and Superpower</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.girldevelopit.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Girl Develop It</span></a></p>
<p><b>03:08 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Lazy Perfectionism”, “The Explosion of Dissonance”, and “The Moment of Click”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062457713/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0062457713&amp;linkId=4bc21e549783a89e20985c17591cc368"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0762447699/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0762447699&amp;linkId=39b7be7a61c4d68c133d091413272aee"><span style="font-weight: 400;">You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero</span></a></p>
<p><b>12:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Improving Self-Directed Learning</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://github.com/Kallaway/100-days-of-code"><span style="font-weight: 400;">100 Days of Code</span></a></p>
<p><b>15:35 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Having Tunnel Vision Past the Point of Where You Should and Moving Beyond a Comfort Zone</span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">“I understood lazy perfectionism differently, more as the tendency to refactor, polish, and improve the various &#8220;-ilities&#8221; of your code long past the point when you should have moved on to something else. It&#8217;s like . . . tunnel vision on things that are important but not all-important. Finding the right balance there is super hard for me.”</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> &#8211; Nathaniel Knight</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Thank you to our latest $50 Patron, </b><a href="https://twitter.com/Joshschmelzle"><b>Josh Schmelzle</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p><b>21:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Performative Diversity” and Community Building</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://elaconf.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ela Conf</span></a></p>
<p><b>28:33 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Words and Actions: Influencing Diversity and Inclusion (D&amp;I)</span></p>
<p><b>34:25 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Angry on Social Media But Feeling the Need to be Perceived as Positive (All the Time)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lazy perfection is a thing with a label and something to pay attention to.</span></p>
<p><b>Janelle:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> How shallow efforts can be to create change (i.e. conference diversity).</span></p>
<p><b>Mandy: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Stop giving lip service! Step up and prove that you care about diversity and inclusion by supporting groups and missions like </span><a href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/sponsors/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greater Than Code.</span></a></p>
<p><b>Jamey: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Having connections with people to prove to yourself you’re not alone.</span></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">If you want to have diverse attendees, get a diverse leadership team.</span></p>
<p><b>Shanise:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> 1. Seeking a balance between wanting and not wanting explosions of dissonance.</span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 1.8rem;">2. Find opportunities to highlight people that wouldn’t normally get opportunities to be highlighted.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to Episode 44 of &#8216;Plant Parenthood.&#8217; I am glad to be here today with Mandy Moore.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, Jessica. I&#8217;m a little bit confused, though. I thought this is Greater Than Code but I could be wrong. Anyway, I am happy to be here with my friend, Jamey Hampton and I am super excited to announce that the two of us will be at Catskills Conf in October so you should definitely look that up and see how awesome it&#8217;s going to be: camping and lodging and hiking and mountaineering and get your tickets because we&#8217;ll have swag. Wooh!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m really excited about that too, Mandy and I&#8217;m happy to be here today with all of you and also my friend, Janelle Klein.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, I&#8217;m excited to be here, too joining the party. I want to introduce my co-host Sam Livingston-Gray.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM: <span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hey, it is indeed quite the party today. As our special guest, we have Shanise Barona. Shanise is a web developer based in Philly, who&#8217;s passionate about the place where technology and social good intersect. She wants to live in a world where emails are short, empathy is a forethought and Netflix doesn&#8217;t ask if you want to keep watching because the answer is always yes. When her eyes aren&#8217;t glued to a computer screen, you can find her doing yoga, reading and plant parenting. Welcome to the show, Shanise.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks, Sam for such a nice intro. Hi everyone and I&#8217;m super excited to be here as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can I just say that I actually get happy when Netflix ask me if I&#8217;m still watching because sometimes I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Oh, my gosh. It actually cares about me.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[inaudible] looking at it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m just like, &#8220;Why are you starting the next one already? Go! Go! Go!&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. I saw thing once where they were like, Netflix should be like a dating app. It should be like, &#8220;Other singles in your area who just binge-watch the entire season of Supernatural.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Shanise, we like to start the show with our superhero origin stories. What got you into tech and what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When I was six years old, I wanted to be an astronaut and that obviously, didn&#8217;t work out. I had a series of different moments in life that I was messing around with HTML and CSS and AP Calculus is my favorite class in high school. I was experimenting with STEM, in science and math classes but I didn&#8217;t realize that this could be something for me. Fast forward to now, I discovered &#8216;Girl Develop It&#8217; and started attending Girl Develop It classes and that&#8217;s how I got involved, not only in tech and learning web development but also in community building.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, so that means Girl Develop It is basically a superhero training?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When I reached out to you because I think you&#8217;re super cool and you have a lot of amazing discussions on Twitter, you came back at me with a pretty lengthy list that we put in our Slack community to see what we wanted you to talk about today. An interesting conversation started about the term &#8216;Lazy Perfectionism.&#8217; Now, I interpret it as, I have this problem and it&#8217;s called &#8216;buying books that I really want to read.&#8217; But then when I buy the books, it just kind of sit here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you want to read the books or do you want to have read them?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to read the book and I wanted to get something out of the book. But these nonfiction books like &#8216;The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck&#8217; and &#8216;You Are a Badass,&#8217; once I&#8217;m done working, I just don&#8217;t frickin&#8217; feel like. I want to either sit down on my couch and drink a glass of wine and watch mindless TV like The Bachelorette &#8212; shout out &#8212; or I want to skip into more of a fiction novel. Then I&#8217;m like beating myself up because I really want to read this book but I&#8217;m just too lazy to do it. I know that if I do it, it&#8217;s going to improve my life. That&#8217;s my definition of lazy perfectionism. What do you think about that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s spot on. That&#8217;s very similar to my definition as well. I can totally relate to buying books that I don&#8217;t end up reading, especially when they&#8217;re more technical. I just bought a bunch of web development books. They came in a pack and it was pretty penny so I convinced myself maybe I&#8217;ll read this because I spent a lot of money on these books. I did start reading one but I can relate to what you said like I want to just have already read it. I don&#8217;t really want to go through the process of reading it, if that makes sense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like that&#8217;s extra hard with tech books because so many of them are not written to be engaging.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a similar problem that I&#8217;ve experienced where the act of reading the book is very stressful for me because logically I know I&#8217;m reading this because it has information that I don&#8217;t know and I&#8217;m going to learn something. At the end of it, I&#8217;m going to know something else. But as I&#8217;m reading it, it gives me a sense of failure, like I don&#8217;t know any of this stuff, like I&#8217;m so stupid. I&#8217;m not doing as well as these other people and not quite impostor syndrome but almost like fear of missing out kind of thing. There’s all these people doing all the stuff that I&#8217;m not doing but the process of getting there, like reading it and learning it, it becomes very stressful. Doesn&#8217;t that resonate with anybody else?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think, the book I started reading was the history of HTML or something and I was feeling that stress for sure. I&#8217;m sure a ton of people don&#8217;t walk around knowing the history of HTML but I was like, &#8220;Ugh! I don&#8217;t know this. How am I going to retain this information?&#8221; I was very stressed.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Question for you then what made you pick up a book like the history of HTML? What inspired you to take that book?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think the perfectionism side of my lazy perfectionism is I want to know all of the things and I want to know right now so I don&#8217;t just want to learn how to use HTML. I want to know everything about it and how it came to be in the different versions of it. But again I don&#8217;t really want to go do that process. I just want to know these things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So we want to have learned it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>To know kung fu.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One thing for me about learning is I do enjoy the process, especially when it makes my head hurt. Piano is the best for this. It&#8217;s fair liable and that can be like take this particular headache, it is like I know my neurons are rearranging themselves in my head and I enjoyed that feeling so it&#8217;s not about ever being perfect. It&#8217;s about continuing to have that feeling because I know that means improvement.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think I have a similar experience where I get obsessed with the explosion of dissonance in my brain of all these new ideas that I didn&#8217;t have before of mixing ideas from a new book I hadn&#8217;t read before, a new perspective, a new way of thinking with all these other ideas I had before. It&#8217;s like all this synergy of ideas start spinning around in my head and I love that feeling of just like productive thinking. I think that&#8217;s why the panel is really fun too, just listening to all of these different perspectives kind of coming together that make you think about things in a way that you haven&#8217;t before.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And if history of HTML is not clicking and being relevant to anything and making you think about things that you haven&#8217;t before, maybe it&#8217;s the wrong book.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. I really like the term that you use, &#8216;explosion of dissonance.&#8217; I feel like I experience that quite often.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I really enjoy that when I have the energy for it, which I guess brings it back to the laziness part, like sometimes I&#8217;m done at the end of the day and I don&#8217;t want to deal with that. But when I&#8217;m in the right frame of mind, that&#8217;s absolutely wonderful. The other thing I like is being able to mentor other people so I can sort of experience that vicariously.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really enjoying listening to the way that you&#8217;re all describing how much you love learning but the explosion of dissonance feeling is a little bit overwhelming for me. That&#8217;s like a feeling that I feel like I&#8217;m waiting through a little bit until I get to the other side and then there&#8217;s a moment of click. That moment of click is the feeling that I really love. It&#8217;s like I read all these things and I think I understood them but I&#8217;m not 100% sure and suddenly, it all comes together in one second and that&#8217;s very exciting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;ve been staring and staring and staring at all the blobs and suddenly they turn into the 3D image?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And you have to push through long enough to get to that point. First, it&#8217;s painful and uncomfortable and you have to stick with the problem long enough and let the thoughts spin long enough that you can get to the other side of being able to organize thoughts back in your brain.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve been struggling with this a little bit recently because on my last visit to the office, my coworkers finally managed to get me into building and flying drones so I have a kit that I&#8217;m slowly putting together right now. They also gave me the wonderful advice that I should learn to fly in a flight simulator so I get all of my crashes out where they don&#8217;t cost me anything. That&#8217;s a really hard to try and learn to fly and really suck at it. But the thing that I&#8217;ve been trying to remind myself of is one of the previous times that I&#8217;ve learned a skill that I had no previous reference for, was trying to learn to juggle.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> After I remind myself that it took a week of solid practice like 40 hours or so, just not dropping the ball every single damn time. Then after that, it was months or maybe even years before I got to not dropping the ball as much to it being anything like smooth. Just having that self-awareness of it&#8217;s going to take some time, my brain is going to have to do its thing that it does, that sort of helps a little bit.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a good point. I think something that I&#8217;m still learning to work through is that part of the lazy perfectionism, just having patience with yourself and just struggling through like you said. I do have moments that I think it click and I say to myself, &#8220;So I suffered through this but I got out on the other side,&#8221; so I just need to keep at it. But then the lazy side says, &#8220;If I can&#8217;t get this in three tries, I&#8217;m just going to give up. I don&#8217;t want to keep working on this right now.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s helpful for me, at least to combat that aspect. It&#8217;s just like jumping around to different things so that I&#8217;m doing something different each time when I feel like I&#8217;m at that point where I want to give up. But I feel like when I&#8217;m learning, I also have an obsessive personality so it feels like a&#8230; What&#8217;s the phrase? Jack of all trades, master of none?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Compared to calculus, is it frustrating that HTML and CSS and all these things that they&#8217;re not quite perfect?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, it is very frustrating, especially because there are so many different ways to get to one result and there are standards but a lot of the time, especially with fun and things, that&#8217;s very relative as well and what people think is the best course of action and the best practice. I don&#8217;t love calculus itself. I just love that class and my teacher and the way that I was learning and feeling like, &#8220;Oh, wow. I&#8217;m grasping this really difficult concept.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was cool, though because we&#8217;re back to loving the learning process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. I guess it also depends to what that process looks like. Maybe the lazy perfectionism is that I&#8217;m not excellent at self-directed learning. Maybe that&#8217;s what I&#8217;m learning about myself is that I enjoy that class because I had a really great teacher and the material and the format was really conducive to our learning for a concept that was really difficult that I would say most high schoolers don&#8217;t particularly enjoy. But now it&#8217;s like adding in the relativeness of web development and doing something like an online bootcamp, which I&#8217;m enrolled in. It&#8217;s hard to keep that focus when you’re self-directed.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wonder if a lot of people have that problem when they get past that beginner courses, that are really restructured and then it&#8217;s like, &#8220;Here. Make some things.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, and you&#8217;re like, &#8220;What do I make? Where do I start? I don&#8217;t know.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What kind of things have you found that help with that? I&#8217;m assuming you&#8217;ve learned a lot of things about how to improve at self-directed learning through this process</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. Definitely, this is where the community aspect was really big for me. I&#8217;m kind of an independent worker and that&#8217;s how I like to function and I&#8217;m very introverted so I do like going to events and networking with other people but it can be very exhausting. Going over code with other people, like I had something on my website that was really stumping me and I just wanted to give up. I was discussing it with a friend and she made me sit down and say, &#8220;No, we&#8217;re going to figure this out.&#8221; She didn&#8217;t necessarily tell me the answer but she sat there with me and basically forced me to do it. Something that maybe a teacher would do. That community aspect is that peer mentorship that happens organically that has really helped me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I have ADHD and one of the tools that a lot of people who talk about that recommend is using some form of external accountability because you&#8217;re much more likely to do something if you&#8217;re on the hook for somebody else socially to actually do it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. Sometimes that doesn&#8217;t work, like 100 days of code, I don&#8217;t know if you all have heard of that challenge but I was very loud and vocal about it on Twitter like, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to do 100 days of code,&#8221; and then I got to the point where I was skipping certain days and then it was like Days 13 through 30, then I got to the point around Day 70 that I just stop, I just gave up and didn&#8217;t have time to do. The external accountability definitely helps someone like me with my personality but I also don&#8217;t care about what people think so if I just needed to stop the challenge, I was just like, &#8220;All right, I&#8217;m tagging out.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s great. There&#8217;s also the thing where sometimes if you picture in your head a goal, you&#8217;ll not achieve it because your brain has already experienced it. Sometimes I avoid telling people I am going to do something to avoid that effect.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, that&#8217;s such a good point. I try to work on that. I just get really excited about things and I want to tell people but then, I&#8217;m working on perhaps just keeping things to myself and plugging away at them, slowly but surely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s like when I work out and I tell everybody on Facebook that I worked out and then I don&#8217;t work out the next day or the next day or the next day and then I look like a fool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But still better than not working out at all.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah but I have an end goal in mind and that is to lose 10 or 15 pounds and working out won&#8217;t just clearly not going to make me lose 10 or 15 pounds.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We mentioned getting work done and I wanted to relate that back to someone in our Greater Than Code Slack community, when we were talking about lazy perfectionism, he saw that phrase &#8212; this is Nathaniel Knight &#8212; and he understood it as, &#8220;More of the tendency to refactor, polish and improve the various &#8216;-ilities&#8217; of your code, long past the point where you should have moved on to something else. It&#8217;s like tunnel vision on things that are important but not all-important. Finding the right balance there is super hard.&#8221; Do you ever suffer from that kind of perfectionism? What’s the lazy in that? I missed the lazy in that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Perhaps, the lazy is he&#8217;s not moving on. He&#8217;s being lazy by just working on one thing continuously.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, I know this one very well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you find it lazy, Sam?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. I&#8217;m totally being lazy. I think the first time I really noticed and recognized this as a thing that I do, probably five six years ago when I was working on a new application in a domain that I didn&#8217;t know anything about. I found that instead of tackling the areas that I knew the least about first, which is the best way for me to actually make progress on an app. What I was doing was I was starting with one little corner of it that I knew I was going to need. Then just polishing the heck out of it and gold plating it until it was perfect. Still didn&#8217;t understand the rest of the application but that one part, I was able to indulge myself in my perfectionism and my in wanting to get that part right and I was using medicine avoidant behavior to not grapple with the uncertainty that I was afraid of.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting, I mean, I am listening to that quote. I don&#8217;t totally get the meaning of lazy. This seems like obsessive addiction to doing the thing that your mind is in and not being able to move on but I don&#8217;t see how this is laziness. Maybe it&#8217;s lazy in thinking not in working.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>To me it&#8217;s like a comfort level. Maybe lazy isn&#8217;t the first word I would pick but I understand how it&#8217;s related because it&#8217;s like, &#8220;I&#8217;m so comfortable working here on this code that I know that I&#8217;m not willing or ready to move on to something else.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think that&#8217;s a really good point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Again, bringing it back to ADHD because that&#8217;s what I do apparently. When people first hear the name of the diagnosis, attention deficit, they think that somebody with a diagnosis has less attention to go around. That&#8217;s not actually the case. What&#8217;s actually happening is that I have as much attention as anybody else but the part of my brain that kicks in to regulate it to notice, you&#8217;ve moved past the point of utility and that other stimulus that you&#8217;ve been ignoring is actually important and you need to go and switch focus on to that. That part is a little weak so sometimes, I realized that I&#8217;ve been doing this and I internalize that and I feel like a failure. I feel like I&#8217;ve been lazy. But in my case, it&#8217;s actually my brain just doesn&#8217;t quite work that way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Discomfort. I like that word, Jamey, that you&#8217;re trying to stay in a place that&#8217;s comfortable. Shanise, what do you do to help yourself move out of what&#8217;s comfortable?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s something that I&#8217;m always still working on. I just start doing the things that make me uncomfortable. I can totally relate to what Sam said earlier about just working on one part of the application because you know that that other part is just going to be challenging and you just don&#8217;t want to deal with it. I&#8217;m not perfect in that obviously but I just try to kind of get out of that comfort zone as much as possible and some days are better than others.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So just to clarify then, I&#8217;m seeing laziness is about the self-control aspects and that we don&#8217;t want to exert self-control and that&#8217;s what the laziness is applied to so we want to stay in that mode of circle thing with constant perfectionism that&#8217;s the thing that we&#8217;re comfortable with and the self-control that it takes to move beyond that or lazy in wanting to move on to the next thing or get excited about something else.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really like your description on that. I think that&#8217;s what it is, at least for me is self-control. Whether it&#8217;s moving on or trying other things or just sticking with something, it&#8217;s not always just moving on. Just sticking with something that is proving to be challenging and not wanting to power through that, I think that&#8217;s self-control and self-discipline. I believe you said the comment earlier about being&#8230; Or Jessica said it about being laziness as far as lazy thinking because I would say that my thinking is very obsessive when I want to learn something but it&#8217;s doesn&#8217;t always translate my actions because I sometimes give up sooner than I would like to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like the self-control, self-discipline description too because I think it also relates to our first definition of lazy perfectionism from before where you&#8217;re talking about learning in the books, like it takes self-discipline to remind ourselves that this is going to make our lives better and we have to get through it. I think it kind of ties them together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sometimes I timebox that stuff and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to do this for half an hour,&#8221; and then I&#8217;m having a glass of wine.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s always time for a glass of wine. I think that that&#8217;s a valid reason to avoid whatever task it is [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Self-care is very important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We would like to thank our newest $50 a month patron, Josh Schmelzle. Greater Than Code is a listener funded podcast. So far, we are open to the right corporate sponsor and if you sign up to contribute to our Patreon in any amount, then you get an invitation to our community Slack and you get to influence the conversations and also chit chat with all of us. It&#8217;s my favorite Slack, personally out of the 15 I&#8217;m in. You should join it and tell us what is your definition of lazy perfectionism?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Meanwhile, the second most popular topic that&#8217;s Shanise proposed is Performative Diversity. What does that mean?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right now, tech is having this conversation about diversity and inclusion and I see a lot of companies that are involved in making these statements and its promises but I don&#8217;t really see a lot of action behind that. Now, that I&#8217;m involved on the community building side and speaking with companies, that is becoming even more so apparent than just being a participant or an attendee at an event. That&#8217;s been super frustrating. Just a performance that they&#8217;re putting is what I feel.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can you give us an example of something that made you feel that way or is that too invasive of a question?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s invasive. Definitely, I&#8217;m not going to call out any particular companies but just with interacting with them at different events that I&#8217;ve either been a part of organizing or attending and asking certain questions and seeing what their reactions and what their responses are, compared to what they have listed on their site or what&#8217;s on there About page and what they say that they&#8217;re looking for, it doesn&#8217;t really match up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had that experience also.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The stuff on their About page, does that sound like they care about diversity more than their actual hiring?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it sounds like it&#8217;s just a very carefully worded PR statement to say, &#8220;Look at us. We do care about diversities,&#8221; but that&#8217;s a whole other conversation too, like what is diversity if there isn&#8217;t any inclusion. Diversity is not going to last there. It&#8217;s been something that now, that I&#8217;m involved in community building that&#8217;s these are the things I&#8217;m looking for, as far as companies that I&#8217;m partnering with then working with and talking to. It&#8217;s been a huge disappointment to be honest.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What are you doing with community building? What is that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the most recent organizations that I just joined is Ela Conf. It&#8217;s a community and conference for individuals with marginalized genders in Philadelphia.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It sounds like there&#8217;s a lot of companies doing PR stunt wanting to pay lip service to these ideas but when it comes to actually making things different, you&#8217;ve got a lot of people that are not including others in the conversation and moving to a place that they&#8217;re actually changing anything but are talking about these things like they value them anyway. You said you&#8217;ve been disappointed. I&#8217;m really curious as to what kind of things you&#8217;ve seen, this pattern-wise generalized &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would say like meetups and groups, not just these companies. It&#8217;s even groups and the local community saying, &#8220;We want to be diverse. We want to be inclusive. We want to add more people to the space,&#8221; but then that whole leadership team is just white people are just cisgender man. There was something that I was volunteering for and it was a very particular event and it&#8217;s a well-known organization nationally. They have different chapters in different cities and they were putting on this event and saying that they really wanted it to be diverse and have different representation. But their whole leadership team is just cis people and white people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Them kind of keeping that core leadership team as just a very specific and privileged group kind of directly goes against the message that they&#8217;re sending and inherently, makes people not feel welcome. It doesn&#8217;t matter what you&#8217;re saying. If people don&#8217;t see people that look like them and people that they can relate to, people are not going to want to be involved.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So the first step in making change, you would say is changing your leadership to represent the type of culture and inclusiveness that you want echoed within your organization or community group?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s enough to just say, as insert privileged or whatever here, I want this to be for everyone. When we use the term &#8216;allies&#8217; they could really be doing a lot more. You could also say, &#8220;I don&#8217;t need to be here. I don&#8217;t need representation but I don&#8217;t need to be this representation. I&#8217;m going to step down and give this position to someone else.&#8221; I don&#8217;t see a lot of that happening either. I&#8217;m in Philadelphia. It&#8217;s a very small community compared to other bigger cities but that&#8217;s just been my experience. I&#8217;ve also had a really good experiences.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I totally understand what you are saying in the way that I&#8217;ve thought about this in the past is that actions speak louder than words when it comes to diversity inclusion. But I also think that inaction speaks a lot louder than words and when somebody says that they&#8217;re going to do something and then they don&#8217;t follow up on it, that&#8217;s a really clear signifier to me that they&#8217;re more worried about how they&#8217;re coming across and their PR than actually caring about these people that they want to represent. I think that people don&#8217;t think a lot about what their inaction is saying about them and the impression that it&#8217;s making about them or their company. I think that it&#8217;s really important that I wish more people would think about. You were talking about allies and something I really believe that is like, ally is something you do, not just the word that describes who you are. You have to continually be working at that to retain that status if that makes sense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. Perhaps, some people think that, &#8220;Oh, this is just something that I have to do to get to this level and I&#8217;m done and the work is over.&#8221; But it is absolutely something that you have to continuously be doing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It seems like there&#8217;s this shallow level of identity that people are striving for to be represent this ideal of diversity in inclusion that is really limited but at the same time, a lack of awareness of how it seems from what you&#8217;re saying, people are not recognizing the shallowness of it and recognizing what it takes to actually&#8230; I don&#8217;t know. I&#8217;m wondering why people aren&#8217;t recognizing that gap of why, and maybe it&#8217;s just humans. It&#8217;s kind of a sad statement in a way but at the same time, we have to move to a point of giving a damn, you know?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Shanise, you said something much earlier about contrasting diversity and inclusion and then Jamey, you said something about action speaking louder than words. But I do want to talk a little bit about the words because I feel like the words reflect how people are thinking, whether or not you believe that our words shape the way we think, I think that they certainly are indicators of what&#8217;s going on beneath the surface. I feel like 10 years ago, we just weren&#8217;t having this conversation at all. Then five years ago, we started talking about diversity a lot and then, I don&#8217;t know maybe I&#8217;m slow on the uptake but maybe just in the last year, I&#8217;ve started seeing a lot more of DNI as the shorthand for diversity and inclusion.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That&#8217;s an interesting reflection to me of where the conversation is going because I think people brought in diversity and inclusion because they realize that you&#8217;re not going to get diversity without inclusion. What I&#8217;m interested in is whether we can get it to the point where we just talk about inclusion, with the implicit assumption that once we work on that, the diversity will take care of itself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. That would be amazing if we could just have that conversation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So get on that, everyone. Listeners, you have your job.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s like accessibility, that inclusiveness work helps the people that are on your team now and helps you welcome more people onto your team.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think maybe something that would be cool to clarify is that when we say diversity and inclusion, what are the difference between those two things? I want to get Shanise&#8217;s take on that, if possible.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m speaking specifically to tech events. I feel like when people say diversity, they&#8217;re thinking amongst attendees, people that look differently and people that have nontraditional backgrounds, people of different gender, etcetera. But I feel like they&#8217;re not really thinking about inclusion. I don&#8217;t really think that even inclusion is mentioned at most events like this. But in my opinion, I would say inclusion is everyone feels like they have a space and that they feel comfortable and that they&#8217;re respected and they&#8217;re not just there to be X amount of this diverse group is present here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If you do diversity without inclusion, I think you&#8217;re going to find that it fizzles out. Maybe you can get less attendees this year but if they don&#8217;t feel comfortable, they&#8217;re not to come back and they&#8217;re not going to invite other people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or you end up getting very cliquish kind of behavior where you&#8217;ve got a diverse group of people there but they don&#8217;t talk to each other and they only feel safe in independent groups.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes and that happens all the time. When I decided to learn how to code about a year ago, like I said I&#8217;m very introverted, I don&#8217;t want to network, I don&#8217;t want to talk to anyone but I thought if I&#8217;m to be in this industry, I have to see if I like it and what these people are like, what these events are like. I kind of forced myself out of my comfort zone and just went to events and spoke to people that look like me, people that were different from me. But not everyone can do that and not everyone should be expected to give.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;ve had people come up to me and say, &#8220;I wasn&#8217;t sure about this event. This event brands itself as an inclusive event but I saw that you&#8217;re attending,&#8221; Or, &#8220;I saw that you&#8217;re organizing,&#8221; Or, &#8220;I saw that you are friendly with the organizers and that made me feel comfortable to attend this event now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It seems like you started this whole discussion, talking about leadership and how leadership basically creates this model or this example, that the entire culture of the event ends up echoing. With speakers who you end up putting on stage and what those people represent, the same kind of thing as leadership is that those people sentiments are echoed throughout the conference or event too. It seems like if you want to influence diversity and inclusion, it has to start with the culture and values of the people that are leading non-stage. I guess the question is from your experience in doing this, what kind of things can people do to start breaking down those walls?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you mean the leadership that&#8217;s not diverse or do you mean attendees breaking down walls?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I think a little bit of both. You can affect things from both sides and it&#8217;s not necessarily an easy problem to solve because going outside of our boundaries is always uncomfortable and as you said, you can push yourself to go outside those boundaries but if the context isn&#8217;t really supportive of that, it&#8217;s going to be hard for other people to do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you&#8217;re leading in events, you&#8217;ve obviously got more influence but at the same time, there are specific things that you can do like you talked about being willing to step down and also maybe, going out of your way to find people. What kind of things would you do? You’re writing an event and you&#8217;re trying to make a more diverse, more inclusive event, what would you do differently?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t think anyone has that figured out. It would be nice if we did. But I think something that can definitely be done is like I said earlier, if a leadership team is an inclusive, I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s lash or harsh to have someone step down and have them add a person that is qualified and is different and can bring a different perspective and make that be a more inclusive just by them being present on a leadership team. We&#8217;ll kind of inherently and organically have that begin to happen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When we started Greater Than Code, one of our specific aims was to have a diverse panel. It&#8217;s not as diverse as we would like. Dave and Sam were both like, &#8220;I would happily step down to have representation from people of another race because we&#8217;re mostly white.&#8221; You want to join our panel?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m just always afraid of saying the wrong thing and I said this to Mandy, I&#8217;m very angry on Twitter so I&#8217;m flattered that she thinks that I have hot takes but usually, it&#8217;s just a moment of rage, just black out and just upset about something.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s where hot takes come from. Twitter is number one source of hot takes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Raging on Twitter?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And those are meaningful to people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s very meaningful to me because I&#8217;m also angry a lot. Sometimes I post about it and sometimes I don&#8217;t. Sometimes I just don&#8217;t want to be perceived as angry. Sometimes I don&#8217;t know how to express my anger but seeing other people get angry about some of the things that I&#8217;m angry about is very therapeutic for me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. That is something that I am learning now on Twitter and that&#8217;s something that I had on the topic list, the struggling with meaning to be positive. In tech, I kind of toy with, should I just be honest and angry on my Twitter like I just want to be? But that&#8217;s unprofessional. That&#8217;s going to reflect negatively on me, even more so being a black woman. Everyday, I&#8217;m not sure like should I retweet this thing? Should I post this thing that just happened to me at the tech meetup that really pissed me off? I kind of looked to people that I admire in tech and see what their Twitter feed looks like and how angry they are and kind of gauge it by that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I wasn&#8217;t realizing that I was doing this at the time and it took me a couple of months to realize that I&#8217;m checking other people to see how angry they are. If these are people that I&#8217;m friends with, I would want them to also be angry. There&#8217;s a lot to be angry about right now in tech.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s my job to be the positive voice on this podcast so I do want to say that in my five years of speaking at conferences, there&#8217;s been a tremendous increase in conferences aiming for a diverse speaker lineup and inviting people and seeking that and I&#8217;m glad. And, oh, conferences that are canceled because of, &#8220;Shit. We published a panel that was all white men.&#8221; You know, at least companies are feeling pressure to give lip service to diversity. This is a step. We just have to keep up the pressure and get further. I&#8217;m sorry, there&#8217;s a fucking lawnmower. I don&#8217;t have anything positive to say about the lawnmower.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Does anyone else feel like they struggle to be positive?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel incapable of feeling and expressing anything other than the way I feel right at this moment. When I feel positive, I come across as very positive and I feel negative, I come across as very negative. I feel like there&#8217;s not much I can do to control it because I&#8217;m just emotional. I try to be genuine. It&#8217;s not so much that I&#8217;m struggling with being positive. It&#8217;s just like this is how things are going and this is how I genuinely feel about it and that&#8217;s what I want to try to express the people because I think that it&#8217;s important to be able to celebrate and commiserate with other people. I like to set the ground for that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And we all want to be understood and felt. We&#8217;re upset and frustrated and angry at the world because it&#8217;s not the way we want it to be. We want other people to be there with us and when everyone else isn&#8217;t in their bubble world and can&#8217;t see us and we feel invisible, it hurts. It&#8217;s like being angry and wanting people to be angry with us is a way to feel connected and cared about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And if we express that anger, then we&#8217;re connecting with the other people who are angry, as opposed to the people who are just fine. They don&#8217;t really need that connection that badly, anyway.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know when I post angry stuff on Twitter, a response I get a lot from friends that means a lot to me is, &#8220;I see you,&#8221; and it&#8217;s like I see you feel like you&#8217;re invisible, you&#8217;re being erased and I see you and also I see your anger and I understand it and validated in a way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Jamey, I like your point about being positive when you feel positive and angry when you feel angry. One thing I like about Twitter is that it is about expressing this particular moment because you can&#8217;t go back and edit it. It&#8217;s not something like a blog post that I would go back and refine if I decide that I was wrong. It&#8217;s just right now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Immediacy is an important word to me. That&#8217;s how I feel about Twitter.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Shanise, we talked about needing to be positive on Twitter. Is there anywhere else where you feel the pressure to be positive?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess, when I&#8217;m interacting with people at these tech events, I feel like just my years of being involved with a local tech community, I&#8217;ve been involved with different organizations and I&#8217;ve met a lot of people. I kind of feel that pressure to be positive, on whatever group that I&#8217;m volunteering for or if I&#8217;m on some sort of organizer team, I feel like I need to be positive for the people that I&#8217;m serving. But at the same time, I feel like Jamey was saying, I&#8217;m so going to be genuine and I want to be genuine and I want people to see my anger so that they can know that if they&#8217;re feeling the same way, that&#8217;s perfectly okay.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s the thing. When you express your feelings, you&#8217;re okay for other people to feel that and that can be powerful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I almost feel like as somebody who is in a relative position of privilege, I feel like I have an obligation to be more negative about things because there is stuff that people will only hear from someone like me. That gives me a platform that I can and should be using to promote visibility of some of these things. There&#8217;s always going to be some person who is just there to argue and I&#8217;m going to wind up blocking them. But I feel like part of my job as somebody with a lot of privilege is to help amplify and signal boost folks when they&#8217;re hurt and upset about something that they have every right to be upset about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because you&#8217;re performing, I said that as a verb and not a noun.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is the part of the show where we each reflect on what it made us think about or what we might do differently? Sam, do you want to go first?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a lot that we talked about that&#8217;s really interesting as always on this show but the thing that I think I&#8217;m going to takeaway today is just that really useful reminder about lazy perfectionism as a thing that I sometimes forget is a thing. I always find that having a name like lazy perfectionism for what&#8217;s happening in my brain, that having that name helps me recognize it and spot it and label it. Then choose how I want to engage with that. Thank you for bringing it up and reminding me, yet again that it&#8217;s something I need to pay attention to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This whole conversation, Shanise just made me really think a lot about how shallow a lot of the efforts have been to try and create change and being on a conference tour where I&#8217;m the only woman on the tour [inaudible] and I&#8217;m in a position to influence a lot of things just because I can go out there and get on stage and lead and make change. There&#8217;s a lot that I could do and there&#8217;s a big difference between saying that you care about something and actually going out there and making stuff happen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I very much appreciate that perspective, especially when it comes to the distinction between diversity and inclusion and actually breaking down those walls and bringing people together in a way that they&#8217;re just not right now and seeing those people. Thank you for that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s why we do this show. We do this show because I see these conversations happening on Twitter and I want to hear more opinions about the topics that can only be said in 140 characters. I also think on the line of performative diversity and inclusion. Right now as the producer of the show, it&#8217;s pretty frustrating for me because I am reaching out to companies who say that they care about these things and while they expressed interest, it&#8217;s lip service.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We are recording these shows every week and are so close to going back to weekly that if just one company steps up, I feel like other companies will as well and sponsor us. If you say you care about diversity and inclusion, sponsor our show. We are probably the most diverse and inclusive tech podcast out there right now and I am proud to be the producer and person that helps to run the show. Again, please reach out to me: Mandy@GreaterThanCode.com and step up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One thing that I&#8217;m taking away from this and thinking about is being kind to yourself and the reason that this kind of popped up in my mind is that we&#8217;ve talked a lot about not being alone in what you&#8217;re going through, I guess. In the last part of the conversation, I was talking about this in terms of being angry on Twitter and seeing where other people are angry and perhaps, being kind to yourself for wanting to express those emotions. But even as I&#8217;m thinking back, the other thing we&#8217;ve talked about like when we were discussing lazy perfectionism and being able to say, &#8220;I thought it was just me struggling with this,&#8221; and hearing other people say, &#8220;No, I also have all these books that I haven&#8217;t read and I struggle with the same things.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> To me having that kind of connection makes me feel less like I&#8217;m failing at something and more like, this is something that we all go through and need to show ourselves those kindness. I think it&#8217;s easier to show other people kindness than to show ourselves kindness and that&#8217;s what&#8217;s on my mind right now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The point that stood out to me was the one about, if you want to have diverse attendees, get a diverse leadership team. Bring diversity in right next to you or step down and replace yourself with someone more diverse. At work, our whole company is white and our leadership team is all white men. When we start hiring again, we have an opportunity to change that. I&#8217;m going to push for hiring someone on the leadership team and you always get the push back of, &#8220;Oh, we need the most qualified candidate,&#8221; and I think the trick there is I read that white men get hired based on potential and women and people of color based on experience and therefore, they don&#8217;t get that experience.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m going to push for hiring someone based on potential because I bet, we can find a lot of people with really high potential. It&#8217;s an untapped market and that is still under-tapped. It&#8217;s the same with conferences that I&#8217;m on the board of, or when I&#8217;m looking for speakers to suggest. I&#8217;m not looking for people who might have seen speak, who are already on the circuit. I&#8217;m looking for people with potential to speak and trying to encourage them and offer any help that I can. I&#8217;m going to be thinking about bringing diversity in at the highest level, looking past people who are obvious at people who might be fantastic. I&#8217;m looking to make myself and my organization better, not safer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know we&#8217;re in reflections here but I just have to respond to that. You mentioned that the next time you&#8217;re hiring is going to be another opportunity to make your team more diverse and I would point out that it&#8217;s certainly your best opportunity and if you leave it alone for long enough, if you missed that one, the next one is going to be a little less valuable and a little less valuable. The longer you leave it, the harder it&#8217;s going to be to change the direction of your organization.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SHANISE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a two-part reflection. Part one would be the explosive dissonance and recognizing that there are moments where I enjoy that feeling and moments where I avoid that feeling so seeking a balance there and kind of reflecting on that these feelings are okay and that they wax and wane and it&#8217;s a normal learning process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Part two of my reflection would be, when we were discussing diversity in leadership. It led me think of a tweet thread Lara Hogan. She&#8217;s a VP of Engineering at Kickstarter and she mentioned that on a dev team or a company, a person can say, they can find opportunities to highlight people that wouldn&#8217;t normally get these opportunities, someone that is more underrepresented than this person. If someone is pitching a project, someone like gay cis white men can recommend someone that is different from them and say, &#8220;I think that this person would be good for this job,&#8221; and kind of promote them in that way because it seems that people like this, especially in the tech community, they have this set credibility that everyone just believes. Using that platform, using that privilege and that credibility to set other people up and promote other people, that wouldn&#8217;t otherwise get that opportunity would be a way to shuffle that along, I guess.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That wraps up Episode 44 of Greater Than Code, which is also Greater Than Plants Parenthood, in my opinion, especially if there are lawnmowers involved.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span><a href="http://twitter.com/@therubyrep"><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Mandy Moore</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Come to <a href="http://www.catskillsconf.com/">Catskills Conf</a> and meet Mandy &amp; Jamey! Stay for the experience.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Shanise Barona: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/shanisebarona"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@shanisebarona</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://shanisebarona.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">shanisebarona.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Plant Parenthood!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>02:19</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Shanise’s Background Story and Superpower</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.girldevelopit.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Girl Develop It</span></a></p>
<p><b>03:08 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Lazy Perfectionism”, “The Explosion of Dissonance”, and “The Moment of Click”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062457713/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0062457713&amp;linkId=4bc21e549783a89e20985c17591cc368"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0762447699/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0762447699&amp;linkId=39b7be7a61c4d68c133d091413272aee"><span style="font-weight: 400;">You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero</span></a></p>
<p><b>12:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Improving Self-Directed Learning</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://github.com/Kallaway/100-days-of-code"><span style="font-weight: 400;">100 Days of Code</span></a></p>
<p><b>15:35 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Having Tunnel Vision Past the Point of Where You Should and Moving Beyond a Comfort Zone</span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">“I understood lazy perfectionism differently, more as the tendency to refactor, polish, and improve the various &#8220;-ilities&#8221; of your code long past the point when you should have moved on to something else. It&#8217;s like . . . tunnel vision on things that are important but not all-important. Finding the right balance there is super hard for me.”</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> &#8211; Nathaniel Knight</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Thank you to our latest $50 Patron, </b><a href="https://twitter.com/Joshschmelzle"><b>Josh Schmelzle</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p><b>21:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Performative Diversity” and Community Building</span></p]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span><a href="http://twitter.com/@therubyrep"><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Mandy Moore</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Come to <a href="http://www.catskillsconf.com/">Catskills Conf</a> and meet Mandy &amp; Jamey! Stay for the experience.</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Shanise Barona: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/shanisebarona"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@shanisebarona</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://shanisebarona.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">shanisebarona.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Plant Parenthood!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>02:19</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Shanise’s Background Story and Superpower</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.girldevelopit.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Girl Develop It</span></a></p>
<p><b>03:08 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Lazy Perfectionism”, “The Explosion of Dissonance”, and “The Moment of Click”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062457713/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0062457713&amp;linkId=4bc21e549783a89e20985c17591cc368"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0762447699/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0762447699&amp;linkId=39b7be7a61c4d68c133d091413272aee"><span style="font-weight: 400;">You Are a Badass by Jen Sincero</span></a></p>
<p><b>12:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Improving Self-Directed Learning</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://github.com/Kallaway/100-days-of-code"><span style="font-weight: 400;">100 Days of Code</span></a></p>
<p><b>15:35 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Having Tunnel Vision Past the Point of Where You Should and Moving Beyond a Comfort Zone</span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">“I understood lazy perfectionism differently, more as the tendency to refactor, polish, and improve the various &#8220;-ilities&#8221; of your code long past the point when you should have moved on to something else. It&#8217;s like . . . tunnel vision on things that are important but not all-important. Finding the right balance there is super hard for me.”</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> &#8211; Nathaniel Knight</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Thank you to our latest $50 Patron, </b><a href="https://twitter.com/Joshschmelzle"><b>Josh Schmelzle</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p><b>21:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Performative Diversity” and Community Building</span></p]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/rl36ydXN_400x400-2.jpg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/rl36ydXN_400x400-2.jpg"></googleplay:image>
										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/821/044-lazy-perfectionism-and-performative-diversity-and-inclusion-with-shanise-barona.mp3" length="47216667" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>yes</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>Yes</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>49:47</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>043: The Accessibility of Board Games with Mischa Lewis-Norelle and James Edward Gray</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/043-the-accessibility-of-board-games-with-mischa-lewis-norelle-and-james-edward-gray/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 16 Aug 2017 05:00:22 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=796</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[In this episode, James Edward Gray and Mischa Lewis-Norelle join us to talk about the accessibility of board games, talk about the various different kind of games and particular challenges of each category, and offer resources for researching and picking out games.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[In this episode, James Edward Gray and Mischa Lewis-Norelle join us to talk about the accessibility of board games, talk about the various different kind of games and particular challenges of each category, and offer resources for researching and picking]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">James Edward Gray: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/JEG2"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@JEG2</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mischa Lewis-Norelle: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/mlewisno"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@mlewisno</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.mlewisno.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">mlewisno.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links are affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Paneldome!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:58</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Backgrounds and Superpowers</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3ojRN4CT7I"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hilary Stohs-Krause: We&#8217;ve Always Been Here: Women Changemakers in Tech @ RailsConf 2017</span></a></p>
<p><b>04:44 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Examples of Accessibility Challenges in Board Games</span></p>
<p><b>07:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Games and Challenges</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/113294/escape-curse-temple"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Escape: The Curse of the Temple</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00720I7TC/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B00720I7TC&amp;linkId=68e011bda94e857e4b22dad236dcf6ba"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/151347/millennium-blades"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Millennium Blades</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1936920573/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=1936920573&amp;linkId=7d3b7e9a8d786ba1e4ae2d233bc51a36"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p><b>11:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Power of House Rules</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/18/roborally"><span style="font-weight: 400;">RoboRally</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N8T7ACD/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B01N8T7ACD&amp;linkId=e3267f057c2b4e90ce3b6fe38096d3b0"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/40692/small-world"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Small World</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0024H7OF6/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B0024H7OF6&amp;linkId=7c13ce13055a0d5cd2a795467cc185f6"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p><b>14:41 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– German-style/Eurogames vs American Games</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/9209/ticket-ride"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ticket to Ride</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0975277324/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0975277324&amp;linkId=8195297768939e58262a884aaba03b90"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/3076/puerto-rico"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Puerto Rico</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00008URUT/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B00008URUT&amp;linkId=fbc944006019689d603d89785f915dcb"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/38821/settlers-catan-gallery-edition"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Settlers of Catan</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000W7JWUA/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B000W7JWUA&amp;linkId=fd5a4dc6e87428c9c3efb1132d9d789a"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/193738/great-western-trail"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Great Western Trail</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01M8GAOBX/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B01M8GAOBX&amp;linkId=17545f3f708d1a4cfca27aab29e70c42"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p><b>16:45 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Video Games; Real-time vs Turn Based Games</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://masteroforion.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Master of Orion</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N0SHEU3/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B01N0SHEU3&amp;linkId=84e76a7e204600942df99206490ca851"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://store.steampowered.com/app/322330/Dont_Starve_Together/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Don’t Starve Together</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00D3TRMD8/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B00D3TRMD8&amp;linkId=2595cebb9bca2282504677c1d75d1441"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_(video_game)"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rogue</span></a></p>
<p><b>19:35 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Tabletop </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Role-playing_game"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Role-Playing Games</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (RPGs)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://dnd.wizards.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Dungeons and Dragons</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (D&amp;D)</span></p>
<p><b>22:45 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Cooperative Games vs Competitive Games</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/123096/space-cadets"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Space Cadets</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009VIE3E6/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B009VIE3E6&amp;linkId=91fa7f973a5837125291718f740ba1d4"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/156129/deception-murder-hong-kong"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Deception: Murder in Hong Kong</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B019FPQZNG/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B019FPQZNG&amp;linkId=6b0c7b9241ee4cec948c74793853cad8"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p><b>22:45 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Bluffing Games, The Autism Spectrum, and Player Elimination</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/139030/mascarade"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mascarade</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00E97DWKA/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B00E97DWKA&amp;linkId=d5fa25f5d6a444599cd8ef556cb3faca"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/157969/sheriff-nottingham"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sheriff of Nottingham</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007EZMABG/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B007EZMABG&amp;linkId=67ddc7701a05369e6ef65f3b0cb7c96c"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.playwerewolf.co/rules/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Werewolf</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00MHWUJA0/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B00MHWUJA0&amp;linkId=86f185cccce97fc48926d0a77581b992"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/147949/one-night-ultimate-werewolf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">One Night Werewolf</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00HS7GG5G/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B00HS7GG5G&amp;linkId=5708f5291d8637cdcea0d9d9069c1466"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Resistance_(game)"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Resistance</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B009SAAV0C/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B009SAAV0C&amp;linkId=77cd68476148f901349421efd0bd8dec"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/102652/sentinels-multiverse"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sentinels of the Universe</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0095ZFA5Q/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B0095ZFA5Q&amp;linkId=f783a82b5aaac33f229138ef1e411563"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://gshowitt.itch.io/goblin-quest"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Goblin Quest</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0756404002/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0756404002&amp;linkId=ce6d7cba713e5b717e89c85b36caa003"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.shutupandsitdown.com/podcastle/sean-bean-quest/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Shut Up &amp; Sit Down: Sean Bean Quest</span></a></p>
<p><b>35:14 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Cost of Board Games: Time and Money</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.shutupandsitdown.com/how-to-build-an-amazing-board-game-collection-for-10/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">How to Build an Amazing Board Game Collection for $10!</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/161936/pandemic-legacy-season-1"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Pandemic Legacy</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00TQ5SEAI/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B00TQ5SEAI&amp;linkId=072e86e381a945e62671b23a3abf1cc6"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/174430/gloomhaven"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gloomhaven</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01LZXVN4P/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B01LZXVN4P&amp;linkId=b903a62ff26894ca65711205ea271049"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://cheapass.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cheapass Games</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://bullypulpitgames.com/games/fiasco/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Fiasco</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1934859397/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=1934859397&amp;linkId=8b742e57329605d85e6322877108a841"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Game_License"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Open Game License</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/166384/spyfall"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Spyfall</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00Y4TYRT8/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B00Y4TYRT8&amp;linkId=eb562229ff9644c2a26872461e2da05b"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_(party_game)"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mafia</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LGYO398/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B00LGYO398&amp;linkId=a7d1a7b6ffca1872f6d7a2cf7021e6d1"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p><b>43:02 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The History of </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(game)"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Monopoly</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">; Leftist Board Games</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/127685/suffragetto"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Suffragetto</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1510/class-struggle"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Class Struggle</span></a></p>
<p><b>45:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Resources</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://meeplelikeus.co.uk/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Meeple Like Us</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.64ouncegames.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">64 Ounce Games</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.maxiaids.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">MaxiAids </span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.dicetower.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Dice Tower</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">BoardGameGeek</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://geekandsundry.com/shows/tabletop/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">TableTop</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Favorite Games:</b></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/88464/repello"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Repello</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004SOUM16/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B004SOUM16&amp;linkId=827ef04f4cd2052d32c7b17f066cd254"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b> <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/34119/tales-arabian-nights"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tales of the Arabian Nights</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B002HU4YXA/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B002HU4YXA&amp;linkId=99b75c7b2b09894752f3d20e090a2874"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p><b>Rein: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Dungeons and Dragons: Second Edition and </span><a href="http://dnd.wizards.com/products/tabletop-games/board-games/lords-waterdeep"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lords of Waterdeep</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0786959916/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0786959916&amp;linkId=69a3440a31f92fe03c5437e93fce1b2d"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p><b>James: </b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exalted"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Exalted</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1588466841/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=1588466841&amp;linkId=6b32cce890bdf974cbf7921c9bff53e4"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p><b>Jamey:</b> <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/10547/betrayal-house-hill"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Betrayal at House on the Hill</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003HC9734/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B003HC9734&amp;linkId=4ddcdcaacf032fddf70b90f9eeda2036"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p><b>Mischa:</b> <a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/2511/sherlock-holmes-consulting-detective-thames-murder"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/2370990023/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=2370990023&amp;linkId=46e9a78f75a758e1ae584eba3aa462e6"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
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<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, I’m Jamey Hampton and welcome to &#8216;Paneldome!&#8217; the show where six panelists enter, have a conversation and then hopefully, six panelists also leave. I&#8217;d like to introduce Rein Henrichs, my fellow panelist.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh. Hi, Jamey. I didn&#8217;t see you there. Actually, I think the title of the show is Greater Than Code but we&#8217;ll let that one slide and I am happy to introduce Sam Livingston-Gray.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Rein. I am pleased to be here and happy to introduce my friend, Coraline Ada Ehmke.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, everybody. We have two guest on the show today. First up is James Gray. James plays games and hopes that he&#8217;s going to be allowed on the podcast today. He’s been a moderate to heavy role player plus video and board gamer for over 30 years. He plays mostly everything. He also recently won the game of Western Trail, 131 to 84 but he warned us that if we say that on the air, his wife may leave him. Oh, shit. I&#8217;m sorry, James. We should have read that in advance.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No do overs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, yeah. No problem. I&#8217;m sure Mandy loves me enough to fix it in post.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And I&#8217;d like to introduce our other guest, Mischa Lewis-Norelle. Mischa has the compassionate heart of a Midwesterner, the resilient legs of Northwesterner and the parched throats of a Southern Californian. When not hosting board game nights, coding in his job in Santa Barbara or trying to figure this life stuff out, he has hastily showing jokes into bios for podcast introductions, much to the chagrin of everyone listening.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m definitely chagrined right now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I could tell. I could see in your face. It’s okay.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, the humanity.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;d like to get to know our panelists before we get into the meat of the discussion. Mischa, what&#8217;s your superpower?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a really hard question. Perhaps, appropriately for this conversation, my super power is building community. I really love getting people together around things that they like doing together and then having that continue over time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>James was too humble to point this out but James is a pillar of the development community and one of the kindest people I know. I don&#8217;t know if you want to take the easy way out, James and say your superpowers is kindness.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Tempting. Actually, I&#8217;m on this episode because I&#8217;m trying to develop a new superpower. I&#8217;ve been working a lot recently on talking about my disability and things like that. When Sam asked me to be on the show to talk about the accessibility of board games, I thought this is a great opportunity to practice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For our listeners who don&#8217;t know you, what is your disability, James?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s complicated, Sam. I have one of the muscular dystrophies. It’s called [inaudible] disease or spinal muscular atrophy type 1 but the MDA has changed over time how they referred to diseases. Back when I was diagnosed, it meant something very different than it means today. It&#8217;s complex but the general description is that I&#8217;m confined to an electric wheelchair, I have a protein deficiency basically that makes the majority of my muscles weaker over time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And James, you recently built a house that you were lovingly refer to as Castle Grayskull?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, that&#8217;s right. I did. I made a totally accessible dream house with huge doors and no stairs anywhere, even out of the garage and things like that. You can find me roaming around my castle in most days.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nice. And Mischa I&#8217;m curious, what is your interest in accessibility in board games? Where does that come from?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of those spur of the moment conversations, I was actually talking to Hilary Stohs-Krause, who after she gave a really excellent talk at RailsConf, we ended up talking about board games and she mentioned that some of the friends in her group had trouble playing some of the board games because of different accessibility issues with the game design. That kind of started me down this rabbit hole over the next couple of months. I just ended up reading a bunch of different blogs about it and looking for different products that are related to it. Sometime soon, I&#8217;m hoping to get to be a part of building additions to games to help make it more accessible as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s really awesome. How about a super basic example that first run that pops in your head a way that a game might be challenging for someone?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the perhaps most visible to most people because a lot of people are aware of this condition, a decent percentage of the American population has red/green color blindness and yet the basic colors for a lot of pieces are red, green, blue and yellow. It means that two of the sets of pieces are oftentimes indistinctionable because they have the same shape and only differ by that color. That’s a super basic example.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Another example would be a lot of games involved dealing with a lot of small parts and putting them very precisely onto a board so if someone has trouble with that kind of muscular position, as I&#8217;m sure you know that sometimes playing those games becomes a lot more challenging, things like rolling die and things like that. If the play space isn&#8217;t designed properly, it can end up not being a feasible thing so the game ends up taking a lot longer and being a lot less fun for people that it might otherwise [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Once upon a time, I didn&#8217;t have any trouble rolling dice. Now, I do and have pretty much let go of that. But I have a six-year old which turns out to be the best dice-rolling mechanism you can come by. Yeah, problem solved.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, James I was actually wondering, do you use a laser pointer to designate where you want stuff to go?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am embarrassed to admit that that&#8217;s a genius idea, Sam. Maybe I&#8217;m using that in the future but I have not done that in the past. It&#8217;s a great idea.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Normally, your laser pointer activities involve contacting alien civilizations but also has more practical use as we&#8217;ve just heard.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And playing with cats.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Playing with my cats which is what I was going to add. Super good idea, yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m worried that the cats would then want to play the game, which sounds dangerous.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that would be awful. If you&#8217;re pointing to somebody&#8217;s [inaudible], and you&#8217;re like, &#8220;This point is [inaudible],&#8221; and the cat flings across the room &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, no, what happened to your tile?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Chaos monkey is [inaudible] games.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>James, I&#8217;m curious about what games you play often and some of the challenges that you face with those games.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I played games for, I don&#8217;t know like 25 years, without ever realizing that my disability was maybe affecting some of them in certain ways because when it&#8217;s just the way you are, you don&#8217;t apply a lot of external bot to it or things like that. But then recently, a trending gaming has been, in my experience, some of the ones I&#8217;ve been playing, doing with real time elements. Coraline, I think you actually mentioned a game with real time elements before the show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, Escape From the Temple, I believe it was.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, and can you explain the overall flow of the game?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. It is a fast and furious dice-rolling game. There are no turns, everyone is playing simultaneously. You’re rolling as many dice as possible to move from room to room and to collect jewels and eventually to escape the temple. You&#8217;re laying down tiles as you go, unlocking tiles to expand the maze and the game actually has a 10-minute time limit enforced by a soundtrack that you play at the same time as the game. Not the friendliest game at all for people with motor difficulties.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That sounds exhausting and I could probably gave up with that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Everybody is kind of acting on their own there and independently. Am I right about that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. The only time that there&#8217;s cooperation really is coordinating who&#8217;s going to what room and if you get a skull on one of your dice, that locks that die and if you get completely locked out, someone has to come into the same room and see you and roll furiously to unlock your dice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. A game like that is pretty much a no-go for me because as I mentioned earlier, if I need to roll dice or something, my solution would just be to ask my six-year old to roll for me because she loves it. But then, I would be stopping her from rolling her own dice at a time-critical scenario or something like that. This seems to be a trending games recently, really popular game last year, I believe was called Millennium Blades and it&#8217;s an amazing game.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s a card-collecting game about card-collecting games, which is just super. It&#8217;s a blast. If you ever play anything like Magic the Gathering or anything, it has so many strategies and you would enjoy. But it has a real-time component to it and trading off the market and stuff like that. Someone may put a card for sale on the market and then you can buy back card off the market. This is a case where me winning on my fellow players will affect a response to someone else like if we&#8217;re both trying to get the same card on the market or something like that. I think that&#8217;s really have been one of the ones I enjoyed but where [inaudible], I have not found a good way to adapt to and may be possible by changing the rules or adapting obviously but I&#8217;m not sure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>James, I have a follow up question. Talking about the game that Coraline mentioned, sounds like it&#8217;s fast and furious game. If anyone remember, but there was a game, one of the standard board games from the 90s that had this half dome, the see through plastic dome and all the dice were put inside of the dome and you can press it and it would roll them for you. Something like that could actually help make fast and furious dice-rolling games more feasible.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a good question and I do remember seeing that mechanism in commercials. That particular one might not be of much help to me but surely, I could use a dice-rolling program on an iPhone or whatever. There would definitely be ways to get around that. But then you have &#8212; [inaudible]. There you go. There’s the name. Good job, Jamey.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I give you the dice-rolling phone or whatever but then you have the issue of rolling and also moving your piece in response to that roll and stuff like that. Some games, I basically like as it is. Is this game close and I could make a little modification here and there? Or is this game the central mechanic of it, probably outside of my Venn diagram of capabilities. I think that&#8217;s a bigger hurdle.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Speaking of modifications, James as we were discussing this over email, you brought up the power of house rules. What are some of the ones that you&#8217;ve come up with?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Some games are very easy to adapt and sometimes, we do it I guess without recognizing we&#8217;re doing it. One of my long time games since I was in high school &#8212; this is forever ago, dinosaur times &#8212; is RoboRally. Has anyone played RoboRally?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I adore RoboRally.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, I love this game. In RoboRally, your robots moving around a factory floor, you play cards to program your robots to next five moves and everyone programs first and then it turns on and they all happen at once so pandemonium ensues as robots are pushed around, sharp with razors that they never saw it coming. Its crazy great. I love that game.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> RoboRally rules indicate that you should start a timer when people are programming their cards. There&#8217;s a little timer included in the box or hourglass timer. We have never done that ever. Never used a timer. Actually, it would be brutal to new players, in my opinion because one of the tricky bits of RoboRally is understanding how the conveyor belt on the factory floor affect you as you&#8217;re moving and when you&#8217;re new, you care to this adjustment period where you&#8217;re getting the hang of it. If you have a timer, that&#8217;s really going to put a heavy penalty on you. We’ve just never played with a timer. We&#8217;ll politely rip each other a little bit when you&#8217;ve been programming for a long time or something but beyond that, we don&#8217;t use any kind of time pressure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That simple house rule has taken that game from something I couldn&#8217;t do to something I&#8217;ve done for over 20 years. I would just say while there are games like Coraline discussed earlier where I think pretty much the premise of the game is pretty far out of what I&#8217;m capable of. Simple rules can make big changes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Just out of curiosity, does that adaptation mean that your six-year old can play RoboRally or is that still in her future?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We haven&#8217;t tried that one specifically yet. I&#8217;m not sure if she&#8217;s quite there yet. Although I will say just like two weeks ago, I think she played Small World with us for the first time and she thought that was a blast and did quite well. She got second place by a couple of points. She loves Small World so she&#8217;s getting it right. She plays the bigger games.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In addition to house rules to modify games, are there categories of games that you find generally to be more accessible. One of the big categories of games is German-style or Eurogames versus American games. Eurogames often have less luck, more strategy, less conflict, more trade negotiation. They often involve things like building a tile or array of components in front of you like cards or tiles or things like that. Examples would be Ticket to Ride, Puerto Rico, and Settlers of Catan is something most people have played. Anyway, is that a style of game that you find generally more accessible or there are issues with that one as well?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love the Euro-style games. My wife and I, we will sit down and play one for an afternoon. You mentioned when you introduce me that we played Great Western Trail this last weekend, which took us three hours just sitting there, building things up and that is our idea of a great way to spend time together. I play a ton of those and I think you&#8217;re right that aspect of everybody working out the ideal strategy for them, it doesn&#8217;t bother people if my slowness or something gets in the way a little bit. It fits better in that model, whereas if you have a fast and furious card game where everybody&#8217;s throwing a card every few seconds or something, it would be much more distracting to have me tossing cards in that situation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also, something that has a large hand of cards, I can&#8217;t really hold a large hand of cards anymore or things like that. For sure, there are definitely games that are better than that. But good news is the strategy games have always been my favorite, far and away. I&#8217;m a tournament chess player from way back so that&#8217;s my cup of tea and I&#8217;ve always leaning to that way. It works out but that&#8217;s the case.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> On the video game side, it&#8217;s maybe I&#8217;m more pronounced, where often video games require pretty quick reactions for certain things and you have things like the Civilizations or the Masters of Orion. They are much more slower and strategic and I do love those games but they can take days to play literally. I think the one I play right now that on the edge of my capabilities is Don&#8217;t Starve Together, which is a rogue-like game where you&#8217;re gathering food and trying to keep yourself from getting too cold or hot or all of those things. There are sometimes attacks by big monsters.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I said rogue-like and rogue-like means a very punishing game where you die all the time and that&#8217;s just expected and you learn from those experiences and try it again. I have learned to beat monsters in that game but I have a system to it. Deerclops is one of the big scary monster that comes for you in the winter and I will put him to sleep, drop gunpowder in his feet while he&#8217;s sleeping, light the gunpowder on fire, back off, you&#8217;ll kill him that way. I have a system for how I kill them, even though my reaction times aren&#8217;t as good as most people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think Rogue, the original and its derivatives, all the other rogue-likes probably represent the kind of video game that people with disabilities can most easily play because all of the actions and all of the movements are triggered by a keystroke. If you&#8217;re able to activate a key by whatever means, you normally press keys on your keyboard, you move and then you see more of the dungeon and you might see a monster but nothing&#8217;s happening real time. Everything is precipitated on you initiating the next move.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And there are cases where you might want to spend minutes considering a single key press so it can be a very slow game at times.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s interesting to consider how much of that might have been due to technical limitations. I don&#8217;t know when Rogue came about but I can see it being played on a teletype where you got to wait and print the whole screen and then send your input.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That category of games we&#8217;re discussing now is often called turn-based games, where for each action, you get the monsters or bad guys or whatever, get one action as well. Those are the kinds of games where I do very well because when it&#8217;s my turn, I can take as long as I want.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>To build on this just slightly more, how would you categorize tabletop role-playing game such as Dungeons and Dragons in this hierarchy of accessibility?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a really interesting one. It probably depends on the role-playing game. It&#8217;s interesting because even a tabletop role-playing game, you can spend across the entire spectrum. Some involved moving little models across a giant table, which requires being able to move around the table things like that but others are really focused on the storytelling. In that case, it&#8217;s almost exclusively just what you say that drives the narrative forward and drives the game forward. I would imagine that those ones where people who are able to communicate with everyone else in the group pretty easily, are those would be a lot easier to play but that&#8217;s just my perception.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I went to a D&amp;D game and I had an interesting situation. I like doing maps in Photoshop and I will spend, literally days crafting a map. What I do is I have a giant monitor that I never put on a stand and I lay that down flat in the middle of the table and everyone has their miniatures. We play 4th edition D&amp;D. There&#8217;s a grid that I overlay on the map and then people position themselves because 4th edition is very tactical. There&#8217;s a lot of tactics to combat.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I had an interesting situation where one of my players moved away, about halfway through the campaign and we actually allow him to play remotely via Skype so I have a little tripod that I put my iPhone on. That way, he can see the board and then from Skype, he can see the other participants but we really had to work to make it such that he could tell us where he wanted his miniature placed on the board. It&#8217;s not certainly the same as a person with disability playing the game but it was one of those similar kind of obstacle that we had to overcome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s interesting to me to hear Coraline talk about her D&amp;D just like, Mischa as you say, it&#8217;s very different than my D&amp;D game. We don&#8217;t normally have maps and mentors because sometimes we&#8217;ll go half a dozen sessions without having any combat. I could do an entire day session without having to roll any dice at all. That&#8217;s just talking.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think that&#8217;s [inaudible] refer to as &#8216;Theater of the Mind.&#8217; While the origins of Dungeons and Dragons actually was a miniature large scale war game but the Dungeons and Dragons that many of us grew up with in 80s and 90s was all theater of the mind.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Another thing that this conversation kind of highlight is role-playing games traditionally have a dungeon master and that person is essentially helping to build the game. With enough planning, I think role-playing games can give you a lot of freedom to solve for any potential accessibility issues that your group might have, before you even start playing. I think there&#8217;s a lot of freedom there that is really cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This actually brings up something I want to talk about, which is cooperative versus competitive games. Don&#8217;t Starve Together is a good example of a cooperative game where you&#8217;re cooperating as a group against, essentially the environment. Then people think that Dungeons and Dragons is about party competing with a dungeon master but really, you&#8217;re cooperating with them to build a good experience for everyone. Can we maybe talk about how that axis of competitive and cooperative plays into disability and other things that we care about?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m so glad you brought up cooperative games. I want to say that I think being a long time gamer and living in a place where there are gaming communities but they&#8217;re not huge and well-known. I think my number one trick for introducing people to games is to show them a cooperative game. They always come in and they say something like, &#8220;My husband and I play Risk but we get really competitive and we didn&#8217;t enjoy it or whatever,&#8221; and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Here, let me show you this game. It&#8217;s you and me together against the board.&#8221; It&#8217;s just a mind-blowing experience. From a gaming standpoint, let alone accessibility issues, if you have not played a cooperative game, you need to do so ASAP.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the problems with introducing people to competitive games is that new players usually lose and that&#8217;s not a fun experience.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. One of the great things about cooperative games is the ramp up is much better because you&#8217;re all in this together, you&#8217;re having this experience, you&#8217;re trying to overcome this puzzle or a problem and you&#8217;re talking it out. If you&#8217;re new, you get to see how the more experienced players like, &#8220;If we do this, then we could follow up with that and we&#8217;ll have that under control,&#8221; and you get exposed to that and you feel like you&#8217;re a part of this, at least I do, I should speak for myself. I feel like I&#8217;m a part of this thing that&#8217;s going on, even when I haven&#8217;t got the hang of it yet so yeah, super great about cooperatives.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then of course, from an accessibility standpoint, they&#8217;re quite good. I mentioned I play a ton of Don&#8217;t Starve Together. I play that with my wife. She plays the fighter-type character, which she enjoys. The particular weaknesses that I have, I&#8217;m the base-builder. That&#8217;s my specialty. I sit in the base and build the entire base and she&#8217;ll ask me, &#8220;What resources do you need?&#8221; I need this and that and she&#8217;ll run out into the world and go kill a bunch of things and do challenging stuff and then bring the resources back. It works very well for offloading those aspects that are harder for you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like that she is the provider in this situation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s kind of romantic in a way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Beautiful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is kind of slightly different accessibility issue but for me, I have anxiety issues and sometimes competitive games can be very stressful for me because I don&#8217;t like to get very competitive. You can play competitive games like intensely competitive, in theory but depending on who you&#8217;re playing with, sometimes you can&#8217;t and that&#8217;s really hard for me when I don&#8217;t want to be intensely competitive and people that I&#8217;m playing with make it into more of the competition than I&#8217;m comfortable with. Cooperative games are also really good for that kind of stress levels, in my opinion.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Well, we&#8217;re talking about turn-based versus real-time earlier and I don&#8217;t have anxiety diagnosis but I don&#8217;t like playing the real-time games. I don&#8217;t find them relaxing and I&#8217;m playing a game because I want to have fun so I generally stick to the turn-based strategy ones as well for similar reasons.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s interesting because I noticed something very similar early on. When I was buying a lot of board games, they tended to be German-style and then perhaps slightly more competitive. But I started to notice that I was enjoying the competitive ones less because I was also getting very tense for a long amount of time, which wasn&#8217;t pleasant so I&#8217;ve almost exclusively been buying cooperative games in the last year or two.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the things that I want to mention on the cooperative aspect is there&#8217;s a really cool game out there. It&#8217;s called Space Cadets. It&#8217;s a cooperative game where everyone is playing different members of the&#8230; What do you called the command part of the ship? I should know this term.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The bridge?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, the bridge. There we go, yes. You got your weapons officer and you&#8217;ve got your captain and all that and what&#8217;s cool about it is each role has a completely different mini-game that they&#8217;re playing but they all need to coordinate the outcomes of their mini-games to be able to propel the ship forward. Unfortunately, from accessibility standpoint, that game is in real-time but I think what would be a really cool thing for game designers to explore is how the cooperative games, where there&#8217;s different mechanics for each player and some mechanics that might be more accessible for one group of people and some that are more accessible for another group of people. But everyone, regardless of accessibility and even of what they enjoy in the game, can find some part of the game that they can play.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love that idea and just to kind of run with it for a second. There are games that need that definition today. Just off the top of my head, we were talking earlier about role-playing games and how they often involve a dungeon master. The dungeon master has a much higher level of requirements in what they have to do and manipulate and control, than someone who&#8217;s just casually playing. That kind of meets your definition there. But also, to get more into a game, Deception: Murder in Hong Kong is a social game, where there&#8217;s different roles involves in the game. You&#8217;d have a forensics scientist who has to manipulate a lot of tiles and place pieces on them to give clues about what&#8217;s happened. But the other people in the game do not have to manipulate tiles in that way so their particular role is less physically taxing but I love that as an idea.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things that I was thinking about as we were talking that there&#8217;s a whole genre of games that I don&#8217;t find particularly comfortable. They&#8217;re bluffing games. One example is Mascarade, which is spelled M-A-S-C-A-R-A-D-E. It&#8217;s a fun party game because you can get a dozen people into it but it involves picking up a card and either claiming that you have a particular identity or claiming an identity that you don&#8217;t have. Then you can be challenged on it or not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That one I found like just about at the edge of my comfort zone and there are a whole other games that I&#8217;ve looked at and I have to lie the whole time and I&#8217;m not good at it. I find those uncomfortable and I wonder what those might be like for people on the autism spectrum as well who might have even more difficulty modeling what states other people are in?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like it as applied. I obviously don&#8217;t know what it would be like from the autism spectrum but I do have two things I want to say to that. One, we recently invited someone on the autism spectrum into our D&amp;D group and it was very fascinating to watch them play. The first time when they came, their hand was shaking visibly and I could tell that it was difficult for them. The stimulation was getting to them and stuff but as the game got rolling and they found their place and everything was rolling along smoothly, they seemed to get noticeably more comfortable and fit in well. I was encouraged by that. I think to some extent, what I&#8217;m trying to say is maybe some of those difficulties can be overcome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also another thing I want to say in regard to bluffing games, I have found the thing to bluffing games is to lie in your teeth about something you could care less about. I&#8217;ll use the game Sheriff of Nottingham. You place goods in a bag for inspection, getting into the city and there are legal goods and illegal goods and you end up having to tell the sheriff what you put in the bag and the sheriff has the choice of kicking you at your word or challenging you in opening the bag to see what you&#8217;ve actually put in there. I&#8217;ll introduce and spin a good yarn about how these apples are for my sick sister and just lie completely but just make it not matter at all.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>With bluffing games, there&#8217;s another concept in board games which is player elimination and I find that the bluffing games and other board games that I enjoy the most are ones that don&#8217;t have player elimination because it&#8217;s never fun to be playing Werewolf and to die the first night and be out of the game for the next hour.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s really unpleasant. Under those games I have tried to fix it a little bit. Werewolf now has a version called One Night Werewolf, where if you are eliminated, you&#8217;re only out for maybe a minute, rather than an hour. You&#8217;re still engaged in the actual game and then as soon as you get eliminated, it&#8217;s like, &#8220;I&#8217;ll just sit here until the next game.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And there are games like Resistance, which is basically Werewolf without player elimination, where they&#8217;ve restructured it so that everyone gets to play for the entire game. I will say that I&#8217;ve played so much Avalon, which is a risk and resistance with some of my friends that they bought me a Merlin figurine, which I put on display every time I&#8217;m Merlin, which is every game we play, as far as they know.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Player elimination is a troubling mechanic, I think through games as a whole. Why is it fun to have somebody knocked out and sit there and watch? I have enjoyed watching games. I try to come to terms with this. In Sentinels of the Multiverse &#8212; another good cooperate superhero card game &#8212; when you die and you flip your card over and you&#8217;re this inspiration to the players that are still going on. On your turn, you can trigger one effect that is basically inspiring other players. It&#8217;s a fabulous mechanic and a great way to deal with player elimination.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And actually, Eurogames generally tend to not feature player elimination.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, there&#8217;s Cthulhu Mythos game that tends to eliminate players. As long as you&#8217;re not fighting the big nasty at the end. If your player dies, you basically get a new character and start over, which sometimes can be fun. Sometimes at the end of the game, you&#8217;re like, &#8220;I&#8217;m totally underpowered because I have no items,&#8221; but it&#8217;s another way of addressing that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Actually, cooperative games can be the worst sometimes for player elimination because the game designers still feel like someone needs to lose.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. That&#8217;s a good point. I remember a cooperative game that had player elimination and we played it a couple of times and I was like, &#8220;There are better cooperative games.&#8221; I reminded of Small World. I feel like that&#8217;s almost the ideal situation. Small World does not have player elimination. In there, you take a race and ability combo, you run them to the point where they&#8217;re utterly worthless and then you just throw that race into the decline and grab a new one. I&#8217;d say, it&#8217;s just like starting over and it&#8217;s great. It plays so well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>On the RPG side, there&#8217;s a lesser-known RPG called Goblin Quest. You play much for goblins but it&#8217;s cooperative. It&#8217;s RPG and it&#8217;s all conversation-based but they have a great ultimate rule set called Sean Bean Quest, where instead of playing a bunch of goblins, you played a bunch of Sean Beans. Every time that a Sean Bean dies, one of your Sean Beans dies, that person then inhabits eight different Sean Bean from a different movie so there are ways to solve that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is the most amazing game description I have ever heard.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I will send you a link to a podcast episode where some of my favorite board game reviewers play Sean Bean quest. It is choice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That sounds amazing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m just sitting here listening to you all talk about various games that you&#8217;ve played and we probably brought up two dozen already on this show and I&#8217;m thinking how do you afford all these games both financially and taking the time to play them?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is a really good point. One thing that is not talked about when it comes to accessibility is cost. The fact you brought up both time and money is also really important. A lot of games that are well-reviewed cost $80, $100, $150 in some cases and for a lot of people, that isn&#8217;t accessible. They don&#8217;t have that disposable income available. There&#8217;s a really great piece that just came out by the same people who did the Sean Bean Quest play through actually about a week ago, where they got from their audience a list of games that worth $10 or less and most of them were free. It was a list of 15 games or something like that. There&#8217;s a really cool space for expensive games because as a matter of fact, building a comprehensive board game selection is really expensive prior to a certain access to money that a lot of people don&#8217;t have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve seen pictures, James of your gaming room and it is impressive.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s pretty bad sign if you have to custom build the gaming room to hold your game collection, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You say bad sign, I say good sign.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s a good point and there&#8217;s also games like Pandemic Legacy or Gloomhaven, I believe or similar, which are like campaigns. It&#8217;s like a board game but more along a role-playing axis where you go through the campaign, play the game through once and at that point, you&#8217;ve actually got the experience out of the game and probably would not be likely to play it again. You can draw up big dollars for a game that you&#8217;re only going to play through one time. That&#8217;s definitely unfortunate, yet at the same time, I have to say that Pandemic Legacy is amazing and has been top on BoardGameGeek for a long time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, if it takes you a couple of months to play through, maybe that makes it worthwhile. But still, there&#8217;s still a financial barrier there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For sure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And you can&#8217;t share the game with other people once you&#8217;ve finished it in the case of Pandemic Legacy. If you&#8217;re playing it correctly, you&#8217;re actually destroying game materials.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Another thing to think about with those type of games is the group of people you&#8217;re playing with. This is more like a time issue but in games like Pandemic Legacy, you have to decide who&#8217;s going to play, then they have to play every time, which means that the same group of people has always been available, which is the same for tabletop role-playing games, like we&#8217;re talking about earlier. We&#8217;ve been talking a little bit about money but on the time side, like playing Dungeons and Dragons, it could be very cheap. You can do it cheap or you can do it expensive, depending on what kind of material is you want to buy but it takes an incredible amount of time to plan out and to play, session are very long. I&#8217;ve been playing in the same campaign since I was 16. You switch out people &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow, a year.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A whole year. It&#8217;s like a huge commitment to join a group like that when that&#8217;s the dynamic.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I do want to say really quickly that overall, the game industry, especially the reviewers have really helped the game industry to an extremely high standard on components and they get dinged heavily if their components are not amazing. I think that is severely driving the cost of games up as now all games have very elaborate wooden pieces or spinners to keep track of life points and things like that and that&#8217;s really driving the cost up. But I will say that in my particular group, we&#8217;ve played several games but what you would call cheap. I had a real blast with them. Just [inaudible] player, a couple [inaudible]. I see Sam and I are on the same page because I was thinking back to a company called Cheapass Games and they have made some really great games like &#8216;Before I Kill You, Mr Bond.&#8217; It&#8217;s been many years. I [inaudible] remembered but anything cheapass &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There was one of that zombies on a train.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. There are zombies making fast food. I can&#8217;t remember what it was called but it was amazing. Anything made by Cheapass Games &#8212; role-playing games can be particularly bad with their cost like, &#8220;Just buy three books. They&#8217;re only $70 each. No problem.&#8221; But there are really fun role-playing games that are considerably cheaper. There are free role-playing games. I don&#8217;t have a ton of experience with them but Fiasco is a low-cost role-playing game.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, that&#8217;s a great game.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s very fun and you can often download modules for it online. That&#8217;s great. Also, don&#8217;t forget the value of a deck of cards. Games like Euchre and Pinochle and things like that. They&#8217;re timeless and still great. I do think there are good ways to do gaming on a budget. Maybe, you just have to look a little bit but there are resources for that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like, there&#8217;s also a trend recently of some card games that are open sourcing their cards that you can print out your own.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. That&#8217;s a good point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I actually wanted to mention that there are almost open source gaming licenses. Pathfinder is a tabletop role-playing game that has what it calls the Open Gaming License. It makes it possible for you to reproduce parts of their content enough to play your own game without having to buy their materials. Another interesting thing is that game designs are not copyrightable. Now, some games need a bunch of equipment &#8212; accoutrements &#8212; to play but some don&#8217;t. There are games like Spyfall, which is a bluffing game and all Spyfall requires is a list of locations and for each location, a list of occupations. That&#8217;s it. Then once you know the game mechanic, you can make up your own and play it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Rein, since I know you&#8217;re a Resistance aficionado, didn&#8217;t that game come out of like an open scenario and was only boxed later, I believe.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think the history is that people are like, &#8220;We&#8217;re going to steal Werewolf and do our own thing with it.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Got you!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It worth mentioning that Werewolf itself is a branded re-package of Mafia, a popular free-to-play game because you [inaudible] friends and [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Now, if you have to buy friends, that gets expensive.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or six-year olds.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or six-year olds, yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I grew up on Mafia when I was a camp counselor. That was like the go-to camp game because you didn&#8217;t need anything. We would tell these elaborate stories. That was kind of my introduction in a way like Dungeons and Dragons and stuff like that because we would come up with these elaborate stories for like exactly why you&#8217;re in this Mafia situation. It was super fun because you&#8217;d have all these people coming up with this different set.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Resistance was a deliberate attempt to make a Mafia without player elimination.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As a public service announcement, I do want to point out that the Greater Than Code podcast does not officially endorse child trafficking.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How about unofficially?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Buying friends is perfectly legitimate. We&#8217;re all Americans here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that was fine.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can I mention something because that&#8217;s a segue for a topic I&#8217;ve been wanting to bring out but haven&#8217;t found a way through yet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s the segue?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, I got to hear this.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Did you know the monopoly is a communist game? Monopoly was originally called The Landlord Game and it was a game designed to demonstrate how ridiculous capitalism is. And there are also other interesting games from a leftist tradition. In 1909, there was a game released by the women&#8217;s suffrage movement called Suffrage-something. They made a game out of the name &#8216;suffrage&#8217; and it was a board game where you had two sides with pieces and one side was the suffragettes and you were fighting the other side. There&#8217;s an entire tradition of leftist board games. There was a game that came out in the late 70s called Class Struggle.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s amazing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was actually popular. It actually achieved some mainstream popularity.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I know that I have always hated Monopoly. It&#8217;s a classic positive feedback loop where once you win, you continue to win.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Monopoly has a completely dominating strategy and you just play that strategy and you win and there&#8217;s nothing anyone else can do, unless they play the strategy and get luckier.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s interesting. I was raised a Quaker and [inaudible] The Landlord Game was a Quaker so I was pretty familiar with this early on. But the game actually had two sets of rules. One was supposed to be a capital set of rules and one that was supposed to be a socialist or communist set of rules. The whole point was to teach people, &#8220;Oh, look at how much the capitalist rules suck and how miserable everyone is,&#8221; and then Parker Brothers was like, &#8220;This looks great. I guess we&#8217;ll make one with just the capitalist rules.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So it kind of works, right? Because anybody has played Monopoly. It has [inaudible] that beat down. It&#8217;s built into the game, for sure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Definitely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I found more info on that game. It was called Suffragetto and the suffragettes have a home base of Albert Hall and the police are the opponents, of course and they start around the House of Commons.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sonic, the Hedgehog was originally supposed to be a game about environmental sustainability.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But then capitalism happened to it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You can see that with the whole killing the animal’s thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And there&#8217;s this whole contingent of Sonic deniers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Too real.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Where do you find these cool details about games?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I Google them immediately before the podcast. I actually knew about the history of Monopoly and I am an excellent Googler because that&#8217;s mostly my job.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So, you&#8217;re a software engineer?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Way to bring it back to tech.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We talked a lot about the metrics of accessibility and some games. We&#8217;ve talked specifically about a few games that are accessible but can we talk about some resources to find out about other games and about the accessibility of existing games that we know?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. When I first got excited about this, I discovered a website called MeepleLikeUs.co.uk. They have a bunch of resources. They do standard reviews of board games then they do these accessibility teardowns where they look at the game from a bunch of different lenses and rate the different accessibilities. They&#8217;ve also created this master list which is a publicly-accessible Google sheet that just has every game that they&#8217;ve done a teardown of, then the grade in each area of accessibility. They&#8217;ve touched on all the versions of accessibility that we&#8217;ve talked about, including socio-economic and space. I would highly recommend that you check them out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Another really cool resource for those who are visually-impaired is 64 Ounce Games. They actually make game modifications like sleeves and things like that, that you can buy as a set for a popular game. Predominantly, they&#8217;re targeted towards people who are partially or completely blind but it will be things like railcard covers and things like that so that people who can&#8217;t see can still play the game. It&#8217;s really, really cool work. It&#8217;s just two people out of Texas.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then the third one is MaxiAids and they&#8217;ve also got some resources for games that are designed for people with visual impairments. A lot of versions of popular games with really large text and things like that. This is more towards partial blindness and nearsightedness. But again, a bunch of versions of games that you can buy that are a lot easier to seek.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to just throw, one other thought out there is price of resource. That&#8217;s been particularly helpful to me. You know, everyone has their own limitations and you know what they are better than anyone else in the world. While all the things Mischa just recommended are great jumping off points, you should also validate. To do that, I do the blind thing of Dice Tower reviews. They showed the components of the game. They show the mechanics of the game and play and explain them. I just sit there and watch them explain the game and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I could do that,&#8221; or, &#8220;No, I couldn&#8217;t.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The reason I think that&#8217;s important is for example, Meeple Like Us, I just heard is rated Hanabi as a poor game for color blind people but I have actually played that game with a color blind player and they mentioned it. As soon as we started playing, they were like, &#8220;I&#8217;m color blind,&#8221; and we said, &#8220;We should play something different,&#8221; and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;No, no. The symbols are different. Just tell me what&#8217;s what,&#8221; and we did and the player played flawlessly after that. I&#8217;m not saying that means that Hanabi is a good game for color blind people. I&#8217;m just saying that obviously, some people are okay with it and able to function with it. It pays to watch the reviews and see if it meets your needs or not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Another thing is like you mentioned, your experience is best and BoardGameGeek is a great place for starting threads where you can share your experiences with games and help other people who might have similar needs to be able to get more resources about what games they should be looking at, including things like linking to the reviews and such.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A warning though, if you are a tech person listening to this podcast and you&#8217;re about to go to the website of BoardGameGeek for the first time, you&#8217;re going to have an experience where you see a pretty horrible interface. It&#8217;s actually gotten considerably better in the last two years, which is shocking because it still atrocious.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And it also does bring up the point that BoardGameGeek.com itself might not be super accessible. There&#8217;s that to consider.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wanted to mention a couple of things. One of them was BoardGameGeek but I, especially want to highlight that each game and they covers many thousands of games, has a collection of strategy forums but also were rules-lawyering forum, where you can go and arbitrate your rules. Also, there are discussions about house rules in various parts of the forms as well, where people have said, &#8220;Here is how we prefer to play the game,&#8221; and list the house rules.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The other one is Wil Wheaton hosted a YouTube series called TableTop, where he plays various board games with a group of YouTube celebrities essentially. It&#8217;s interesting because you get to see how the game plays in a group and what sort of interactions it promotes. For me, a large part of why I play games is to have fun interactions so it&#8217;s nice to be able to see the games being played and see how they play out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Plus one to TableTop. It&#8217;s awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Definitely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>At the end of every show, we like to close out with reflections and Jamey had a great suggestion today, which was that in addition to our reflections, we should mention a board game that we particularly like. I&#8217;ll start that off. I have had the game Repello for a couple years now and I still really enjoy it. It turns out to be a really programmer-friendly game. It&#8217;s got a couple of clever mechanics that people who work in tech, seemed to do really well with. I&#8217;ll just leave it at that. It&#8217;s a fun game. It&#8217;s fairly quick to play and definitely, one of my favorites. As for reflections, I don&#8217;t have much other than perhaps six-year olds, speaking of which, I see a six-year old on the screen right now, are an incredibly valuable and national resource.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of my favorite games is Tales of the Arabian Nights. It&#8217;s a storytelling game with a really interesting mechanic. At the beginning of the game, you are assigned a quest and you spend the game trying to fulfill your quest and you also set your own conditions for victory in the game and those are kept secret from other players. What I like about it is the storytelling aspect. You get to a place, you draw a card and there&#8217;s a series of tables, you consult which leads you into the storybook and then at the storybook, it explains the scenario that you find yourself in. Sometimes, you have choices to make. Sometimes, what happens is based on skills that you have acquired.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But the storybook is really thick and generally speaking, you don&#8217;t run across the same scenario twice, at least in the year or two that I&#8217;ve been playing the game. It&#8217;s very age-accessible. There are very few mechanical considerations and there&#8217;s only one dice for all [inaudible] in your turn. I think from an accessibility standpoint, it&#8217;s probably a good game and definitely very, very fun.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m going to mention two games. One for nostalgic reasons, Dungeons and Dragons 2nd edition, which is a game that I have spent many hundreds, if not thousands of hours on. It was weird if the rules were bad and now they&#8217;re much better but I still have a soft place in my heart for those weird rules. I like TAKO. What is that? One of the games that I&#8217;m enjoying playing now, I think was mentioned earlier is Lords of Waterdeep, which is a Eurogame based on worker placement and it has a hidden win condition, I think. You also mentioned that Jamey and it&#8217;s a fun, probably top 10 Eurogame for me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m sure it&#8217;s &#8216;Tay-ko&#8217; not Tako but &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Fight me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Let&#8217;s see. I&#8217;ll just risk our favorite game at the reflections. I&#8217;ve been swiping boards over here and thinking, that&#8217;s like picking my favorite kid which had cheated my way out and by only having one kid so &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; The six-year old.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, the six-year old, right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m sorry to make this such a stressful situation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It is very hard. I&#8217;m going to not mention anything I&#8217;ve mentioned before because you&#8217;ve been listening carefully and you know what I like but I will, instead choose role-playing game. I&#8217;m going to say, Exalted. If you have not heard of Exalted, everybody in the world plays D&amp;D, which is just a really poor version of Exalted in my opinion &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Once again, fight me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. Rein is getting after me but Exalted is like an anime, swords and sorcery game. One of my absolutely favorite elements of it is if you describe what you&#8217;re doing and add a bunch of flair, then the game gives you extra dice to accomplish what you&#8217;re trying and a &#8216;Get out of jail free card&#8217; against the game master unexpectedly killing you. It used to be a White Wolf game. White Wolf, I think went under and was purchased by some company and I can&#8217;t remember the name of right now but I&#8217;m sure, if you Google Exalted role-playing game, it&#8217;s in 3rd edition now. It&#8217;s a great game.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, can I just say that a house rule we&#8217;ve had for a long time in most of my D&amp;D groups is the dungeon master is allowed to award positive rolls for good role-play?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We actually do spiffs in my game. I bought these little glass pebbles and I will award them for good role-playing. Then at the end of the game, all the players vote on who did the best role-playing and that person inherits the spiff for the next game. The spiff allows you to re-roll a bad roll.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, that is amazing and that idea, I promise you, initiated in Exalted.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just want to tell a quick story. While I was playing a game, they had this rule and one of the players spent a good two or three minutes describing the way that they rouge, bolting around, ended various things and resulted in a completely impossible thing that they were trying to do. When the DM listen to all of this and thought about it and said, &#8220;You scored a crit.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Jamey, what are some of your favorite games?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My favorite game is probably the Betrayal at House on the Hill, which is very similar to the game in many ways that Coraline was describing. It&#8217;s a story based where the ending of the story is different every time. It&#8217;s a Lovecraftian horror game, which is like an appealing genre for me. But it&#8217;s also very fun for me because it&#8217;s both a competitive and a cooperative game. It starts out cooperative for the first half and then once you enter into this second half story mode, you&#8217;ll end up competing against each other in various ways. It picks someone to be the traitor and that person is doing something different than the rest of the team. There&#8217;s kind of like, &#8220;Go into that other room while we discuss our playbook,&#8221; and you have your own playbook, which makes it really interesting and fun. But it doesn&#8217;t get as competitive as some other games do in my opinion because it&#8217;s so random like you don&#8217;t know who&#8217;s going to be the traitor until it happens and it doesn&#8217;t really allow for that kind of, &#8220;Oh, I&#8217;m better than you.&#8221; It&#8217;s just everybody is at the mercy of this Lovecraftian fate. [inaudible] about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMES:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think probably my favorite game that I didn&#8217;t already mention is Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective. First of all, it&#8217;s cooperative, which is fantastic. It&#8217;s great from a bunch of different accessibility perspectives because you need to have one person in your group that can read the booklet but other than that, it&#8217;s all just working through a puzzle. The premise is that you are members of a street gang that Sherlock works with to solve crimes and there&#8217;s 10 crimes in &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The Baker Street Irregulars?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MISCHA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, exactly. Thank you. The Baker Street Irregulars. In this game, you&#8217;re given a mystery to solve and you&#8217;re given a map of London and a couple of newspapers. After that, it&#8217;s just deciding where you want to go. There&#8217;s no time or anything like that. You can choose to go to the crime scene, you&#8217;ll learn some stuff, you can choose to go and visit the house of one of the people mentioned in some conversation or another. At the end of it, you&#8217;re all working together, trying to solve this as quickly as possible. At the end, you go a knock on the door and talk to Sherlock Holmes. Your score is based on how quickly you could solve the mystery, meaning how few places you could go to, to solve it compared to what Sherlock needed to do to solve it. You will always lose because it&#8217;s Sherlock Holmes but it&#8217;s a really fun evening. It&#8217;s a good two to three-hour game of trying to solve an interesting puzzle in a cool city. It&#8217;s very thematic and very, very fun.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would like to remind people that if you enjoyed this conversation and other conversations that we have on this podcast, you can support us directly through our Patreon, that&#8217;s Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. All Patrons get access to outtakes from the show, which tend to be very, very fascinating. We call them truth bombs. You can pledge at any level and get access to our Slack community, where you can continue the conversation with other Patrons and with the hosts and with our guests as well. If you like us, prove it. Go to Patreon.com and put your money where your mouth is. Thank you so much to Mischa and James. It&#8217;s been a delight having you both on the show and we will talk to you all in a couple of weeks, with Episode 44. Thank you.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">James Edward Gray: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/JEG2"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@JEG2</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mischa Lewis-Norelle: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/mlewisno"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@mlewisno</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.mlewisno.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">mlewisno.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links are affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Paneldome!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:58</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Backgrounds and Superpowers</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3ojRN4CT7I"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hilary Stohs-Krause: We&#8217;ve Always Been Here: Women Changemakers in Tech @ RailsConf 2017</span></a></p>
<p><b>04:44 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Examples of Accessibility Challenges in Board Games</span></p>
<p><b>07:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Games and Challenges</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/113294/escape-curse-temple"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Escape: The Curse of the Temple</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00720I7TC/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B00720I7TC&amp;linkId=68e011bda94e857e4b22dad236dcf6ba"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/151347/millennium-blades"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Millennium Blades</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1936920573/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=1936920573&amp;linkId=7d3b7e9a8d786ba1e4ae2d233bc51a36"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p><b>11:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Power of House Rules</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/18/roborally"><span style="font-weight: 400;">RoboRally</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N8T7ACD/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B01N8T7ACD&amp;linkId=e3267f057c2b4e90ce3b6fe38096d3b0"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/40692/small-world"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Small World</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0024]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">James Edward Gray: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/JEG2"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@JEG2</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mischa Lewis-Norelle: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/mlewisno"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@mlewisno</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.mlewisno.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">mlewisno.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links are affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Paneldome!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:58</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Backgrounds and Superpowers</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3ojRN4CT7I"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hilary Stohs-Krause: We&#8217;ve Always Been Here: Women Changemakers in Tech @ RailsConf 2017</span></a></p>
<p><b>04:44 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Examples of Accessibility Challenges in Board Games</span></p>
<p><b>07:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Games and Challenges</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/113294/escape-curse-temple"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Escape: The Curse of the Temple</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00720I7TC/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B00720I7TC&amp;linkId=68e011bda94e857e4b22dad236dcf6ba"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/151347/millennium-blades"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Millennium Blades</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1936920573/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=1936920573&amp;linkId=7d3b7e9a8d786ba1e4ae2d233bc51a36"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p><b>11:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Power of House Rules</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/18/roborally"><span style="font-weight: 400;">RoboRally</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01N8T7ACD/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B01N8T7ACD&amp;linkId=e3267f057c2b4e90ce3b6fe38096d3b0"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Purchase</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/40692/small-world"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Small World</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (</span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0024]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/game.jpg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/game.jpg"></googleplay:image>
										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/796/043-the-accessibility-of-board-games-with-mischa-lewis-norelle-and-james-edward-gray.mp3" length="58519537" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>01:00:57</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>042: @CallbackWomen and Organizing Conferences for Diversity and Inclusion with Carina C. Zona</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/042-callbackwomen-and-organizing-conferences-for-diversity-and-inclusion-with-carina-c-zona/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 09 Aug 2017 05:00:22 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=787</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[In this episode, Carina C. Zona joins us to talk about making a difference with her organization, @CallbackWomen, why diversity and inclusion is so important to have at conferences, and sending signals and/or indicators that encourage people to apply to speak at your conference.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[In this episode, Carina C. Zona joins us to talk about making a difference with her organization, @CallbackWomen, why diversity and inclusion is so important to have at conferences, and sending signals and/or indicators that encourage people to apply to ]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Carina C. Zona: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/https://twitter.com/cczona"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@cczona</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://cczona.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">cczona.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.callbackwomen.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@CallbackWomen</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHPAN418xoGcgu2N51C4tWQ"><span style="font-weight: 400;">YouTube Channel</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Life, The Universe, and Podcasts!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:13</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Carina’s Background and Superpower</span></p>
<p><b>02:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="http://www.callbackwomen.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@CallbackWomen</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and The Naming Struggle to Make Sure Marginalized and Non-Binary People Know They Are Included</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/increasing-diversity-at-your-conference"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ashe Dryden: Increasing Diversity at Your Conference</span></a></p>
<p><b>12:13 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Sending Signals and/or Indicators That Encourage People to Apply to Speak At Your Conference</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">I hate to say this, but conferences need to relocate out of the U.S. My country is making business travel to U.S. untenable for so many ppl. <a href="https://t.co/bMOfbe6VDP">https://t.co/bMOfbe6VDP</a></p>
<p>— Carina C. Zona (@cczona) <a href="https://twitter.com/cczona/status/870868124710584322">June 3, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>23:10 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Conference Outreach</span></p>
<p><b>27:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Accessibility at Conferences</span></p>
<p><b>34:19 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Conferences “Competing” for Speakers</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Call For Proposals (CFP)</span></p>
<p><b>40:26 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Financial Aid, Travel Stipends, and Reimbursement </span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">This is now part of the US non-immigrant visa application. This is obnoxious, absurd and threatens freedom of speech. <a href="https://t.co/lnpLmC5v4I">pic.twitter.com/lnpLmC5v4I</a></p>
<p>— Nima Fatemi (@mrphs) <a href="https://twitter.com/mrphs/status/888817794879553538">July 22, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>49:05 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Making a Difference with @CallbackWomen and Codes of Conduct</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/cocpledge"><span style="font-weight: 400;">#cocpledge</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/codes-of-conduct-101-faq"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ashe Dryden: Codes of Conduct 101 + FAQ</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://joinfundclub.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Fund Club</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.callbackwomen.com/donate"><b>Donate to @CallbackWomen!</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong><a href="https://www.patreon.com/cczona">Pledge via Patreon!</a></strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Jamey: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Having travel and accommodation expenses covered is important for speakers.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Flipping the paradigm. </span></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Using influence to affect change.</span></p>
<p><b>Carina: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Having</span> <span style="font-weight: 400;">speaker mentors: both experienced and newbies.</span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> How conferences have evolved in a positive way around diversity and inclusion.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-788" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/margaret.png" alt="" width="500" height="520" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/margaret.png 500w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/margaret-288x300.png 288w" sizes="(max-width: 500px) 100vw, 500px" /></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, I&#8217;m Rein Henrichs and welcome to Episode 42 of &#8216;Life, The Universe, and Podcasts.&#8217; I&#8217;m happy to welcome my co-panelists, Jamey Hampton.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, although I believe this is just the regular Greater Than Code today, is that right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think we need to discuss it further.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to introduce one of my co-panelist, Sam Livingston-Gray.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you and in honor of an Episode 42, I think we can let that slide just this once but anyway, welcome to the show, Coraline Ada Ehmke.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hey, everybody. We have a wonderful guest today, Carina Zona. I&#8217;m happy to introduce her. Carina Zona is a developer, advocate and certified sex educator. She spends a lot of time thinking about the unexpected cultural effects of our decisions as programmers. Carina is also the founder of CallbackWomen, which is on a mission to radically increase gender diversity at the podium of professional programmer’s conferences. Welcome, Carina.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. Great to be here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re going to start off by getting to know you a little more. Can you tell us a little bit about your background and what are your superpowers?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh my God. What are you doing to me? I started off as a developer in the late 90s, just sort of sidled in needing to solve my own problems and gradually became a professional. I have, in recent years done a fair amount of volunteering with various groups that are about increasing diversity in tech, particularly in programming like RailsBridge, Rails Girls, PyLadies, Girl Develop It, Write Speak Code, Black Girls Code, Women Who Code, we have so many. Isn&#8217;t it awesome?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A lot of those, when I started attending and organizing, really woke me up to the possibilities that there were things that I can do too and that was really helpful, especially because those were places where I was getting mentors who were introducing me to conference speaking and giving me a lot of pro tips that helped me actually make that successful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As I was dipping toes into those waters, it started to make sense to do a lot of things that my mentors had done, which is to scale beyond myself, to make something that other people could benefit from the way I was and to be able to give back the way I had been given something back so I always reach that hand back and bring someone forward with you. That&#8217;s really where CallbackWomen was born from. It&#8217;s all these various groups showing me the way and showing me that that kind of help is really powerful. It&#8217;s life changing and certainly, career changing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We mentioned CallbackWomen, can you give a little background on what CallbackWomen&#8217;s mission is and what you&#8217;re doing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. The official mission is to radically increase gender diversity at the podium of professional programmer’s conferences. Let me break that down a little bit. Gender diversity, despite the name means more than just women. It means everybody who&#8217;s gender is underrepresented or has been underrepresented at the podium. That includes gender non-binary people, it certainly includes transwomen because women, but also for instance, transmen is a gender underrepresented at the podium as well. Those things are that first part of the mission.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The second is at the podium, not just attendance at professional programmer’s conferences, meaning not just tech conferences in general but one specifically by professional programmers so not academic conferences, not founders conferences, not hardware conferences, being really specific about who is being served and how do we bring them into the pipeline and how do we make sure that those people are recognized for their expertise and are successful and are building a career off of it if they want to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Carina, it&#8217;s CallbackWomen but you just said that your organization is intended to encompass the white spectrum of gender diversity and I kind of empathize with that naming struggle. I have a project called open source for women (OS4W) and I was asked early on, &#8220;Can non-binary people participate?&#8221; and I ended up describing it as a place for anyone who is comfortable in women spaces but I&#8217;m curious if you gotten push back from people who don&#8217;t identifies as women and who also don&#8217;t identifies as gender man.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve never gotten push back, at least not directed to me. It&#8217;s possible that there are people who have dissatisfaction with it but my policy has always been to get permission so anyone who&#8217;s pronouns are not clearly evidence or they&#8217;re otherwise isn&#8217;t clear that their gender is woman before I kind of pull them under that mantle, I contact them privately and I ask their permission. If someone&#8217;s pronouns are, for instance &#8216;they&#8217; or they&#8217;re indicating that they&#8217;re transmen, I want to promote their work but I also want to make sure that that&#8217;s not being done by misgendering them. Obviously, any time you&#8217;re pulling someone in under that name &#8216;woman,&#8217; and they aren&#8217;t woman, that is inherently misgendering.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I have contacted a number of people and all but one ever said, &#8220;Yes, thank you for asking and thank you for promoting me.&#8221; It&#8217;s important to ask. It definitely is. I did have one person essentially say, &#8220;And if you hadn&#8217;t asked, I&#8217;d have been super not okay with that,&#8221; so it&#8217;s part of being respectful. I think probably one of the reasons why I haven&#8217;t gotten push back is because I&#8217;ve tried to be handling that correctly and certainly if anyone feels that I haven&#8217;t, I do want to hear from them and I can do that better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The one person who said, &#8220;No,&#8221; just said no. They didn&#8217;t say, &#8220;That&#8217;s an offensive request,&#8221; or, &#8220;I just don&#8217;t feel comfortable with that.&#8221; When I started off, I was a lot less aware and I was thinking very much of women and inherently cis women and the name really was born out of that that that originally I saw it as bringing more women to the podium of professional programmer’s conferences and the name at this point is something I really struggle with. It&#8217;s difficult and I would like to change it on the one hand.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> On the other hand, it&#8217;s been four years and there&#8217;s a significant brand that&#8217;s been built up around it. It&#8217;s always a little bit of a thing of do we end up losing some of the attention that has been built from conference organizers, the awareness of where to go, who to talk to, who to hear so that needs be dealt with. Every year the name is more problematic and every year, I&#8217;m not sure what to do about that. I have to admit also, I&#8217;m really wedded to the pun. It&#8217;s meant to evoke callbacks inherently programming and also calling back to the podium and to the industry. The women who used to be far more prevalent in the industry in the 1980s, calling back to the respect of our expertise. That name, I would like to be able to somehow preserve, at least in part because it has meaning to the mission and to me. However, if anyone wants to contact me and pitch better names that are more inclusive of the actual current mission, I would love to hear that. I would love to hear a way to walk that line much better because it needs to be done at some point soon.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s an accident that it&#8217;s hard to find language that is both piffy and gender-inclusive because it&#8217;s very baked into our language, the notion of the binary.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Indeed. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had an experience with this when I was first starting to do conference speaking. Some friends of mine motioned me to CallbackWomen like, &#8220;This could be helpful for you,&#8221; and I have to admit that my first reaction was like, &#8220;Oh, for me,&#8221; as a non-binary person, I was like, &#8220;Is it really?&#8221; Bunch of my friends are like, &#8220;No, really. It is. Don&#8217;t worry. I understand what you&#8217;re saying but it&#8217;s going to be good and it&#8217;s going to help you.&#8221; It did help me and I think that a real way to combat that initial feeling that I got is like having a lot of people know about it and talk about it. If trusted people that I know are saying, &#8220;No, really. It&#8217;s good. It&#8217;s going to be good. It&#8217;s going to help you. It&#8217;s not going to make you feel bad,&#8221; then that&#8217;s more meaningful to me in a way. I think that&#8217;s how word gets out about things. In the tech industry, I think that&#8217;s how word gets out about a lot of things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, we&#8217;re very much a word of mouth industry. Thank you for saying that. That&#8217;s really great to hear. When I first started it in 2013, four and a half years ago&#8230; Wait, I&#8217;ve lost track&#8230; Yeah, four and a half. At very early on, I had envisioned it as somewhat like the mailing list that it was coming out of the discussions that we&#8217;re having on lists like Dev Chicks, I just thought it was of interest to women, for women, that only women would find it relevant. Even though it was on Twitter, it just never really occurred to me that there would be an audience beyond women.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Within months, I started seeing all these men following and I did have a little talk with myself about is this okay and decided, &#8220;Yes, it is very much okay.&#8221; The point here is to democratize access to information, to be able to have these conversations that are only being have in private, in small networks and to be able to have that, be something that anyone can benefit from. I also felt like part of the problem at this point has been that only, not only man, but largely, men in particularly white men at well-funded companies that can afford to send them out to talk are the ones in this inner circle of communication so they&#8217;re the ones that are getting lots of experience and exposure. But I feel really confident that once other people have that access and exposure, we&#8217;re going to kick their ass.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Let’s all compete. That&#8217;s fine because I know that this is going to be a very fair fight and the best thing we can do for conferences is to have a really lively competition of different ideas, different experiences and what CallbackWomen is trying to do is make sure that we can, as an industry benefit from having a lot more voices, a lot more topics, a lot more ways of thinking about existing topics. As long as we had this really small ecosystem of speakers, we were losing. As an industry, we were losing. I&#8217;m fine with anyone who wants to be benefiting from CallbackWomen and I know that it&#8217;s marginalized people who most benefit from CallbackWomen because marginalized people are the ones who are least being heard and who had a tremendous amount and still do, to say that&#8217;s useful to the whole industry.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It kind of reminds me of something that Sandi Metz had when we had her on the program early on. She said, she looks forward to the day that she gives her last keynotes because that means she&#8217;s made room for other women and basically not men to take the spotlight because what you&#8217;re saying about the small circle of speakers from big companies that will pay their way, it&#8217;s absolutely true. That&#8217;s something I&#8217;ve definitely seen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, this was some of the feedback I got. One of the reasons why there were women who were really helping me when I started out in 2012 as a speaker, literally saying, &#8220;I&#8217;m tired of being the one who&#8217;s asked to do everything and feeling the burden of having to say yes on everything or else there&#8217;s not going to be a woman there. It&#8217;s just too much. I want to help and have more women speaking because it takes the load off of me.&#8221; This pragmatic reasoning, not just I want to do this as some social justice cause but because I personally need this to happen so I will put the time into mentoring you and others in order to just take a weight off of my career and my sense of responsibility to my gender.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wanted to muse a little bit about how organizations and conferences may be sending some kind of signals are indications that may discourage people from applying even if they don&#8217;t need to do that. I&#8217;ve personally experienced this specifically. I do speak at women&#8217;s conferences even as a non-women and I have contacted people sometimes and like, &#8220;Am I welcome as a non-binary person to speak? Do you want non-women speakers?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;ve had some people that are like, &#8220;Yeah, why are you even asking this. It should be self-evident that you are welcome,&#8221; and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I&#8217;m glad that you&#8217;re saying that I am welcome but it&#8217;s not self-evident because I have not had the same answer from everyone.&#8221; That made me feel like they don&#8217;t realize the signals that they&#8217;re putting out on who they&#8217;re trying to welcome and I think that&#8217;s true for women in conferences too, like what kind of things might people be accidentally doing in your experience that are discouraging women from wanting to come.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. There are a lot of things. It&#8217;s almost easier to say what are the things you can do because there&#8217;s such a long list of things that are either implicit or explicit that are discouraging. I think actually the thing to look at is how do you make it clear and incentivize having people speak who otherwise would not be sure whether this is the conference that they want to choose. At this point, CallbackWomen follows over 1300 conferences just for by about professional programmers. That means that everyone should feel like you have a tremendous amount of choices and conferences should feel like they are competing for speakers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> What are you doing as a conference to be competitive? Is a conference not doing something to show that they&#8217;re really trying to compete for all speakers as many as possible to choose them? Propose to us. Give us the chance to have you. What kind of things can a conference do about that and what are some particularly big turn offs?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Some things that you can do definitely are to have things like say the words literally. Don&#8217;t make the assumption as you&#8217;ve noted, that&#8217;s really important to say things like we want to hear from as many diverse people as we can. We want to hear from women. We want to hear from people of color. We want to hear perspectives from people who have disabilities. Go through our list and make sure it&#8217;s clear that that is not the exclusive end of the list but be really explicit that this is something we not just are okay with but we really actively are hoping to hear from you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Some other things that I think send really strong signals are when they make a point of saying, &#8220;We have gender neutral restrooms.&#8221; Right away, that acknowledging that people exist who are not just going to be having trouble with restrooms but in many cases, I think we have serious problems with conferences continuing to choose locations where it&#8217;s illegal to be a transperson in a restroom. We need to start having conference organizers be far more conscious of the choice that they&#8217;re making.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Even things like location for people who have to make those kinds of choices, you see the location and immediately know, &#8220;I&#8217;m not going to that.&#8221; You see a conference being held in North Carolina or Texas and it&#8217;s immediately off your list. That conference has lost the opportunity to compete for a whole bunch of speakers and that really sucks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Someone invited me to a conference in Russia recently and my talk is about being trans. I&#8217;m like there&#8217;s nothing that anyone could do to convince me. I&#8217;m sure the conference is really great or whatever but there&#8217;s no way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had a conference invitation last year to go to South America. The country that I was requested to visit, I looked on the State Department website because they had tips for LGBTQ travelers abroad and the laundry list of problems that transgender people have in that country, including beatings by police officers, hospitals refusing to treat you, it just went on and on and I was like, &#8220;I&#8217;m sorry. I can&#8217;t go,&#8221; and they said, &#8220;We wanted you to come as an ambassador,&#8221; and I was like, &#8220;I&#8217;m not putting my life on the line for that. I&#8217;m sorry. I can&#8217;t do that.&#8221; Worth noting that under the Trump administration, those LGBTQ traveling abroad pages had been removed from the State Department website.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and unfortunately that there&#8217;s a calculus that a lot of people outside the United States are now having to consider a lot more as we&#8217;ve become much more actively hostile to pretty much anybody.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, this is something that I actually had a lengthy tweet storms/conversation about recently, holding conferences in the US at this point, among a number of other countries like we&#8217;ve just discussed. I think at this point, it&#8217;s really become unethical. If it&#8217;s a regional conference that is about serving and promoting regional developers, that&#8217;s one thing. But if it&#8217;s meant to be an international conference, at this point having it in US, excludes a tremendous cross-section of people who either literally are never going to be able to participate, they can&#8217;t get the visa or at this point, a real threat. Their presence is not something that they&#8217;re willing to or should have to risk-attending here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> North America and primarily by far, America hosts a tremendous number of conferences for professional programmers. Usually, conferences are organizing one or two years ahead as far as reserving a venue. I understand that it&#8217;s going to take some time but I really want to see conference organizers at this point commit to making choices that are inclusive of our entire industry, or at least as much as humanly possible our industry. You can&#8217;t say are trying to be inclusive, while holding it in a place that is absolutely categorically, assuredly not inclusive. Your question, earlier I want to go back &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I don&#8217;t mean to derail the list of things that we can do. I&#8217;m sorry.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, that was definitely not a derail. I really love that you asked that question and we could get on some of that stuff. One of the reasons why I wanted to be here today is because there&#8217;s a lot of conversations, as an industry we&#8217;re not having and a lot of conversations, specifically the conference organizers need to be hearing and speakers need to know, you can ask. You can make these choices. You&#8217;re not alone. It&#8217;s not weird that you have these feels and these are things that you can and should get feedback on and not feel that your opportunities to speak are going to be threatened by it because there are plenty of organizers who do want to hear that feedback and who do want to be responsive to it but they need to hear it. They need to understand it. They&#8217;re not aware. One of the things that we can do in this conversation is how exactly those kinds of conversations aren&#8217;t nearly as visible as they should be. I love that you asked that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Some of the things that kind of give some signaling, offering things like a nursing room and childcare. Even if absolutely no attendees are going to use them, it&#8217;s really strong signaling and oftentimes, what happens is in the first year, no one signs up for childcare and I&#8217;ll explain why in a second. But then in the second or third, because people have learned to trust that that really will happen, that&#8217;s when you start seeing the sign ups.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Meanwhile, what I love seeing and this is one of great things about having so many men at CallbackWomen is seeing how many people of any gender who are parents saying, &#8220;Wow. This is so cool. I got to go to this conference because they&#8217;re offering childcare,&#8221; or because, &#8220;They have child-friendly events that are part of the conference. I can participate with my kid.&#8221; Even if they do see that as something that they can do this year, they can envision that as their future and that&#8217;s something that really makes them feel excited about that particular conference. It&#8217;s something that they&#8217;re going to watch for next year and they&#8217;re going to mention other people, &#8220;Did you know&#8230;&#8221; It seemed that kind of enthusiasm is really neat.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Conferences, be serious about offering these things and don&#8217;t give up in the first year when they&#8217;re not necessarily used because parents, particularly have to make long term plans. You can&#8217;t look at it and say, &#8220;Well, they&#8217;re claiming they&#8217;re going to offer it. They&#8217;ve never done this before. They&#8217;re not even totally sure how they&#8217;re working this out but I&#8217;m willing to gamble on showing up with my kid and everything being fine.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They need to see that this is for real. They need to have time to be able to make plans, for what happens, how do you even bring your kid with you, what&#8217;s going to happen during parts of the conference where there isn&#8217;t childcare and yet you&#8217;re supposed to be, for instance at a party or some sort of networking event or a workshop. That stuff that is far more complicated than just providing childcare but again, it&#8217;s about signaling and being real about your signals, being honest about it and being committed in the long term to what that signal was saying.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It seems like there are some signals that demonstrate that you&#8217;ve put actual effort into it like setting up childcare. That requires work and there are other signals that are just, &#8220;We value diverse people,&#8221; that require no work. It&#8217;s just some words on a page.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. The ones that require no work are always the ones that you have to be a little more wary of. What are they doing about inherent bias? For example, I get much more interested in conferences that do anonymized review because there is such a ton of research in various fields showing over and over again. When reviewing materials, research, proposals, even say performance reviews, when you know the gender of the person being reviewed, there is very strong bias. It&#8217;s usually unconscious bias but it exists and it&#8217;s not just by men. All genders demonstrate gender bias in doing reviews like this.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the things that anonymized review is meant to do is just level that playing field. It doesn&#8217;t favor any gender. It just makes sure that we&#8217;re taking out a certain amount that we know exists and we can try to set aside. Doing things like removing any indications of pronouns, anything else in the bio that might indicate the gender of the person and by the way, this also means, trying to factor out things like making it ambiguous as to say nationality or primary language or race or other things that also very easily biased the selection process. Taking out any indicators there and in the proposal and doing that first round based purely on this idea, regardless of who it would come from, am I just excited about this idea. That kind of thing says that they&#8217;re not just giving lip service but they&#8217;ve actually thought about what it takes to have a diverse end result.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Another thing is outreach and a big one that I see at conferences struggle with or not understand is they&#8217;ll get to the end of the CFP and even to the end of selection and announcements and have absolutely nothing but men. When called out on it, they say, &#8220;No women applied,&#8221; as if that is a reasonable justification for their end result, rather than seeing that as a failure in their process and it is a failure. It&#8217;s a total failure. What did you do about outreach? If you&#8217;re not doing the work to have a diverse pool of proposers, there is absolutely no way you&#8217;re going to end up with a diverse pool of speakers. It&#8217;s impossible. What are you doing? Are you doing that early enough in the CFP process to be able to correct for mistakes? Are you monitoring?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> You’re going to have to ask questions and conferences are so scared of asking on a proposal, simple questions about what&#8217;s your gender. They&#8217;re afraid of asking and it&#8217;s weird because I&#8217;m not sure why. If you can&#8217;t measure your current status and your performance over time, how are you actually able to approve. Every time I see conferences say things like, &#8220;We have twice as many women speaking this year,&#8221; I&#8217;m thinking, &#8220;Are you sure? How do you know that? Have you asked? Do you know what their gender is? Did you know in previous years?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It&#8217;s speculative and it&#8217;s a real problem that they&#8217;re not able to measure, at the time of the process where it&#8217;s most useful and they&#8217;re not able to measure over the long term and be able hold themselves accountable next year to, for instance target like, &#8220;We can&#8217;t close our CFP until we see, for instance at least X percentage of people in the pool who are not men.&#8221; That stuff is incredibly useful and I think bottom line, absolutely minimum necessary in order to achieve anything useful result.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It sounds like some of these things are a longer-term commitments, which I think is a good thing but some of those things when framed that way, can seem kind of like chores. I think what you were saying earlier about parents seeing childcare and being enthusiastic and maybe planning to attend next year, that really made me think about how these aren&#8217;t like check boxes that you have to tick off in order to be a more wholesome person or a conference or something. These are actually competitive advantages. When you do them properly, they can bring you a lot of benefits as a conference.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. Actually, I should revisit the childcare because another way conferences can do this is if they feel like it&#8217;s going to be complicated and obviously, for many speakers, it&#8217;s complicated. Bringing your child along to the conference changes your experience of the conference, for better or for worse and probably indeed both. What are some things that you can do? A conference might do something like providing a stipend for the child to have nanny care at home.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;ve seen two conferences in Colombia: RubyConf Colombia and JSConf Colombia, they cover the expenses of bringing your child and if the child is young enough, the expenses of bringing some other adult and they&#8217;re open ended about that. It&#8217;s not your partner or spouse or the other parent, or something like that, it&#8217;s another person. You can choose who you bring, who can be helping in whatever way you need, dealing with your child so that you can have the full experience in your conference, including your child&#8217;s participation at whatever level that you find appropriate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think the biggest you could do is much like what we talked about with diversity in various level. Say the words and say, &#8220;What can we do to help you? We would love to hear from anyone who has needs that we haven&#8217;t it listed here. We are eager to hear from you and try to work with you to make sure that you can participate fully.&#8221; I have seen a number of people, including Sarah Mei talked about what it&#8217;s like as a new parent to have to ask and be brave about asking, &#8220;Would it be possible to have a place for me to nurse?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It&#8217;s really, really helpful to be able see that. That&#8217;s not going to be a scary conversation. They might have to say no, but at least it will not be a scary conversation and will not, in some way threaten your participation that no one is going to withdraw your invitation for having asked a question that is hard and this is certainly something that inexperienced speakers rightly assume is that if I ask for anything, if I inquire about anything that I don&#8217;t know about, I will look in some way, either ignorant or greedy or prima donna and that will get me into trouble. They don&#8217;t ask for what they need. My experience with conference organizer is overwhelmingly, they really do want to hear. They just didn&#8217;t know that they have to actively solicit that kind of feedback and request that doesn&#8217;t happen easily.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I saw a recent Twitter thread. I can&#8217;t remember who is having a discussion about conferences claiming to be accessible to people with disabilities and making that claim without really understanding what all that entails.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah. I saw that thread too. First of all, every conference should be, as part of the venue selection process, drawing a hard line on, the venue must be accessible. You&#8217;re going to have to make a clear definition about what you mean by accessible but if it&#8217;s not even on your checklist at all, you&#8217;re failing at diversity right there. That has to be part of the decision making process and be ready to say no to a fantastic venue that is going to exclude people with disabilities.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Obviously, there&#8217;s some minimum stuff in the US like ADA compliance. In other countries, you have to find out what minimum standards exist there. But I would like to see more conferences choose venues that are as compact as necessary. Last year, I was really struggling with an injury and I found out it is really hard to walk back and forth in a convention center-sized venue regardless of how accessible it is to someone with wheelchairs. People with, for instance canes or who have various disorders that make it really tiring to be physical. Those kinds of things create a significant burden when you&#8217;re forcing people to walk long distances, especially quickly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you&#8217;ve got five to 10 minutes between sessions and you&#8217;re supposed to walk what is essentially a block in that time, that&#8217;s a heck of a lot of people with disabilities that might not be admissible but who are really constrained in their ability to participate in the conference at all. Some more things that I think are really important for accessibility and much like childcare, turn out to be exciting and useful for a far broader range of people, than is initially assumed: live transcription and also sign language.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> With live transcription, you&#8217;re not just helping people who are for instance, deaf but also people who are hard of hearing. You are helping people in a room that is say, noisy or large where it&#8217;s hard to get the speaker sound all the way to the back of the room or who are in the middle of the room, far away from a speaker or there someone for whom, the conference language is not their first language so they need a little more time to process what&#8217;s being said or someone who is distracted by looking at the slide and didn&#8217;t fully hear what was being said or was tweeting and thus, didn&#8217;t catch the next thing that was said or would like to tweet that last comment and is really glad that it&#8217;s been captured so they can quote it accurately.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There are so many reasons why live transcription is tremendously valuable and then afterwards, you get to just pop that right into the video as captioning. There&#8217;s this long term benefit that doesn&#8217;t just exist at the talk itself. But when you just see these things as accessibility and you think, &#8220;We&#8217;ve never had someone who is deaf asked and it&#8217;s unlikely,&#8221; don&#8217;t reserve that for someone having to ask. It&#8217;s putting a burden on them, especially since these things are not cheap and it&#8217;s missing an opportunity for a whole bunch of people to benefit. I see this over and over again, following the hashtags to so many conferences over and over again, people are saying, &#8220;Wow, this is great.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Now, let&#8217;s talk about the other one, the sign language. That one seems like would be far more specific, unlike say typing, people who can read sign language are a lot smaller subset. Here&#8217;s the neat thing. Watching sign language turns out to be highly entertaining. People end up really loving it. They learn some signs for things that they would never otherwise heard because the interpreters usually have to deal with are highly technical language by getting to see the slides, the script, the transcript or whatever you can provide so they&#8217;re able to prepare in advance for our jargon. It&#8217;s this neat opportunity sometimes to see how our unique jargon is translated into sign language. People get really excited.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s also been some cases were a speaker was speaking so fast that the audience just goes bonkers overseeing the interpreter keep up and it becomes almost like rock stars doing a riff together. It&#8217;s like they&#8217;re jamming so it becomes something that&#8217;s really exciting and dynamic and brings energy into the room. These are things, again where if you&#8217;re only thinking accessibility, you&#8217;re missing out on something that&#8217;s really bringing a spark to the conference and certainly reputation. People are taking notice and they&#8217;re really excited to want to participate next year.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then as a speaker, if I know I get to do the guitar riff on stage, I&#8217;m kind of excited about that and thinking I want to propose next year. Obviously, for some people, it&#8217;s totally scary and that&#8217;s also a great reason to have that public. You want that to be known in advance. Put that on CFP that they will, for instance be an interpreter because you do want to find that up before you walk out on stage. I think accessibility is a really exciting to topic, once we see it as something that is about access for all, rather than access for a handful of people who need to go out of their way to ask for it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can say at RubyConf Australia last year, there was a live transcriptionist and she got a standing ovation at the end of the conference. She was an absolute rock star. It was great. She improved the conference for so many people in a lot of the ways that you mentioned.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Anecdotally, the first conference I ever spoke at was AlterConf and they have live transcription in ASL. It was my first speaking day. I was very excited about it and my dad who was also in tech and really wanted to come and he was not able to come to New York City to see me but he was able to read the live transcription while I was speaking from home so that was really nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s so cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, [inaudible] also had a live feed of their live transcription. It&#8217;s much more uncommon to do this for small live feeds and general are less common and then combining it with a live transcription is even less common. It&#8217;s really exciting to see these highly technical talks scrolling by in real time like that and being able to follow it from remote. These are really neat things to be thinking about and doing. There are services now that are incredibly experienced at doing a live transcription of tech conference specifically and have gotten really, really good at being able to make that work well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Carina, I want to go back to something you said earlier about conferences competing for speakers. It seems to me and this is something Sam pointed out in chat, that the way we think of conferences is that we are competing through a CFP process but you&#8217;re sort of flipping that perspective, instead of conferences should be competing for good speakers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Realistically, it&#8217;s both. They have to compete to even have us propose and then we&#8217;re competing among other proposers. That&#8217;s assuming there&#8217;s a CFP. There&#8217;s also noncompetitive processes where the speakers are selected by invitation or sometimes, it&#8217;s a pay-for-play spot. Sponsors sometimes can buy a speaking spot and they put usually an employee into that. Not every speaking spot or speaking slot is competitive but those that are going usually through the CFP process &#8212; actually, I should have define it a long time ago for those who are new to this. That&#8217;s &#8216;Call For Proposal.&#8217; That&#8217;s literally a conference calling out, &#8220;Please, propose things to us that we can consider and hopefully be able to pick.&#8221; That&#8217;s CFP. We&#8217;ll keep on saying that. So yeah, there&#8217;s two stages but the conference doesn&#8217;t have the opportunity to have a competition among speakers if they haven&#8217;t done the work of competing for speakers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re talking about conferences competing for speakers and I guess the main way they could do that is trying to offer more value to the speakers to go to their conference over another conference. I&#8217;ve been thinking about these different ways of trying to benefit disadvantaged groups and there is a frame that may be useful to think about this that I&#8217;ve been trying to work through where there are certain actions that intentionally favored disadvantaged groups. For example, ASL intentionally favors the deaf and hard of hearing community.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But there are others that don&#8217;t intentionally favor disadvantaged groups but they counteract this systemic equality that&#8217;s caused by discrimination. A good example of that in the broader sense would be universal health care. It&#8217;s intended to help everyone but it disproportionately helps minorities because minorities suffer from structural inequalities where they have lower incomes, less access to capital, and things like that. There are things that conferences can do that are of value to everyone but just proportionally help disadvantaged groups. Does that makes sense?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, although I&#8217;m going to push back on the language of that because when you&#8217;re starting from a point of significant disadvantage, really all these things are not advantaging those people. They&#8217;re trying to level up and at best, that&#8217;s usually what they accomplished. They&#8217;re not benefiting the people who are being targeted typically. I do want to make that clear and I think we&#8217;re probably in agreement on that &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, absolutely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; But it is meaningful language when we think about this. For instance, like anonymized review is being a good example of that. It&#8217;s not advantaging anyone. It&#8217;s making sure that as near as possible that we can get to everyone have the same level of opportunity to compete.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Some of the other things &#8212; I&#8217;m going to really come to money &#8212; we have pay gaps in general. We have pay gaps specific to our industry. We have pay gaps specific to programming side of things and when you look at those, the bottom line is that there are many people who are underrepresented at programming conferences and it&#8217;s for darn good reasons that are purely pragmatically financial.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m kind of alluded to this a little bit earlier. When your company can afford to just cover all your expenses, including getting you work time to prepare your talk and even giving you, for instance fellow employees to provide mentorship, giving you opportunity to practice your talk in front of your team or your peers. All of that stuff tremendously advantages people who have not just benefited from pay gap but are benefiting from their employer&#8217;s resources. Compare that with someone who self-employed, every single hour that they&#8217;re not spending on generating billable hours is out of that loss. They don&#8217;t necessarily have a circle of people to help them polish that talk. If they do, that&#8217;s more time that they have to take away from earning a living. The structural systematic, cultural pay gap is one thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s also just the pay gap between what kind of advantage do you have in your employment environment. We have really clear understanding that in our industry and in general, black women and Latina women are significantly underpaid compared to white men and Asian men. In fact, even significantly compared to Asian women. But talking just about gender here, we&#8217;re looking at as much as half of the income for a Latina versus a white man.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you consider that they have similar expenses, we&#8217;re talking about tens of thousands of dollars per year of disposable income for someone to invest in their speaking career and being able to take unpaid, without any covering of expenses by their employer or by the conference, they&#8217;re able to go and really put themselves out on the international stage and be able to do that incredibly well-prepared because they had purely financial access to do so. It puts people who don&#8217;t have that financial resource because of structural reasons, completely at a disadvantage. You cannot really talk about having a commitment to diversity at the podium without talking about money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I&#8217;ve observed that just in my own career. A lot of the time that I spent getting into public speaking in the first place was when I was working at LivingSocial which had a really good policy about sending you to, at least one conference a year and sending you to more if you were a speaker on a case-by-case basis. I spoke at four or five conferences when I worked there and now that I&#8217;ve moved on to another job that doesn&#8217;t have the same policies, I go to a lot fewer conferences and I don&#8217;t speak at very many of them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If you have two people, one of whom are benefits from this structural inequality, has access to the spending money to go to conferences and one who doesn&#8217;t, financial aid offered by a conference, travel stipend and things like that, would let someone who couldn&#8217;t otherwise go, even though nominally have benefits both of them the same.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. There are a number of conferences that offer financial aid. I think there is some problematic things about that. One problem is that financial aid implies something that is stigmatized, essentially implying poor, need, having to ask. If one has experienced having financially process, for instance in school, it comes with lengthy paperwork requirements that can be not just time consuming but doing documentation and being fairly intrusive. I think when you use that language, even though conferences usually are not doing that kind of stuff, it comes with the baggage of our understanding of that word, that phrase.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I would like to see it, first of all come up with better phrasing and secondly, I think again flip the paradigm, offer up front to everyone that this is what we cover and then &#8212; a few conferences do this &#8212; essentially saying, &#8220;If you don&#8217;t need it, if you would like to decline it, we will use it to invest in other things such as being able to offer more diversity scholarship &#8211;&#8221; I&#8217;m going to use that word just because I don&#8217;t have better language for it either right now, &#8220;Or we&#8217;ll invest it in paying speakers or we will use it to expand how much we can cover for our speakers.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In some way, make it optional to opt out, rather than put pressure on people to do the uncomfortable thing of asking for something that can feel stigmatizing and potentially really hard. Change the way that that&#8217;s offered and if that does mean potentially almost certainly, you&#8217;re going for budget for more because there are people who have held back. But again, if you&#8217;re serious about diversity, these are things that are mandatory. You can&#8217;t decide that it&#8217;s too expensive to pursue diversity.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s funny. This is exactly why I used universal health care as an example because it&#8217;s not aid. It&#8217;s a human right that everyone should have access to. I think that it&#8217;s going to be hard to find language that&#8217;s not stigmatized because the very idea of helping the structurally disadvantaged people is stigmatized in our culture. Whatever language there is around, we have to try really hard to find that neutral or non-stigmatized language.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, right now what conferences do when they offer this is they say, &#8220;We cover travel and lodging.&#8221; You don&#8217;t have to call it scholarship at all. You&#8217;re simply saying, &#8220;This is what we pay for.&#8221; We can have a whole discussion about whether covering travel or lodging is A, quite an accurate description of what gets paid for and B, whether that is truly covering all the speaker&#8217;s expenses. I&#8217;m going to say meekly, &#8220;No,&#8221; but you can describe it in ways that are affirmative, neutral and don&#8217;t put a mental burden on people to feel they&#8217;re asking for something special and burdensome in itself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think we are in strong agreement about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Another thing I&#8217;ve noticed since I&#8217;ve started speaking is that I try to apply for conferences that say they&#8217;re going to cover travel like you just said. Aside from it, not always carrying all the expenses, I&#8217;ve noticed that normally I am booking things and getting reimbursed later. I&#8217;ve noticed that if I were paycheck-to-paycheck and didn&#8217;t have the expendable income to be able to wait for this money to come back to me in a month or two, I wouldn&#8217;t be able to do this. That&#8217;s been something on my mind lately when I&#8217;ve been doing conference.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Access to capital was a huge limiting factor.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I would go back to questions of who has access in the first place and you&#8217;re actually right, that for some people, the salary or their ability to save is really not making that viable to prepay on behalf of the conference. I think of it as also a geographical issue and a class issue. There are plenty of people and plenty of, not just in other countries but within the US who make far less money than they do in major tech centers of the US.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I know people who in Eastern Europe, $10,000 a year is a good salary as a programmer. Pre-paying $1000 to travel to a foreign country is absolutely not viable under any circumstances. Not a matter of being able to save or borrow. If you want someone to come from places that aren&#8217;t wealthy and that aren&#8217;t themselves individually well-paid, regardless of whether their area is wealthy, again diversity is not realistic without dealing with the money barriers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Another one is visas. There are many countries that have essentially reciprocal agreements on visas where you just can show up at the border and if your passport is valid and if they don&#8217;t think you&#8217;re trying to overstay, you&#8217;re just going to be let in. Then there are many countries for whom going to travel is tremendously hard and expensive and you have to spend quality time, documenting through visa application. Every bit of travel you ever done, why, proving that you are legitimately going to be speaking at a conference, have no other purpose and definitely would not be staying and you have plenty of money back home, all of this stuff is even if the person can afford to do that, it goes back to, &#8220;What billable time are they losing on doing that? Is the conference willing to, at least pay for their visa application fees?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I, at one point was concerned about entering a particular country that had been having problems. Yes, Rachel Nabors specifically is the one I was thinking of. I had to really lobby the conference, &#8220;Please have an immigration lawyer available to you that you&#8217;ve already identified. In case I get stopped at the border, I need to know that I&#8217;m not just going to be stuck there.&#8221; It did take some education on their part for them to understand that I&#8217;m not kidding. I can&#8217;t participate without knowing that you&#8217;ve got my back in a real way and it wasn&#8217;t, &#8220;Hey, have a retainer.&#8221; It&#8217;s, &#8220;Have it identified in advance that there&#8217;s someone who has requisite knowledge and you have their phone number and I&#8217;ve got your phone number. I can ping you right away if I&#8217;ve got a problem.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Dealing with all of logistical stuff, these are all expenses for conferences. I get it. It&#8217;s really hard to raise sponsorship money. It&#8217;s complicated. It&#8217;s easy to gloss over these things or not be aware of them and I think particularly, not aware is the big one with dealing with now, which is why it&#8217;s really, really important to have these conversations and for people who are much more visible about the financial barriers that they&#8217;ve experienced or that they know of so we could start really pushing further on the stuff. Really educating and then frankly being more demanding, saying if you want people to come from developing countries, you&#8217;re going to have to really work with them on the visa process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I know a number of conferences that have had speakers turned away at the border because customs just didn&#8217;t believe that that person was there to speak. That&#8217;s really insulting first of all. Also, that&#8217;s a loss of the conference, it&#8217;s a loss of the person and somebody paid a whole lot of money for a ticket that didn&#8217;t get to be used. What are you going to do to prepare in advance for not eating it on the cost of say, that person&#8217;s airfare? You can look at it as it&#8217;s really expensive to have an immigration attorney available or you can look at that as is really cheap to have an immigration attorney available.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Travel insurance, basically?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Actually, that would be really neat if the conference is when they&#8217;re paying for a flight, included paying for travel insurance because stuff happens. Great idea. Travel insurance, usually isn&#8217;t terribly expensive. Now, these are all things where individually do something. As a conference organizer, pick at least one of these things. If it feels overwhelming to do all of them, I understand that so much but this is part of demonstrating our commitment as actually look at some of these things and choose, at least one of them every year to add and make a serious long term commitment too. We&#8217;re not just experimenting with this. We&#8217;re doing this.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re almost at the end of our show but before we go, I wanted to give you another chance to talk about CallbackWomen and what that&#8217;s been like for you. I wanted to ask, have you been able to see any changes from the work that you&#8217;ve done on this?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Like I said, it&#8217;s been four and a half years and that&#8217;s amazing. First of all, that&#8217;s been going on this long. I did not envision that and part of the reason is because there&#8217;s still so much more work to do. CallbackWomen started off as just providing information, &#8220;Here&#8217;s a CFP,&#8221; and quickly expanded beyond that into advocacy and education. A lot of times that&#8217;s meant really having to do the emotional labor of conflict of pushing conference organizers who particularly in the early years, really didn&#8217;t see it and felt offended by being asked who felt very defensive about the idea that they needed to make changes, particularly on issues like Codes of Conduct, on outreach.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I heard so many times the answer to, &#8220;Why are there only men in your roster?&#8221; The answer was, &#8220;Well, there are no women in our niche of the industry. You don&#8217;t understand. It&#8217;s not our fault.&#8221; That kind of blew my mind but it also really spoke to the ignorance and the narrowness of the networks and the part of where CallbackWomen was originating from is the networks that conference organizers were drawing from were really small. It was people that they are, either in it personally or who they had seen as speakers at other conferences so those people were getting recycled over and over and over again because it&#8217;s the low-hanging fruit. Every time that that person is giving another talk, they become essentially more renounced. It becomes even more obvious to choose that same few people over and over and over again. Expanding the network of conference organizers is hugely important in order for things to change.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> CallbackWomen started to be really promoting speakers and their talks and people raving about them and saying, &#8220;This is what I drew from that this. This is how I&#8217;m changing my work because of what that person said.&#8221; That was me, essentially pushing back on that, that it was easier to show that we are in every single niche in the industry, in large numbers with significant expertise that people value when they get to hear it. You don&#8217;t get to have that excuse because it never was a real excuse. It was never valid. The problem was we don&#8217;t exist. It&#8217;s that you didn&#8217;t know. You didn&#8217;t see us. You don&#8217;t know us. If you haven&#8217;t done the work of trying to do harder, do more.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The advocacy stuff and being able to make changes on that has been really exciting. I don&#8217;t usually hear that anymore. Occasionally, I do but it&#8217;s become a lot less common and I think that really has to do with doing that particular work. A lot of conferences for CallbackWomen and it is that opportunity to really push the needle forward.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Travel funding is one that I really do feel CallbackWomen has had a major impact on. That was very rare when I started in 2012. Extraordinarily rare and usually, it would turn out that if you were willing to ask because they were then just going to cover one speaker&#8217;s expenses, they&#8217;d say, &#8220;We probably can find some money for it. Let us get back to you,&#8221; so it became something where again, you have to be in the know. You have to have some sort of inside knowledge that these are okay questions that can be potentially met with a positive answer. Really pushing conferences A, to by default cover travel and lodging and B, to make that public as part of the announcements, as part of the CFP, as making this integral to their process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Codes of Conduct was another one where I push really hard. Ashe Dryden made the Code of Conduct pledge. I&#8217;m trying to remember what year that was. I want to say something like 2015 or 2015 &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was 2014.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. I really piggybacked on that and really use that to push hard on Codes of Conduct and that meant that CallbackWomen had to take the heat of those. A lot times when I did this, I would switch the conversation off to my private or for personal rather account: @CCZona, rather than have it all come through Callback. But it was still regardless of which handle it&#8217;s under, me doing all of that emotional labor and dealing with a lot of confrontational stuff, which needed to be done but that&#8217;s how it gets done. It was me and a number of other people, certainly not me alone but a bunch of us deciding to take that heat in order to push the needle forward. We have seen a great deal of change.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In 2015, the response that we got so commonly was if we adopted a Code of Conduct, it would look like something bad happened and nothing that&#8217;s ever happened at our conference so this would just be essentially tarring us unfairly. We can&#8217;t do this. It&#8217;s unnecessary and it would make us look really bad and that&#8217;s not fair to our attendees. I could spend a whole hour on the reasons why that is not valid but the important thing is that within a year of that Code of Conduct pledge and all those hard conversations we had, the environment changed a lot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Conferences did truly get the message. They saw so many people saying, &#8220;I literally pledge to not participate in any conference that doesn&#8217;t have a Code of Conduct,&#8221; so it became something with fairly wide adoption. We still have some exceptions, which I think is great when they&#8217;re really visible about they&#8217;re exception because identifying themselves as a hostile space so we know not to participate. They have competed and lost. Please feel free to visibly eliminate yourself from competition for great speakers. I&#8217;m very happy with that choice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Free speech, Carina.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But I think that &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Diversity of thought.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; Speak out saying you absolutely will not adopt the Code of Conduct and you find it ridiculous and offensive so that all of us know not waste any time at all in your conference. If that&#8217;s your posture, I&#8217;d rather it wasn&#8217;t your posture but as long as are candid and loud about it, awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have to say that as an attendee and as a speaker, it&#8217;s important to actually read that Code of Conduct because there are some very bad ones now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Heck, yeah. And deliberately so. Some of them were created to evade real responsibility after having called out. They are created for the purpose of being faux Codes of Conduct, for having no actual safety provided and no accountability for trying. I agree with you wholeheartedly on that. The other thing is that is their training. Did they link to a Code of Conduct without really reading it and embracing what that requires of them? Did they provide contact information for an enforcement officer and probably, at least two is really minimum. Ashe Dryden has a great 101/FAQ on the COC so I&#8217;m not going to spend too much time on that. But everyone should be reading that and taking very seriously what to do about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We’ve really changed now to the conversation is what is a good CFP? What is a valid CFP? What is their commitment to the CFP? How do they follow through with enforcement, rather than it being you must adopt one? That’s no longer good enough. I love that we&#8217;ve pushed forward the conversation. Again, that&#8217;s something where the work is clearly not done but we&#8217;ve moved into a next stage and that&#8217;s really exciting. It&#8217;s no longer okay to just be, &#8220;Meh!&#8221; We don&#8217;t want to do that or we have very strong reasons why we consider that absolutely unacceptable to do. Those have become marginal, rather than the rule.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Some other things that I&#8217;m really excited about are and I mentioned this earlier, getting much more conferences to care about having gender neutral restrooms and that was something where CallbackWomen could be a pretty easy influencer. Just by constantly retweeting people and showing pictures of the signs going like, &#8220;Oh, this is so cool. Look! They have gender neutral restrooms here and look at this neat logo for it,&#8221; and there are so many different kinds of variations and just normalizing CallbackWomen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the great things that&#8217;s very, very easy to do is just normalize things that people don&#8217;t believe are normal. Sometimes creating that perception is not normal today but I can sure very easily, make it normal by having a whole bunch of people repeating that same message. You may not be paying close attention and noticing that was just from a handful of conferences at all that buzz was coming, but was legit buzz. People were that excited. Over and over again, you have all these people going to the restroom and taking a picture of the door. It matters. Stuff like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think the live transcription stuff, I think also would have been a niche thing, stayed a niche thing without having something like CallbackWomen constantly promoting it. From that perspective of this, this is really cool rather than this is just something that accommodated me as an individual or the one person there. I think a lot of these things CallbackWomen has just had a real easy opportunity to provide exposure and normalization that&#8217;s helped get people on the same page about these are things that we just do by default rather than things that are something unusual to budget for or aspire to in some future year.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Here’s the thing, when I say that I follow these hashtags to find all of this stuff and promote all the speakers and all the wonderful feedback given to their talks, that takes time. Every once in a while someone will say to me essentially, &#8220;Oh, you just retweet.&#8221; Yeah. There have been days where I&#8217;m retweeting very carefully over 150 things and putting them all in buffer to make sure that you&#8217;re not going to lose with a wall of 150 things at once and that&#8217;s where I picked out reading a thousand or more tweets that day from one or a couple of conferences happening concurrently.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The idea that it&#8217;s just this quick thing you can knock off in a few minutes is really not understanding that 1300 conferences, all being active at once and having so much good stuff happening that we want to be able to share and we want to be able see and want to be able to benefit from, that actually is a significant amount of time. It&#8217;s a significant amount of processing. Some of the things, I&#8217;ll have to go back and forth over tweets about a given talk because there&#8217;s so much good feedback and I don&#8217;t want to be a wall of a feedback about just any given person so I have to figure out what is the best, say seven to eight tweets about this talk that cite the person by name. Please always cite the handle of the person so that we&#8217;re not just giving a vague quote that was good but attributing it to somebody.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I only retweets the ones that are attributing that talk or that thought to a particular person. Picking out those ones that form a narrative logically and can hold up on their own and cite that person&#8217;s expertise. It takes a lot of time and I love doing it. I wish I could do it full time for a living as a paid job and unfortunately, for four and a half years, it has largely been a nearly completely uncompensated job.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Fund Club last year was amazing and took it on very short notice and raised about $9600 which was great for paying my rent for several months. I really appreciate that. But it frustrates me that the industry individuals are benefiting financially from this work being able to get raises, being able to get exciting new jobs, being able to have other opportunities. Companies are benefiting from having their speakers represented and being able to have their message pushed out. Sponsors are benefiting from being able to, essentially put a halo over themselves by affiliating with these conferences. Conferences are getting better speakers and more variety. They&#8217;re having unique talks that if you want to hear this talk, you have to come to our conference. That&#8217;s a reason to buy a ticket to our conference.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s all of the system of people who are benefiting financially from free labor and significant amount of free labor. As much as I&#8217;ve talked about the free labor of speakers and how that&#8217;s completely unreasonable to not be covering their expenses at minimum and hopefully to treat with respect to the work enough to actually even do things like speaker pay, not just covering expenses. I would like to see people look at CallbackWomen too, as a vital necessary community resource that&#8217;s doing something a financial benefit and thus should return some financial investment that&#8217;s sustainable in order to make this work sustainable because there&#8217;s so much more work to do. I want so much to be able to do it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> At this point though, it&#8217;s really hard to be able to keep that up. I really am very torn about that. Every day, I have to do less on CallbackWomen every day. It really eats me up. I&#8217;m troubled by it and it makes me sad. I see more things I want to do not less and yet I have to do the less because I have to set boundaries between my ability to earn an income and my ability to help other people and then come quite frankly. What I really like to say as closing words is consider the value of CallbackWomen, consider the value of other services doing similar things and put your money behind them. Make sure it&#8217;s viable for these things to exist and make the impact that they&#8217;re making.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you have a Patreon for CallbackWomen?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I will by the time this airs. Meanwhile on CallbackWomen.com, there is a donation page. You can use Square or PayPal to provide funding but I think Patreon has the really useful part of ongoing payments. The main reason I haven&#8217;t done Patreon is it&#8217;s essentially more on paid labor. The expectation that you do things like provide newsletters or some other work product, rather than just what CallbackWomen has already done or is continuing to do. It&#8217;s kind of not optimal because it still shifts the burden of being compensated for unpaid labor by doing more unpaid labor. I would like to see that model be re-thought a bit.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Fund Club was just amazing because there&#8217;s absolutely no strings attached to it. I think they had me write up a paragraph or two on what CallbackWomen is but otherwise, it was just them: Ashe Dryden and Shanley Kane, literally ordering their members to pay $100 each right now. You have five days to pay CallbackWomen $100. That is amazing and they do that every month for some other project that is for and about and benefiting marginalized people in tech and gaming. I absolutely love what they&#8217;re doing and you cannot imagine until you&#8217;ve experienced the impact of them just doing what I asked.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Every single donor on the donation page, how do you know about CallbackWomen and how does it impacted you, I think out of the 960 donors, there were two who didn&#8217;t even heard of CallbackWomen. They didn&#8217;t donate because they felt it mattered. They donated because they believe in Fund Club. Those kinds of things, you can do too, even if you don&#8217;t personally benefit from projects like CallbackWomen. Decide that you&#8217;re going to fund them and decide that you&#8217;re going to tell other people. You should too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Actually, we were from clubs on a pick for June so I could definitely see the benefit there. We&#8217;re going to wrap up now and we like to wrap up our episodes with reflections on the conversations we&#8217;ve just had and maybe calls-to-action. Jamey, would you like to share your thoughts?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, this conversation has been really interesting for me, as someone who&#8217;s new to the conference speaking scene. I&#8217;ve been doing conference speaking for about six months and really enjoying it. But I&#8217;m having a lot of trouble with deciding what conference to go to and I think a lot of the things that we&#8217;ve talked about are things that I&#8217;ve been subconsciously thinking about without really always realizing that that&#8217;s what I&#8217;m thinking about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The aspect having travel and such expenses covered, it&#8217;s important to me when I look at conferences but I definitely have this mindset of like, &#8220;I&#8217;m a beginner and I have to establish myself. This conference isn&#8217;t going to pay all my expenses but I really need this experience,&#8221; so being able to be part of the conversation must have like, we deserve to have this and we should be able to be more demanding about what we need, what is really valuable to me. Thank you, everybody especially Carina.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. That&#8217;s exactly the kind of impact that is the point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If I can piggyback on that, that was one of the aspects that I picked up on and has really been catching my attention throughout this whole conversation. That idea of flipping the paradigm, I always love finding those places where I don&#8217;t even realize I&#8217;ve been looking at a thing in a particular way or through a particular lens until somebody comes along and says, &#8220;But what if you look at it from this completely different angle?&#8221; and then everything just falls into place in a new way. I love watching my brain do that. I love the feeling that I get from having that happen. Thank you for being able to frame the competition angle in a completely different way. I really enjoyed that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I really enjoyed that too. One of the takeaways for me in this episode is I&#8217;ve been speaking for about four years and I&#8217;ve given close to 50 talks. I want to think about what influence I have and how I can use that to affect change as someone who&#8217;s woman for speaking. It&#8217;s definitely something I would be thinking about, maybe tweeting about. Thank you for that, Carina.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love that you brought this up because this is something else that CallbackWomen has been able to do and I would love to be able to do more, which is retweet women, making the offer to do mentorship of speakers. There have been a handful of people who&#8217;ve been doing this consistently for years and [inaudible] Ricky Ensley, Susan Axtell, Jen Myers or Jen Meyer, I forget which her last name is but people who have decided to make a long term commitment to helping new speakers get a leg up and it would be really cool to have more people choose to do that, to just say for instance typically something like, &#8220;I have office hours. I&#8217;m willing to give 30 minute slots. Feel free to DM me,&#8221; whatever it is that you want to do and whatever scale, we all have expertise, even I would like to say Jamey, newcomers and especially newcomers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This is something that I&#8217;ve really, approximately annually have done, a speakers panel on video. I always try to make sure to have speakers from a range of experiences, including new speakers who have given one or two talks total because you actually have tons of valuable feedback to give to new speakers and to conference organizers. Your perspective is so valuable and it&#8217;s that phase when you&#8217;re figuring everything out and everything that you have to say, you can say to a brand new speaker because you are closest to the problems and you&#8217;re closest to the questions and you just discovered what is okay and useful and clever and you can share that right away with someone else. They&#8217;re going to have that sense of empathy of like, &#8220;Well, you think you are totally a beginner and unqualified and you&#8217;re doing it and you&#8217;re really need that.&#8221; It&#8217;s not just some senior person saying giving lip service the idea that I could do it too, it&#8217;s someone who genuinely knows that it&#8217;s like me saying, &#8220;You can because I did.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Totally.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So much of this conversation has been meaningful to me but I think the thing that strikes me the most is that it&#8217;s taken CallbackWomen four and a half years but there has been a real change in the conversation, a real change in how conferences go about organizing themselves, inviting speakers. They&#8217;ve changed things in a real material way, not just for conferences but also for the people that go to conferences. If you&#8217;re a person that cares about gender inequality or racial inequality or class inequality and all of these things are deeply connected.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This is the kind of activism that needs your support and there are a lot of ways that you can support it. You can support it by donating your money, your time but I&#8217;m reminded of a quote by Margaret Mead, which is, &#8220;Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it&#8217;s the only thing that ever has.&#8221; CallbackWomen is exactly what she was talking about and they need your support.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Jamey, you also mentioned the difficulty of pre-paying for travel and of course, the obvious solution would seem to be to have conferences pay for the travel expenses up front. I do have some sympathy for conference organizers why this is difficult. I talked to some who have said the reason that they can&#8217;t is because there are people who abuse the system who literally take the money, either been given as a grant to cover expenses or who take the free ticket and don&#8217;t even show up. They don&#8217;t speak. They completely cheated their system and that&#8217;s really shocking to me but I understand why a conference would need to have some safeguards, controls.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It&#8217;s typically why a conference does something like either reimbursing only on-site when you arrive or after the fact. Of course, it will also give them time to raise sufficient money if they have to pay expenses a couple months ahead. That&#8217;s also harder for them but there are genuine reasons for a lot of these problems and I think it would be really helpful for all of us to come together and try to find ways to, at least moderate, minimize, reduce the effect of those kinds of dilemmas.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to thank Carina and all of our co-panelists for this episode. It&#8217;s been really important to me and I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks everyone.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Carina C. Zona: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/https://twitter.com/cczona"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@cczona</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://cczona.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">cczona.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.callbackwomen.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@CallbackWomen</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHPAN418xoGcgu2N51C4tWQ"><span style="font-weight: 400;">YouTube Channel</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Life, The Universe, and Podcasts!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:13</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Carina’s Background and Superpower</span></p>
<p><b>02:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="http://www.callbackwomen.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@CallbackWomen</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and The Naming Struggle to Make Sure Marginalized and Non-Binary People Know They Are Included</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/increasing-diversity-at-your-conference"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ashe Dryden: Increasing Diversity at Your Conference</span></a></p>
<p><b>12:13 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Sending Signals and/or Indicators That Encourage People to Apply to Speak At Your Conference</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">I hate to say this, but conferences need to relocate out of the U.S. My country is making business travel to U.S. untenable for so many ppl. <a href="https://t.co/bMOfbe6VDP">https://t.co/bMOfbe6VDP</a></p>
<p>— Carina C. Zona (@cczona) <a href="https://twitter.com/cczona/status/870868124710584322">June 3, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>23:10 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Conference Outreach</span></p>
<p><b>27:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Accessibility at Conferences</span></p>
<p><b>34:19 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Conferences “Competing” for Speakers</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Call For Proposals (CFP)</span></p>
<p><b>40:26 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Financial Aid, Travel Stipends, and Reimbursement </span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">This is now part of the US non-immigrant visa application. This is obnoxious, absurd and threatens freedom of speech. <a href="https://t.co/lnpLmC5v4I">pic.twitter.com/lnpLmC5v4I</a></p>
<p>— Nima Fatemi (@mrphs) <a href="https://twitter.com/mrphs/status/888817794879553538">July 22, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>49:05 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Making a Difference with @CallbackWomen and Codes of Conduct</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/cocpledge"><span style="font-weight: 400;">#cocpledge</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: c]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Carina C. Zona: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/https://twitter.com/cczona"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@cczona</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://cczona.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">cczona.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.callbackwomen.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@CallbackWomen</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHPAN418xoGcgu2N51C4tWQ"><span style="font-weight: 400;">YouTube Channel</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Life, The Universe, and Podcasts!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:13</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Carina’s Background and Superpower</span></p>
<p><b>02:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="http://www.callbackwomen.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@CallbackWomen</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and The Naming Struggle to Make Sure Marginalized and Non-Binary People Know They Are Included</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.ashedryden.com/blog/increasing-diversity-at-your-conference"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ashe Dryden: Increasing Diversity at Your Conference</span></a></p>
<p><b>12:13 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Sending Signals and/or Indicators That Encourage People to Apply to Speak At Your Conference</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">I hate to say this, but conferences need to relocate out of the U.S. My country is making business travel to U.S. untenable for so many ppl. <a href="https://t.co/bMOfbe6VDP">https://t.co/bMOfbe6VDP</a></p>
<p>— Carina C. Zona (@cczona) <a href="https://twitter.com/cczona/status/870868124710584322">June 3, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>23:10 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Conference Outreach</span></p>
<p><b>27:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Accessibility at Conferences</span></p>
<p><b>34:19 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Conferences “Competing” for Speakers</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Call For Proposals (CFP)</span></p>
<p><b>40:26 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Financial Aid, Travel Stipends, and Reimbursement </span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">This is now part of the US non-immigrant visa application. This is obnoxious, absurd and threatens freedom of speech. <a href="https://t.co/lnpLmC5v4I">pic.twitter.com/lnpLmC5v4I</a></p>
<p>— Nima Fatemi (@mrphs) <a href="https://twitter.com/mrphs/status/888817794879553538">July 22, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>49:05 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Making a Difference with @CallbackWomen and Codes of Conduct</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/cocpledge"><span style="font-weight: 400;">#cocpledge</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: c]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Carina.jpeg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Carina.jpeg"></googleplay:image>
										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/787/042-callbackwomen-and-organizing-conferences-for-diversity-and-inclusion-with-carina-c-zona.mp3" length="34485704" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>01:11:51</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>041: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Mind Manipulation with Casey Watts!</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/041-cognitive-behavioral-therapy-and-mind-manipulation-with-casey-watts/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 02 Aug 2017 05:00:41 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=774</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[In this episode, we talk with Casey Watts about cognitive behavioral therapy and mind manipulation.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[In this episode, we talk with Casey Watts about cognitive behavioral therapy and mind manipulation.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;">This episode is sponsored by <strong><a href="http://upsd.io/2wmwtFp">Upside</a></strong>!</p>
<p><a href="http://upsd.io/2wmwtFp "><img class="wp-image-785 size-large" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png" alt="" width="1000" height="128" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png 1024w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-300x38.png 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-768x98.png 768w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-600x77.png 600w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo.png 1382w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></a></p>
<div class="oridest-header" style="text-align: center;"><strong>Bundle your flights and hotel. <span class="line">Save money. Earn gift cards.</span></strong></div>
<div class="question-oridestdates"></div>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Casey Watts!: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/kyloma"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@kyloma</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://caseywatts.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">caseywatts.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTW1b3aErmPfUWmyj9_bARHW-Cl-7b6q7acmIdWOg5KhGhErYd5NDyZioXFqamTRMMdPlORCD4WOGu9/pub"><b>caseywatts.com/mindmanipulation</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.slideshare.net/CaseyWatts/neurobiologists-guide-to-mind-manipulation-010"><b>A Neurobiologist&#8217;s Guide to Mind Manipulation </b></a><b> [slides]</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “CBT: Chunky Bacon Tacos and Psychological Safety” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:18</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Empathy Development</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><b>03:25 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Training for Customer Support</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-037-failure-mode-with-emily-gorcenski/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greater Than Code Episode 037: Failure Mode with Emily Gorcenski</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtefvXagutM"><span style="font-weight: 400;">A Neurobiologist&#8217;s Guide to Mind Manipulation by Casey Watts @ EmberConf 2017</span></a></p>
<p><b>06:53 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cognitive Behavioral Therapy</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (CBT)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/2017/07/12/emotions-as-state-machines/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke: Emotions as State Machines</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (from the GTC blog!) </span></p>
<p><b>10:48 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Acknowledging Emotion; Rationality </span></p>
<p><b>14:23 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Inner vs Outer Brain </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"></p>
<p style="text-align: right;"><a href="https://giphy.com/gifs/cat-cucumber-e920gt7lI36Ug">via GIPHY</a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374533555/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0374533555&amp;linkId=84cece32e1ce829edf996c30821467bb"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman</span></a></p>
<p><b>16:22 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Empathetic vs Empathic; Empathy vs Sympathy</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxeOo2jWoNM"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Pavneet Singh Saund: Practical Empathy: Unlock the Super Power @ NDC Oslo</span></a></p>
<p><b>21:32 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://www.coursera.org/learn/intellectual-humility-science/lecture/MXL5p/the-earned-dogmatism-effect"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Earned Dogmatism Effect</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> [Video]</span></p>
<p><b>26:10 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Maladaptive Thought Patterns</span></p>
<p><img class="alignnone size-large wp-image-775" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Unhelpful-Thinking-Styles-Copy_Page_1-724x1024.png" alt="" width="724" height="1024" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Unhelpful-Thinking-Styles-Copy_Page_1-724x1024.png 724w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Unhelpful-Thinking-Styles-Copy_Page_1-212x300.png 212w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Unhelpful-Thinking-Styles-Copy_Page_1-768x1087.png 768w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Unhelpful-Thinking-Styles-Copy_Page_1.png 793w" sizes="(max-width: 724px) 100vw, 724px" /></p>
<p><b>31:34 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The “Woop” State and Psychological Safety</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=Amy+Edmondson:+Psychological+Safety&amp;spell=1&amp;sa=X&amp;ved=0ahUKEwizna3E1KfVAhUJVT4KHZc4AqwQvwUIJSgA&amp;biw=780&amp;bih=588&amp;dpr=2"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amy Edmondson: Psychological Safety</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://where.coraline.codes/blog/my-year-at-github/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke: Antisocial Coding: My Year At GitHub</span></a></p>
<p><b>38:09 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Leading with Vulnerability</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Janelle: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Choose your presence.</span></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Feel feelings in the moment, and then act on them.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rationality is a facade and state machines can be edited.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Understanding empathy over only performing empathy.</span></p>
<p><b>Casey: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Making responding with empathy a habit.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to the Episode 41 of &#8216;CBT: Chunky Bacon Tacos and Psychological Safety.&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Singing] Chunky bacon tacos!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am very happy to be here with Sam Livingston-Gray. Thank you, Jessica for the musical interlude.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you that was amazing. I was away from my time zone for three weeks but unless I missed a memo or I suppose a robot uprising, I think we&#8217;re still Greater Than Code. With that out of the way, I&#8217;d like to welcome Janelle Klein to the show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Sam. I&#8217;d like to introduce, Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning. Thank you, Janelle and I have the great honor of introducing our guest today. Casey Watts works for Heroku doing Ember. His superpower is empathy and helping others become more empathetic. Casey never leaves home without bubbles. He has a background in both psychology and software development, making him well-prepared to discuss psychology with developers. He studied neurobiology at Yale University and he co-published a few neurobiology papers. Casey, welcome to Greater Than Code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Casey, it says in your bio that your superpower is empathy. Were you always an empathetic person?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s an awesome first question. No, I was born a robot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Were you an empathetic robot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, I don&#8217;t think it matters.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Then how did you acquire your superpower?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Eventually, I use my robot introspection abilities to realize that other people mattered and that understanding myself and my feelings matter because my subconscious brain has lots of secret messages for me that are really useful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting. How did you figure out that the stuff was useful?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I remember a friend in middle school who helped me learn that having friends was useful and good. He would tell me things all the time like, &#8220;Casey, you can&#8217;t say that to people,&#8221; like I have a mentor of sorts in that way, then I learn.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Casey, you studied neurobiology at Yale. What brought you into neurobiology?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was almost accidental. I went to college expecting into computers or maybe biology or genetics. Those are very interesting but the classes I took, I just took the ones that were taught the best, would learn the most from for proportionally the least amount of work. I didn&#8217;t mind working but I had to optimize the amount that I was going to learn and the psychology classes at Yale was just awesome. All of that [inaudible]. They were some of the most satisfying classes that I took but I love biology too. I took enough biology classes that I can kind of cross it together. But then I found a lab that I could work in for two or three years there, doing really cool research and that was neurobiology. That&#8217;s my major.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Did you write software as part of the research?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Actually, I did work at a lab that did that for one semester earlier at the college but I made no software for my major really. Software was totally like a side project hobby thing. I had a student internship for four years doing software development and computer tech support stuff. That&#8217;s kind of a fork part of my life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Out of curiosity, did the tech support contribute to your empathy development?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Surprisingly, yes. Customer support is really important to work well with people and the things that taught explicitly there just kind of clarified, solidified and crystallized some of the thoughts I had about it anyway.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So the training for customer support, that&#8217;s interesting. Could software developers use some of that training?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s an exact training, absolutely customer support people could use, like role playing on angry customer and then considering all the options you could use. I think software developers could also use it in terms of working with your problems with teammates, maybe a role playing a scenario where you disagree with a teammate because their idea is different from yours and what things you could say. I kind of imagining the different options of the reactions and situations that you have, that&#8217;s really useful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It kind of reminds me the previous podcast that we did on failure modes. It seems like this kind of training for dealing with emotions and different situations, it could be considered prepping for failure mode in interpersonal communication.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That makes a lot of sense because it&#8217;s a lot like with failure in software, we&#8217;ve accepted that a distributed system is going to have failure somewhere all the time. It&#8217;s just a matter of making it not catastrophic and it&#8217;s the same in conversations, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Basically, the idea is that when you&#8217;re designing a system or participating in a system by managing it and extending it, you need to plan for failure modes because failures are inevitable. If that&#8217;s not part of your thinking early on, if it is not part of your planning and design, it&#8217;s going to come back and bite you. That&#8217;s something that&#8217;s really lacking in software architecture but it seems like that it can also be lacking in interpersonal relationships.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting. I, sometimes get overwhelmed in trying to game out things like that where people are involved because what I&#8217;m thinking about a software system, I feel like I can almost predict the states that it&#8217;s going to be in but dealing with other humans, it&#8217;s so complicated that my mind just kind of freaks out and goes, &#8220;Ahh! I can&#8217;t deal with that.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think a lot of disconnect happens when people aren&#8217;t not of the same page and they don&#8217;t realize they&#8217;re on the same page, also.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Like when we use the same word for two different things and we don&#8217;t realize that each of us has a different definition.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, definitely. That&#8217;s a clear one. Even deeper sometimes, people just have different values, different things that they value more than the other person and then if you don&#8217;t get to the root of that, they can argue in circles forever.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Other thing I&#8217;ve seen what happen with circles is when you end up having projections of other people that aren&#8217;t quite accurate and then you&#8217;re reacting to each other based on these projections and models that you have in your head for another person that doesn&#8217;t necessarily match where that person is actually at. I was watching your video on cognitive behavioral therapy and the interrupt patterns in it, just reminded me a lot of research that focus more on neuroplasticity and changing your patterns but something I&#8217;ve noticed a lot in my self is just the mechanics of projection and how we see other people and then incorporate that into our own thoughts and feelings.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If you got a friend close enough or a coworker close enough, you could talk with them deeply about this thing. You can really learn so much about them. I just had &#8212; I don&#8217;t want to say fight &#8212; a disagreement with a friend the other day and as it turned out, she imagined that I was thinking very different thoughts than I actually was and she was thinking very different thoughts than she actually was. When we set out and to talk about it later, we imagined other person&#8217;s mindset. The projection was just completely wrong for both sides.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cognitive behavioral therapy just got mentioned. Can you, maybe give us indoctrination of &#8216;chunky bacon tacos,&#8217; I mean, cognitive behavioral therapy?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cognitive behavioral therapy, I want to introduce it as the correct answer for every psychology test that I took. It&#8217;s like circling &#8216;C&#8217; on a math test. It&#8217;s very likely going to work. Out of these therapies, CBT is a really good one. CBT is a type of therapy you would do with a therapist most often. There are also like, of course 100 types of therapy but you could do just one of them. I think the core of CBT is the most important part and a lot of other therapies have the same core. The core is just introspect, think about your thoughts and emotions naturally, reflect on them, critically think about them and then take the best action after that. Really deep thought is the core of what CBT is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like the part about when you have a feeling, you can consciously decide how to feel about having that feeling, sort of, so it doesn&#8217;t spiral.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Part of CBT distinguishes between automatic and deliberate thoughts and feelings. I think of automatic feelings as kind of inputs to your system but as soon as you can stop yourself and notice, you can&#8217;t decide whether you want to continue feeling that feeling or not, once you&#8217;re in this kind of introspective state.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So your example is like when you step in a puddle and you&#8217;re like, &#8220;Gaah!&#8221; and super frustrated. What&#8217;s your reaction to that with consciousness?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can tell you my inner narrative of what will go through my head. If I step in a puddle, I think terrible thoughts like, &#8220;Today is the worst, everything is terrible, my foot is wet, I hate it.&#8221; A lot of that and there&#8217;s a negative feeling then negative word and thoughts also and I can catch myself and say, &#8220;Casey, is it useful to feel upset about this?&#8221; Probably, it&#8217;s useful to feel the emotion and be with it for a moment so that it doesn&#8217;t fight back harder. But then to continue feeling it and thinking about it and focusing on the negative outcome that I just experienced, it&#8217;s not really useful. I can hopefully catch myself and say, &#8220;Casey Watts, this is not useful [inaudible] this, make a plan and just do it and shut up.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This kind of reminds of I&#8217;m working on a book called &#8216;Compassionate Coder&#8217; and I have a chapter that models emotions as state machines. My thinking there is programmers understand state machines. If we transcend emotions to a state machine model, maybe we can better analyze our feelings. One of the examples that I give in that chapter, &#8216;Hostile is Anger,&#8217; I think a lot of the triggers for anger involves a boundary or a self-image being challenge and that trigger is anger. You have different options in how you want to respond to anger. Probably our automatic reactions to lash out and by lashing out, we internalize our anger and at least to resentment. But if, rather we acknowledge the fact that we have anger, then we can work in a more rational way to restore the boundary or self-image that got challenged. This is going to be a blog post on the Greater Than Code Blog, by the way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The thing that strikes me about state machines is that, as we encounter them in computer science, we tend to see them as these static things. There&#8217;s a path or a graph that you can&#8217;t get out of but it sounds like maybe CBT is a way of editing the state machine, giving yourself another option at a particular point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I love that image but I think those state in which you can modify your thoughts and emotions control them deliberately is just like having a debugger at break point in your mind.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And then your talk, Casey you pointed out that a system has input some processing and some output and a feedback loop because as conscious humans, we can observe the state machine as we move through it and then, we can change it for next time. We can change that process step so that the same splashy puddle produces a feeling of frustration and an attitude that is not grumpy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think one of the important things that you mentioned, Casey kind of in passing that I like to talk about a little more is the fact that the goal is not to become emotionless but rather to acknowledge the emotion and be with the emotion for a while and then handle the processing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, love to the brain is not the conscious brain. Most of it is just subconscious part of emotion and I think my brain is useful. Most all of my brain is pretty useful and I like to respect it too. The emotional parts are there for a good reason. People who had lose the ability to feel emotion by losing a part of the brain with the senses it, are just really crippled. They unable to perform even basic tasks of choosing what food to eat for breakfast. A lot of decision making is rooted in that emotional part of the brain.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That sounds like there&#8217;s some fascinating research behind that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s really interesting. It implies that most of the decisions that we make on daily basis don&#8217;t have a clear rational answer but we need to have some answer anyway so we do that with our feelings.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think that&#8217;s exactly right. The feelings I&#8217;m equating here, I guess to subconscious mental process, the calculus that&#8217;s underlying your brainfolds.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, the people who can&#8217;t feel emotions can&#8217;t do that. Clearly, the emotions are like you said, they&#8217;re input.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think we have software developers that the ideal software developer is emotionless and is a purely rational creature. I think a lot of people aspire to that and that&#8217;s seems so sad and so damaged to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think there&#8217;s something to it though. If you could be a robot that takes into account feelings, you could be a formidable force and be very effective but a lot of people just forget to incorporate emotions into their heuristics that they&#8217;re using.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I use emotions in my programming all the time, though like we talk about code smells. I think a code smell is a taxonomy on top of the gut reaction that we have after working with code for years and years of, &#8220;That doesn&#8217;t seem quite right.&#8221; At least, the way I experience it my first clue that there may be a code smell I need to pay attention to is that feeling of, &#8220;Ugh!&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So emotions are not in opposition to rational thinking. They are crucial input to productive rational thinking.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I like the way you said that a lot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think even more than that rationality is at the side on top of an emotional brain. I don&#8217;t think rationality is at the core of the way that our brains are wired as irrational, emotional systems. We&#8217;ve got a set of rules and metaphors for what is logic, what is rational that sits on top. As soon as people get to energy zero status and their ability to interrupt themselves and think and be aware of their decisions kind of goes away and they&#8217;re stuck in that subconscious emotional processing mode &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is that like being &#8216;hangry&#8217;?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah but you start to see the rational stuff that go out the window because it&#8217;s sitting on top, like the outer brain.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For the record, hangry is a word that comes up in Casey&#8217;s talk and of course, it means angry because you&#8217;re hungry. I learned about this while pregnant.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I first encountered the word when some friends of mine were parenting a kid who&#8217;s a couple years older than ours. I was like, &#8220;Oh, that&#8217;s what&#8217;s coming.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Inner and outer brain has now come up and I know that&#8217;s something that you cover in your talk, Casey. Do you want to introduce that concept?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The inner brain versus the outer brain is really useful. I&#8217;d like to illustrate it with an image of a cat you may have seen. There is a cat eating its food, behind it there is a cucumber sneakily placed by the cat&#8217;s owner. When the cat turns around, the cat jumps because the cat is so afraid of what the thing is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What is up with cats and cucumbers?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t know why they&#8217;re so afraid. I can&#8217;t explain it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My daughter has tried it and our cats are not fooled.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wonder if there&#8217;s a conspiracy in the cats aren&#8217;t afraid of cucumber but some loud sound off screens. The cat has two responses. One is the jump, which it&#8217;s afraid and then afterwards, the cat looks at the cucumber and realizes a cucumber looks like, &#8220;Uhh, this is fine. Seriously, this is fine.&#8221; This illustrates the inner versus outer brain. The inner brain is super quick. It&#8217;s really fast to make a snap judgments like being afraid of potential threats on the ground. Then the outer brain is the thoughtful conscious part that realizes after the fact, &#8220;That is not actually a threat. That is a cucumber.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cucumber, tacos! Is this like System 1 and System 2 in Thinking, Fast and Slow?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, just like that. Exactly. I love that people bring that book up. System 1 and System 2 and that&#8217;s like the feeling part of the brain and the thinking part of the brain. The feeling part has emotions and amorphous things and the thinking part of the brain has more conscious verbal words.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What is it we can do once we have that model?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Your brain has made up of thoughts and feelings and to realize they&#8217;re different parts of the brain is pretty useful. There&#8217;s no direct action here. This is just background how the brain works stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cool and it&#8217;s more useful to recognize that feelings are fast but they&#8217;re not our last reaction. We can jump at the cucumber but later, we can go back and eat it if we were a vegetarian cat.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>True.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Casey, I have a question. I was so fascinated by your talk and your interests and your perspective on life and I was wondering if you could share a little bit about just your story and how you came to be the person that you are today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a story recently about how I have a smoker living near me that smokes a lot and I confronted him empathetically and it turned out great. He&#8217;s sorry. He doesn&#8217;t want to do that to me and now that he knows that&#8217;s uncomfortable. Empathy is powerful and useful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s that word empathetic again. Can you define empathetic versus empathic.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The way that I&#8217;ve always encountered them is that empathic is an ESP psy power, an empath is somebody who magically intuits the feelings of others or gets them across the ether or something. It&#8217;s very sci-fi, right? Whereas, empathetic is I just think of it as somebody who has empathy or who perform empathy. I have no idea if that&#8217;s useful but there we go.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So empathic would be like a literal super power of supernaturally knowing what someone else&#8217;s feeling and empathetic is using our outer brain to figure out what someone else is feeling?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it involves the outer and the inner brain both but it&#8217;s like using the clues from the environment that you can pick up like facial expression, tone of voice, things they said and the background maybe, the history if you know that and how a normal human would feel in that circumstance, using all those inputs to formulate in your mind then imagine feeling of how they feel. Probably, actually feeling it too like mirroring that bad feeling in a part of your brain.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The other day at NDC Oslo, Pavneet gave a really good talk about empathy and he distinguished sympathy from empathy as sympathy is, &#8220;I can tell you how I would feel in your situation,&#8221; and empathy is, &#8220;I see how you feel in that situation.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I like that definition. Similar in what I use. It&#8217;s pretty close. I think in sympathy, you are just thinking about the thoughts of what it would be like but not actually feeling it yourself but then actually feeling empathy is feeling the feel, experiencing yourself really deeply.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting, so in this case, you’re outer brain is influencing your inner brain because you really do feel it by conscious decision.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I suppose you can only really feel it if you felt something similar before and remember that feeling. There&#8217;s even some prep work to make yourself able to empathize.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There was an interesting study that I heard about that dealt with learning empathy. It involved rats. I think the research was done at a university in Japan. There was a box with two compartments that was divided by a partition. On one side of the box, a rat was placed in a pool of water that was not so deep that the rat would drown but the rat had to tread water basically.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> On the other side of the box, another rat was placed on a dry platform and there was a small round door that the dry platform rat could open. Within a few days, the rat placed in the dry platform learned how to help the rats in the wet side of the compartment. If the other side was dry, they weren&#8217;t concerned with opening the door. But the rat perceives the other rat was in distress, it would actually go and open the door and let the rat climb through to the dry side. I think some people feel like empathy is something you either have or you don&#8217;t but I think the lesson with the rats is that empathy can be learned. You can learn to practice empathy or perform empathy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because empathy is an active process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and with regard to what Casey said about having to draw on your own experience, in that study the rats that had previously experienced being on the wet side were faster to react to the distress of the other rat.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s awesome. I&#8217;m so glad to have heard of that study.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So the first step in learning empathy is go feel all the things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly or imagine feeling all the things, at least like you&#8217;re [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or like you brought up in your talk, read fiction.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I love that one. People say fiction is useless. Nuh-uh. No way. Fiction is the place you go to see other people&#8217;s thoughts clearly written out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Please expound on that. How can fiction lead to a greater performance of empathy?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Structure of empathy must hold by helping you imagine what other people are thinking and feeling and it&#8217;s done extremely well in fiction because the main character you&#8217;re trying to think about being, you have to get their head to really experience the book fully. It&#8217;s possibly you could do something similar by talking to friends who are very introspective but with books, there&#8217;s so much [inaudible] for you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It kind of reminded of an observation I made about William Gibson&#8217;s writing. His main characters, you don&#8217;t really see their motivations and I think that he leaves that out deliberately to encourage the reader to place themselves in the role of the character but I wonder if he&#8217;s doing a disservice by not sharing that emotional journey as part of the plot. By the way, I think that&#8217;s why Keanu Reeves is perfect in one of Gibson adoptions because he does not display emotions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Casey, this podcast is aimed at software developers and one of the interesting things that I saw on one of your talk slides was this idea of Earned Dogmatism. I think that it resonated with me because I see this in a lot of senior developers. Can you go into that a little bit?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love to. That&#8217;s one of my favorite psychology phenomenon, probably because the term to describe it is so flowery and interesting. The Earned Dogmatism effect is when you are so experienced in something, you have so much experience that you know the correct answer and you know what the incorrect answers are, very like black and white and this experience is often useful. For example, I&#8217;m dogmatic about basic math. Two plus two is absolutely four. Do not argue with me. I know that it is true but that&#8217;s kind of useful on a low level. But as soon as you get into more complex systems, it&#8217;s not as useful where you think that this implementation of code is better than the alternative because you&#8217;re so experienced. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The problem with the Earned Dogmatism effect is when you&#8217;re in the state, you&#8217;re close-minded to new information, you&#8217;re so sure that you don&#8217;t want to hear about other people&#8217;s perspective because it could be like a waste of time, you&#8217;ve already thought of everything. Of course, people act like this sometimes. Probably you&#8217;ve seen it. Your senior developers you&#8217;re working with just know that they&#8217;re right, they don&#8217;t want to hear about other options but you suspect that your solution that you&#8217;re proposing has some merits and the other one has some demerits that we haven&#8217;t even discussed yet. They are on the table.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For me, the best tincture, the best solution or cure for this situation is to help the dogmatic person realize they&#8217;re missing information because if they&#8217;re missing it, of course they would want to have the full picture hopefully. But it doesn&#8217;t always work. It&#8217;s not a fool-proof thing. You can&#8217;t make anyone be open-minded all of a sudden just by your actions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Something that helps me to avoid that, what I think is an instinctive reaction really is pairing with someone less experienced because they are more apt to ask questions like, &#8220;Coraline, why are you doing it that way?&#8221; Or, &#8220;Why do you see it that way?&#8221; Then having to explain it to them, I get beyond the knee-jerk pattern recognition impulse to solve a problem the way I&#8217;ve always solve the problem and actually consider like, &#8220;Is this the best way to approach solving this problem,&#8221; because if I can&#8217;t explain it, then it&#8217;s probably not a good idea.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like what you&#8217;ve just described, Coraline is a wonderful hack and a wonderful way to get yourself back into beginner&#8217;s mind but you have to place yourself into an appropriate frame of mind to be able to take that feedback. I&#8217;ve worked with a couple of seniors when I was earlier in my career that they were just there to teach me the right way to do things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It goes back to Coraline state machine of at the point where you&#8217;re challenged, when they ask you why did you do that, they&#8217;re challenging your boundaries or if you&#8217;re really dogmatic, yourself image and you can either acknowledge, &#8220;Thank you, and I&#8217;ll try to explain why,&#8221; Or you can lash out and that&#8217;s really destructive because then you&#8217;re teaching that junior dev to shut up and that&#8217;s the last thing you want.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think the other thing it does is it forces us to come up with words for a lot of things that are driven solely by gut instincts, like you get used to making lots of development decisions based on gut feel and doing things because it&#8217;s just the way that makes sense to do it without really spending a whole lot of time thinking about it and processing what&#8217;s going on and having clarity in your own way. Working with more junior folks, I find that it has forced me to clarify a lot of my own ideas and opinions during those challenges.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think I would defend the human brain for a moment. This is a natural brain tendency to take shortcuts, become close-minded and do things very quickly and that&#8217;s awesome. Our brains have to conserve a lot of resources, it helps us do lots in our life like choosing what clothes to wear in the morning. You don&#8217;t need to deliberate on that for hours but it gets in our way a little bit when we&#8217;re doing software development of complex systems and we really should be thinking critically about these things. I think it&#8217;s an appropriate mental response in a lot of situations. I don&#8217;t want to poo-poo on it at all. I don&#8217;t think we&#8217;re done yet but it&#8217;s natural to want to do next.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One factoid that I ran across when I was researching a talk on cognitive bias I gave a couple years ago was that the brain is 2% to 3% of your body mass but it accounts for 20% of your caloric intake, approximately. That&#8217;s just a huge amount of resources to be used by a tiny part of your body so your brain naturally has to be very efficient with the resources that it uses because your body, otherwise literally could not support it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, the biology of neurobiology, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Casey, in your talk, you gave some interesting examples of negative ways to react unhelpful mental processes and you had a cool graphic of that so question one, do you have a link to that little summary because I want to stick it to the wall? And two, can you give us some examples of what not to think about how we feel?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s an awesome graphic that I&#8217;m really into it. It has ten maladaptive cognitions. The most common unhelpful thinking patterns. The link to this is at CaseyWatts.com/mindmnipulation, all lower case, one word, no dashes, nothing. That&#8217;s a Google Doc that I published that has a whole bunch of links to things. One in particular has the word &#8216;Poster.&#8217; If you [inaudible] that page for poster, that&#8217;s the [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Generalizing is a short cut [inaudible] and it&#8217;s useful but it&#8217;s not always the most effective. Sometimes it causes us to have trouble. Another one is magnification. If I stepped in a puddle and I say, &#8220;This is inconvenient,&#8221; I also probably think of myself, &#8220;This sucks. This is the worst. This day is terrible. I hate everything.&#8221; You&#8217;re kind of generalizing and disqualifying the positive things that happened that day and fortune telling the rest that is going to be bad. Probably, you&#8217;re having those kind of thoughts too and those are all examples of maladaptive thought patterns, ways of thinking that aren&#8217;t always bad but are kind of like red flags that you should stop and think about them if you notice you&#8217;re thinking in that way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Probably, any time you&#8217;re angry, a lot of thoughts that are the most satisfying to say are going to be these maladaptive thought patterns. I think that seems to be true and that&#8217;s unfortunate. I don&#8217;t know why that&#8217;s true. That&#8217;s a standing question.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is it related to why we want to swear?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, probably. Part of it is expressing that you&#8217;re upset to other people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So maybe, we should just curse and not think. &#8220;This is all my fault.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, probably externalize it. Let it pass muster. I think cursing is not bad in that kind of situation anyway.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Now, I have an excuse.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cathartic release.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[inaudible] aside, I know there have been studies about cursing in mental health. Does anybody have any memory of what that was about?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It said that cursing is totally good for you. I&#8217;m making that up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Like 87% of statistics which are made up on the spot?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Research is so great at providing a narrative to what I already want to believe.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was just thinking about the other side of empathy as a human. We have thoughts and feelings and we want to be heard. I think it&#8217;s just one of the deepest needs of the human heart so amplifying your feelings and your experience such that someone else can go, &#8220;Wow, I can really see that you&#8217;re having a really awful day and feel really frustrated.&#8221; We want somebody to empathize with us so we can feel connected. I&#8217;m guessing that amplification probably comes from that inner drive to need to be heard.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That sounds true. Bonding with other people is certainly proven to be useful and good for health.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, now I&#8217;m thinking about something I read a little while ago about yawning and how yawning is this deep-seated behavior built way down in the limbic system. I read some theories about how it is used as a signaling behavior to signal to other members of your species that you are changing state, either into or out of wakefulness and they then maybe need to pay attention. It&#8217;s a signal that is wired into us in a very low level. I wonder if the swearing is a higher level manifestation of that same thing, is what you&#8217;re saying.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Now, that sounds great. This is a signal. Swearing is certainly a signal of some kind, either to you or to people around you. Probably to people around you since you&#8217;re saying it out loud usually.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Casey, when we hear someone else, either cursing or doing one of these maladaptive cognition things, such as magnification or filtering out the positive, what can we do when we hear that on our team?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s tricky. You can absolutely do this to yourself but you can&#8217;t just make other people think differently. You can do it ahead of time, maybe by sharing this talk or a book about CBT or the chart with your team and helping them think about it more but it&#8217;s hard to make them do anything. You can&#8217;t really force anyone to do stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>At the same time, though if we translate this back to what we&#8217;re talking about and when the human is expressing is that they&#8217;re frustrated and they have a need to be heard that I think the thing that we can do in response is to hear them. Somebody is essentially calling out from their heart and these feelings that are coming up and they just want somebody to hear them. I would think that helping to give the person what they need makes sense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I totally agree. I think validating their experience is the most powerful thing you can do at that moment probably. If you were to skip straight to, &#8220;Oh, I noticed you were thinking some maladaptive cognitions,&#8221; that&#8217;s kind of invalidating him.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If that were me, I would be thinking, &#8220;That might be maladaptive cognition.&#8221; See, it turns into a nice statement.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It kind of goes to psychological safety thing too we&#8217;re just creating beyond on your team where that&#8217;s okay.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like to think that I really got another saying, &#8220;I&#8217;ve always entering the whoop state.&#8221; I didn&#8217;t define that, yet. Do you want to hear about that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Whoop!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When I&#8217;m getting upset over something in a bad mindset, I often catch it and I think to myself or sometimes out loud if I&#8217;m around the right people, I&#8217;ll go, &#8220;Whoop!&#8221; and that puts me into what I called the whoop state. The whoop state is something where I&#8217;m very introspective and I&#8217;m thinking about all the inputs that are affecting me and my mood and if I&#8217;m hangry or not and what just happened to me and what someone said and my values and principles. I try to think about everything and how would I ideally respond to the situation. I can think about all the thoughts and feeling inputs and I can choose which outputs to do. I&#8217;m pretty good in getting into the state being introspective and I&#8217;m really proud that I can do that. Every time I do it I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Yes, until the end. Pretty awesome, Casey.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The next step is what I&#8217;m proud of is sometimes I say that it is useful to be upset in the situation so I should maintain it and not defuse it. But most of the time, it&#8217;s not really useful being upset over walking out a street and somebody cuts you off like a driver drives by and he&#8217;s mean or terrible. That&#8217;s not really useful to be upset on that person if your upsetness is not having any positive impact on them or the world or anything so that one, I might [inaudible]. But if it&#8217;s a neighbor that&#8217;s always parking at the end of the line and I can barely get in, it might be worth getting upset over that enough to talk to them about it rationally. Choosing your response is really the core of this idea of CBT.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And you want to talk to them about it while you&#8217;re annoyed but before you&#8217;re furious.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah or at least I want to write down why I&#8217;m annoyed so I can read it later to get into that state again maybe. I want to maintain the annoyance such that I actually do take action and talk to them like with the smoker upstairs. I think that&#8217;s a fun anecdote.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I mentioned the smoker earlier. I actually got a note from him yesterday. It&#8217;s taped to my door and says, &#8220;Thank you so much for talking to me like an actual human. That was amazing. Here&#8217;s my phone number. Text me if anything else is terrible,&#8221; and I have to have saga with this upstairs neighborhood. Three months, four months, he&#8217;s always smoking and I always ask him not to and it&#8217;s just awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Does the smoking example is a good example of there&#8217;s a time in between when you have the feeling and when you suppressed it so much that you have a narrative about it about how terrible that person is and then you&#8217;re furious with them. This applies on our teams too, right? On our teams, we want psychological safety. Could you define that first?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Amy Edmonson is a researcher who did a lot of the initial research on psychological safety and her definition is, &#8220;It&#8217;s a shared belief how members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.&#8221; Teams that have this property ended up being way more effective as teams, they&#8217;re able to collaborate better and make more creative output. They&#8217;re just better by many metrics that teams that don&#8217;t have this. In fact when Google was doing research into what makes Google&#8217;s teams the best, it wasn&#8217;t any of a list of 10 or 20 things that they thought it would be. It was psych safety which is number one.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What was that interrelational risk taking?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Interpersonal risk taking.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was close.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, same idea.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Would that be like talking to your neighbor?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. The upstairs neighbor who is smoking, I don&#8217;t know him. I don&#8217;t trust him closely. I&#8217;ve never interacted with him except in this situation so we didn&#8217;t really have a safe environment. I didn&#8217;t feel like I could tell him all of my thoughts and feelings that he would respect them immediately because I don&#8217;t know this person. You should probably expect that most people aren&#8217;t going to care about you very much. They don&#8217;t know you. That&#8217;s a pretty good baseline.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Probably now, I have psych safety with, like he respects and values my thoughts and feelings and experiences and I respected him and his and it only went well probably because I went up to him and tried to make an environment where we&#8217;re safe to talk about what we&#8217;re thinking. I was like, &#8220;I respect you. It&#8217;s fine that you&#8217;re smoking. Some people are probably very stressful and you smoke extra today.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I try to be very empathetic with them and not shame him for smoking and he needed this piece of information from me and I needed him to be in a state where he accepts it. He just needed to know that smoking indoors go through the vent into my room. That&#8217;s a thing I&#8217;m sure he could not know of on his own. This information is only I had and I wanted to convey it in a way that he would accept. I thought really hard about being empathetic and I presented it in just the right way and apparently it worked. All of my friends are saying, Casey, no. Don&#8217;t even. Just tell the manager. You don&#8217;t have to deal with this.&#8221; I&#8217;m like, &#8220;No, I want to treat him like a person.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You mentioned that you didn&#8217;t have safety and then you took the risk any way and now you think you do have safety. This is another one of those spiral things that psychological safety makes it okay to take this risk of sharing information like that, which in turn increases psychological safety.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, definitely. It&#8217;s a feedback loop. Once you have it, you&#8217;re kind of cool. It keeps proliferating itself, hopefully.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Assuming somebody on the team doesn&#8217;t take that as a sign of weakness and lash out at it, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It could happen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s the risk part.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I recently wrote about my experience in working on the community in safety team at GitHub and they got some attention. In thinking about that and framing it in light of our conversation, I think that what I experienced was a false sense of psychological safety. I was hospitalized for depression, and immediately coming out of that was forming a performance plan the worst possible timing. When I tried to share the effects of the trauma from my hospitalization that I was experiencing, I was accused of being manipulative, rather than being with empathy and compassion. Do you think that that false sense of psychological safety is prevalent and that endangers, if one person feels psychologically safe and the environment actually is not psychologically safe?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But say, you felt like it was safe to take the risk of sharing this personal stuff with your team but it was not safe, that was a risk that turned out poorly. I&#8217;m sorry that happened. That was stressful. It&#8217;s more than stressful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How do we identify, whether a situation really is safe or not?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m not sure you can ever know for sure. I think there are some factors that make it more or less likely that it&#8217;s safe. I think smaller groups are more often safe. Groups of which you know people better or trust them more, even on a personal level, that&#8217;s more likely going to be safe. There&#8217;s no guarantee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think as Jessica was just saying, that&#8217;s just the risk and you have to, at some point decide whether it&#8217;s an acceptable level of risk and either do the thing or don&#8217;t do the thing. What I&#8217;m curious about is whether it&#8217;s possible to turn those situations around if there&#8217;s anything we could do other than burn it to the ground and leave, which is of course my first reaction to most things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Janelle, you were saying earlier that you have a strategy of leading with vulnerability.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I guess what I&#8217;ve learned is that people will naturally reciprocate. Casey you were talking about modeling in your video and essentially, what I&#8217;ve learned as I&#8217;ve learned to feel safer and more comfortable in myself is that floodlighting vulnerability generally reciprocates vulnerability. Also, I&#8217;ve learned is assaulting to people that are just can&#8217;t get there. I&#8217;ve had to learn how to tone down my intensity at the same time but it&#8217;s just kind of how I am. I want to sit around and dream and talk about philosophy of life. This is like where I&#8217;m at mentally.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There are some people that are willing to challenge themselves in the way they think about themselves and there&#8217;s other people that&#8217;s like the thought of whooping themselves and living in that awareness. It is just like too much effort.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Janelle, when you are in that situation of leading with vulnerability and it&#8217;s been successful, at least sometimes, what were the power dynamics there. Were you leading from a leadership position?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Generally speaking, yeah. I&#8217;ve been either like a team lead or leading like consulting team and with consulting, it&#8217;s all a matter of leadership because you don&#8217;t have any official control with you. It&#8217;s all influence in the context of my job of figuring out how do I take this corporate monster organism of people that are so very deeply in their dysfunctions and figure out how to make them move together. I learned these set of skills of basically understanding my own energy and how I was able to pull on the emotional energy of others to influence.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;ve got skills in that regard that has become eventually came to like my trauma that I went through is given me a really useful set of skills in regards to self-awareness. Now I can kick ass at work because I&#8217;ve been traumatized. I kind of just come to this place of accepting all my past, put me in a position so that I&#8217;m capable of doing all the things I can do today and that helps me to just be in a place where I can be deeply vulnerable and lead at the same time. I think one thing missing in most of our leadership is that kind of deep, strong empathy, that ability to not need to defend your ego or your sense of feeling that you know all the things, like just being comfortable with being ignorant.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But how do you think the power dynamic influences that because in my particular situation, I was not a person in power so I did not have the authority to set the tone and make this an empathetic interaction. Do you think that being in that leadership position gives you that advantage, that may be other people don&#8217;t really have?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s why I feel a sense of responsibility with that because a lot of people that feel trapped in that way and when I was in the system, I felt trapped like I was ready to explode. Working in the context of organization, I had so many times where I just like rock the boat and almost got myself fired because I cared to damn much and with stupid decisions and things that were just wrong and broken, I get railed against the machine and exploded. But then when I was a consultant, it&#8217;s like you&#8217;re on the outside and then it was about me seeing all that pain in the machine and being able to figure out how to make things move so I could help people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As a leader, there&#8217;s a lot you can do with vulnerability. Casey, do you have any more information for us about how we can encourage psychological safety on our team?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We could break psych safety down into two parts. One part is about the average social sensitivity on your team, which is empathy and that&#8217;s something people can learn, people can train in empathy but it&#8217;s harder and slower to train technical skills for sure. The other one is communication, like how often people share their thoughts and feelings. It&#8217;s pretty good to correlate to how safe they feel.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I used to manage 300 students that work for the IT department of university and when we hired, we decided whether we wanted to hire on two scales: how empathetic they were versus how technical they were. We&#8217;re inclined to hire people who are five out of five technical that literally have done this job before but that was the opposite of what was good. Our favorite employees, the most effective ones, were the ones that had [inaudible] low tech skills but learned the tech. We taught the tech. They can learn it absolutely. We&#8217;re not so worried about it. The high empathy people learn the tech but the high tech people didn&#8217;t learn the empathy on the job. They could have potentially somehow but it wasn&#8217;t a priority of theirs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Did they have earned dogmatism with their extremely high tech skills?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Actually, often they did. Some of them felt superior to the students they were helping, like why don&#8217;t you just [inaudible] already know how to do everything. They were all trying. They want to do their best but it&#8217;s harder for them if they were already empathetic to be empathetic at the instance they were helping.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So that disparity in tech skills actually magnifies the communication problems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is reminding me very strongly of a recent tweet storm that Sarah Mei wrote. She&#8217;s talked about this a couple times on Twitter, I think. She talks about how the rise of code schools is allowing people to change careers into tech from other careers and how that plays out interestingly over the course of five years or so that code schools have been around. She talks about specifically how people who are changing careers have already developed their communication skills in some other arena and they bring those with them when they change into tech so they spend a couple of years learning the tech and they get slowed down a little bit because of that but once they hit mid-career at three to five or so years, they start to pull ahead of people who have started from a computer science background because CS doesn&#8217;t teach empathy or communication skills. They&#8217;re really minimized or neglected entirely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> She’s been observing some interesting patterns in the careers of people who come in with those communication skills and that they&#8217;re starting to outperform those of us with a traditional CS background, which I think is great.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Not only does it not teach empathy. It doesn&#8217;t teach you core value empathy even. I think more important than being empathetic is valuing empathy because at least, when you&#8217;re on a trajectory to get better. I can be immensely patient with people who are learning things but I really not that patient at people who actively don&#8217;t want to learn empathy. I don&#8217;t know what to do with those people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Like you said earlier, Sam to perform empathy, means to care about it. It doesn&#8217;t mean to fake it. It means I am trying to do a better job at this than I have been able to do in the past. Casey, we&#8217;ll link to your video in the show notes. What else will people learn from watching it after listening to this podcast?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m so glad you asked. In the slideshow/video, there are a lot of diagrams that explain the kinds of things we&#8217;re talking about visually. That&#8217;s pretty useful. Also, we didn&#8217;t talk about how to encourage psychological safety in your workplace. I have 10 specific things you can do on your team to make it better. Some of those are from the research and some are from my experience, it kind of mixed both. The video I guess is probably the best way for that. I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s written up fully. There are a lot of links to articles and other videos that go to all of these topics in more depth and of course, you could do your independent research to go even deeper. I&#8217;d love to hear from you what you find.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was having this conversation earlier with Jessica about identity and our presence within our self and I found that there&#8217;s three primary ways of being in the world. If we connect with others and see ourselves through their eyes like we live in a reflection of ourselves and define our identity in terms of how we believe other people see us and then we can live within our body and we can feel ourselves and we can feel our feelings as inputs an do this whole awareness of this translation and feel that process inside of our body, then we can step out of that which I call the choose your presence, where we start looking at life and who we are as a set of first principles, the set of vectors, a direction as opposed to a goal.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> To me, I see bubbles as the vector so I find so much beauty in this idea of bubbles that just really resonates with me. When you&#8217;re describing empathy, this idea that empathy is this value that we need to hold, it seeing empathy needs to be a first principle, this chord of who we are. But it&#8217;s also a centric to that &#8216;choose your presence’. I think the thing with cognitive behavioral therapy is it allows us to shift to that &#8216;choose your presence&#8217; and make a decision to take ownership of our lives. That&#8217;s really powerful. That&#8217;s how you find your way in authentic alignments is making a decision to choose your life. That&#8217;s pretty beautiful to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love the word in volition. I think it sounds really good. It means choosing the actions you do. That&#8217;s like how a will power and executing it. I think that&#8217;s what Janelle just say.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Jessica, do you have a reflection on our conversation today?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things that I wrote down in my notebook about this conversation is the part about when you have that feeling of frustration or anger, it&#8217;s still useful to feel it in the moment so that it doesn&#8217;t hang around and it eat you. But after you feel it, then we decide how to react. That&#8217;s important because Coraline, you said something about how if after anger you lash out, that internalized your anger and for a second, I was like, &#8220;Wait, but didn&#8217;t you just express the anger?&#8221; But I think actually by acting on it, you made it yours. You made it a part of your history and yourself, as opposed to choosing a different reaction.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And you reinforce that path for future use.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We wield anger like a sword.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Our weapons become part of us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It can be really useful when wielded properly or you could hurt yourself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sam, what are you taking away from this conversation?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, there&#8217;s a lot. I feel like I need to go back and listen to this like always. But there were a couple of things that I wrote down. I wrote down that rationality is a facade, which I knew as an idea but I hadn&#8217;t heard it expressed in those four words before and I like those. The other thing I wrote down was this idea that state machines can be edited because I hadn&#8217;t realized that I thought of them as static before, until I actually said that. Looking at those two things: rationality is a facade and state machines can be edited, I&#8217;m really enjoying the apparent contradiction between those two and I&#8217;m going to have to sit with that for a while and enjoy how they are contradictory and yet, not at the same time. Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[inaudible] and I&#8217;m going to think about this a little more. I use to phrase performing empathy and in the chat that we have going on while record the podcast, it was pointed out that maybe that was in the [inaudible]. Empathy is our [inaudible] and didn&#8217;t necessarily sincere. Casey, you talked about the importance of valuing empathy and I think the idea of performing empathy is basically that if empathy doesn&#8217;t yet, come naturally it&#8217;s you. It&#8217;s something you&#8217;re still learning or adapting to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you don&#8217;t initially have the response of understanding and feeling with another person, you can learn that by performing it as an action, making deliberate choice to try to be empathetic even when you don&#8217;t necessarily feel it. I think that&#8217;s probably part of learning and internalizing and strengthening the empathetic reaction to the emotions of others.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Casey, do you have any reflection?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CASEY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve been reflecting this week a lot about this smoker and I&#8217;m so glad I responded empathetically to him because he was responding empathetically back and everything turned out great. But I&#8217;m wondering why don&#8217;t other people do this. I think responding empathetically is just not always a good idea but it takes energy to do, especially if it&#8217;s not your habit. The more of a habit we can make it, the lower energy costs it is for us and I just want to help a lot of people lower that cost and that would be awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sweet. I think you&#8217;ve done that today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This has been a really great conversation as usual and I want to remind people that if you enjoy the conversations that we have on this podcast, you can support our efforts directly by going to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. One of the benefits of becoming a patron is you get access to our patron-only Slack community where you can speak at greater lengths with our guest and our panelist and other members of the community and explore the ideas and share your thoughts and opinions on the ideas that we talked on the podcast. We are very thankful to all re-patrons and your patronage ensures that we can continue having these conversations so thank you all.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Also, you get access to the outtakes that we record while Coraline is in the bathroom.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks for oversharing that, Jessica.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like that should be our unofficial motto. &#8220;Thanks for oversharing, Jessica.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you all and we look forward to talking to you again in a couple of weeks. Bye!</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;">This episode is sponsored by <strong><a href="http://upsd.io/2wmwtFp">Upside</a></strong>!</p>
<p><a href="http://upsd.io/2wmwtFp "><img class="wp-image-785 size-large" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png" alt="" width="1000" height="128" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png 1024w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-300x38.png 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-768x98.png 768w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-600x77.png 600w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo.png 1382w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></a></p>
<div class="oridest-header" style="text-align: center;"><strong>Bundle your flights and hotel. <span class="line">Save money. Earn gift cards.</span></strong></div>
<div class="question-oridestdates"></div>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Casey Watts!: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/kyloma"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@kyloma</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://caseywatts.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">caseywatts.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTW1b3aErmPfUWmyj9_bARHW-Cl-7b6q7acmIdWOg5KhGhErYd5NDyZioXFqamTRMMdPlORCD4WOGu9/pub"><b>caseywatts.com/mindmanipulation</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.slideshare.net/CaseyWatts/neurobiologists-guide-to-mind-manipulation-010"><b>A Neurobiologist&#8217;s Guide to Mind Manipulation </b></a><b> [slides]</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “CBT: Chunky Bacon Tacos and Psychological Safety” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:18</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Empathy Development</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><b>03:25 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Training for Customer Support</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-037-failure-mode-with-emily-gorcenski/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greater Than Code Episode 037: Failure Mode with Emily Gorcenski</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtefvXagutM"><span style="font-weight: 400;">A Neurobiologist&#8217;s Guide to Mind Manipulation by Casey Watts @ EmberConf 2017</span></a></p>
<p><b>06:53 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cognitive Behavioral Therapy</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (CBT)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/2017/07/12/emotions-as-state-machines/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke: Emotions as State Machines</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (from the GTC blog!) </span></p>
<p><b>10:48 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Acknowledging Emotion; Rationality </span></p>
<p><b>14:23 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Inner vs Outer Br]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;">This episode is sponsored by <strong><a href="http://upsd.io/2wmwtFp">Upside</a></strong>!</p>
<p><a href="http://upsd.io/2wmwtFp "><img class="wp-image-785 size-large" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png" alt="" width="1000" height="128" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-1024x131.png 1024w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-300x38.png 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-768x98.png 768w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo-600x77.png 600w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Upside_FullLogo.png 1382w" sizes="(max-width: 1000px) 100vw, 1000px" /></a></p>
<div class="oridest-header" style="text-align: center;"><strong>Bundle your flights and hotel. <span class="line">Save money. Earn gift cards.</span></strong></div>
<div class="question-oridestdates"></div>
<hr />
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Casey Watts!: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/kyloma"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@kyloma</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://caseywatts.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">caseywatts.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTW1b3aErmPfUWmyj9_bARHW-Cl-7b6q7acmIdWOg5KhGhErYd5NDyZioXFqamTRMMdPlORCD4WOGu9/pub"><b>caseywatts.com/mindmanipulation</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.slideshare.net/CaseyWatts/neurobiologists-guide-to-mind-manipulation-010"><b>A Neurobiologist&#8217;s Guide to Mind Manipulation </b></a><b> [slides]</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “CBT: Chunky Bacon Tacos and Psychological Safety” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:18</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Empathy Development</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><b>03:25 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Training for Customer Support</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-037-failure-mode-with-emily-gorcenski/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greater Than Code Episode 037: Failure Mode with Emily Gorcenski</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AtefvXagutM"><span style="font-weight: 400;">A Neurobiologist&#8217;s Guide to Mind Manipulation by Casey Watts @ EmberConf 2017</span></a></p>
<p><b>06:53 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_therapy"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cognitive Behavioral Therapy</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (CBT)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/2017/07/12/emotions-as-state-machines/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke: Emotions as State Machines</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (from the GTC blog!) </span></p>
<p><b>10:48 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Acknowledging Emotion; Rationality </span></p>
<p><b>14:23 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Inner vs Outer Br]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/bubbles2.jpg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/bubbles2.jpg"></googleplay:image>
										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/774/041-cognitive-behavioral-therapy-and-mind-manipulation-with-casey-watts.mp3" length="51364064" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>53:30</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>040: F*ck It And Be Nice</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/040-fck-it-and-be-nice/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 26 Jul 2017 05:00:28 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=764</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[In this episode, we talk about communication on the Internet and especially in social media. Topics covered include dealing with jerks, teaching by example and practicing restraint.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[In this episode, we talk about communication on the Internet and especially in social media. Topics covered include dealing with jerks, teaching by example and practicing restraint.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>* Extra super disclaimer: This episode contains a lot curse words.</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mandy Moore</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jenn Schiffer: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jennschiffer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@jennschiffer</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://jennmoney.biz/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">jennmoney.biz</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://glitch.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Glitch</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Lord: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jllord"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@jllord</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.mongodb.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">MongoDB</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “The Upcoming Release of the iPhone 4!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:36</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jennschiffer/status/859473189902135296"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Tweetstorm that Started it All</span></a></p>
<p><b>04:29 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Our Communication Skills and Curbing the Snobbery</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-020-jenn-schiffer/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greater Than Code Episode Episode 020: Sexuality in Tech with Jenn Schiffer</span></a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">“It’s just not good business to be a jerk.” &#8211; <a href="https://twitter.com/jennschiffer">@jennschiffer</a></p>
<p>— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode/status/886327495800360962">July 15, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-039-the-b-side-of-software-development-with-scott-hanselman/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greater Than Code Episode Episode 039: The B-Side of Software Development with Scott Hanselman</span></a></p>
<p><b>11:33 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Arguing on the Internet</span></p>
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<p><b>16:55 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Dealing with the Jerks </span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">psa: all of your code is ephemeral &amp; will one day not even matter. it probably doesn&#8217;t even matter now. how you treat your peers matters <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/2.3/72x72/1f4ab.png" alt="💫" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></p>
<p>— jennmoneydollars (@jennschiffer) <a href="https://twitter.com/jennschiffer/status/600109116019838976">May 18, 2015</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>36:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Reacting with Meanness and Failed Attempts at Banter </span></p>
<p><b>29:08 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Teaching by Example</span></p>
<p><b>31:52 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Practicing Restraint</span></p>
<p><b>37:45 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Defense Mechanisms; Empathy for Offenders and the Offended</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Jessica L.: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">You are way more evolved and valuable if you can work with humans and write code.</span></p>
<p><b>Jenn: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">We have to actively be learning how to interact with people in the industry and people entering the industry.</span></p>
<p><b>Jamey:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> When you’re mad, approach it offline.</span></p>
<p><b>Jessica K.: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tell people they’re great publicly, not privately! Make it normal to tell each other we’re awesome.</span></p>
<p><b>Mandy:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Just be f*cking nice.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY: </b> Hello, everybody and welcome to &#8216;The Upcoming Release of the iPhone 4!&#8217; My name is Mandy Moore and I am here with our new panelist, Jamey Hampton.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> Hi, I&#8217;m Jamey but when I join this show, I thought I was joining Greater Than Code. Is that wrong?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY: </b> Oh, yeah. It&#8217;s Greater Than Code. I&#8217;m sorry. I did make you that promise. I&#8217;m sorry.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> Okay, I feel better now. I&#8217;m here today also with Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Thank you, Jamie. I&#8217;m really excited that you&#8217;ve joined us as a panelist. I&#8217;m also excited that today, we have two fabulous guests. The first one is Jenn Schiffer. Jenn works at Fog Creek as the Community Engineer on Glitch.com. She&#8217;s also an artist and she&#8217;s extremely strong on the internet. Jenn, welcome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Hi, thanks for having me again. I&#8217;m going to introduce your second guest, a dear friend of mine, who&#8217;s in my apartment but in another room and that&#8217;s Jessica Lord. Jess is a Node.JS engineer, recently joined at MongoDB. She loves scented papers and burning wood that smells nice. She also loves open source and she built a lot of it. Welcome, Jess.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA L: </b> Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Awesome. We invited you both to the show because there was an interesting tweet storm the other day and in this tweet storm, Jenn credited Jess with the statement that the way we communicate on Twitter influences the way new developers communicate. Was that right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Well, actually I was talking at Jess over a [inaudible] and it wasn&#8217;t enough to just talk at her. I figure I tweet at everyone about this topic. I have recently spoken at a conference in Seattle called Deconstruct Conf, which is really cool. It’s like a polyglot conference. I gave a sort of satirical talk on how to be a real web developer &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Only &#8216;sort of satirical&#8217;?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Yeah because all of my satire has a sort of moral to the story thing towards the end of it so I guess it was full of satirical but I went on this rant at the end of it about how we portray ourselves on the internet and how new people are entering the space and learning how to communicate with each other, through how we speak. For example, if you&#8217;re a new developer, you&#8217;ve probably learn online or through your instructors and like, &#8220;Here are the people you need to follow on Twitter,&#8221; so I got a lot of followers who are new to code and they follow me. I can see that they&#8217;re in a boot camp or something or they DM&#8217;ed me questions and stuff like they&#8217;re new so I have to be on my best behavior, I guess that reminds me to do because they are not only learning how to code but they&#8217;re following developers learning how we communicate with each other and how we answer questions. I think that we&#8217;ve been doing a disservice to the community by being jerks on Twitter especially, and this is just something that I was kind of ranting about because I think the parallel of that discussion and I wish the video for this talk was out, it&#8217;s not yet, the parallel was the JavaScript bread making community. There is this weird &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> It&#8217;s a what?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> JavaScript bread making community, not JavaScript bread but there are a lot of JavaScript developers who recently discovered that instead of buying bread, you can also make it at home, given the correct ingredients and ability to follow directions. They&#8217;ve even like making bread and tweeting about it and they&#8217;re all talking about if you don&#8217;t use self-leavening dough, then GTFL. I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Oh, this sounds familiar. This sounds like how we talk about programming. This is all problematic as well.&#8221; Of course, it&#8217;s mostly men who are posting about the bread that they&#8217;re making, which I think is kind of ironic but we have fun. That conversation was about &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Snobbery and bread making. That’s so hipster.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> There&#8217;s going to be snobbery in everything. That’s what I&#8217;ve learned from [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> So how do we change that because we&#8217;re all part of everybody?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> I did this yesterday: someone said something annoying to me at Instagram and I was like, &#8220;Go fuck yourself,&#8221; which I feel was warranted but that was, in retrospect, what they said was but a mild annoyance. They actually reach out to me and apologize and I said, &#8220;Apology accepted. Sorry, I was so cross in return,&#8221; and we had a good conversation about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> That was in private, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> That was private. That conversation wasn&#8217;t public so I&#8217;ll probably tweet later that the person apologized. When I get angry on the internet and I lashed out like that, it&#8217;s in response to somebody being mean to me. If someone&#8217;s tweeting about a product I&#8217;m working on or something like that and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t get it. I don&#8217;t get it.&#8221; I&#8217;m not like, &#8220;What do you mean, you don&#8217;t get it?&#8221; Like I try to empathize at them and learn what they don&#8217;t get.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When I was on the podcast last, my job was a secret. I think we called it my secret lizard job and then a week later, it was announced that I was working at Fog Creek and I work on Glitch so now my job that is partly dev role, I have to learn about our user or our potential users and empathize with the issues that they have that&#8217;s related to the product. I won&#8217;t say put on a better face about those things because I feel like my online presence was already doing that but I think that a lot of people can work on, I guess, improving the rhetoric around speaking. Jess can probably speak to this. She formally working at GitHub about GitHub users and issues and how people speak and reply to projects.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA L: </b> There is a ton of work all of us can do in thinking about our communication skills and how we communicate and understanding who are we communicating with and trying to possibly over-communicate just for the other person&#8217;s benefit. It sounds really lame but I think a lot of this goes back to just the benefit of being nice. We get on Twitter and when we&#8217;re jerks to each other and when we&#8217;re really tribal and defensive about our language or if we use semicolons or not, we are creating these communities that aren&#8217;t welcoming. That does a disservice in whole because everything we do will be better if we have more people and more different perspectives working on it so being jerks, not only this cycle where we teach all the new people to be jerks but we&#8217;re also losing the people who don&#8217;t want to come in to a crappy environment and we need them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Yeah or we need the nice ones to stay and not be driven out because that makes us, in aggregate, jerkier.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> When we&#8217;re talking about like teaching people how to communicate, I think people may get this idea that it&#8217;s cool to be a jerk about this issue, like you mentioned, semicolons or it’s cool to post mean jokes about it and then people will think I&#8217;m funny or whatever. I think that&#8217;s a perception that we give to people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Yeah. I know for sure that the perspective that you want to give that you know something so you either prove that you know it by doing it or you can prove that you know it or some fake idea of knowing it by shitting on everything else around it, just putting on a [inaudible] error about you. We’ve seen this with the early JavaScript framework wars that were going on the rhetoric. It was very toxic. I think that it hampered the community growth and therefore, the framework growth of some of the frameworks. But now, all of those framework organizations seemed to be talking to each other more and collaborating more and ideas of moving, like JavaScript as a language forward.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that everyone&#8217;s getting along better and the rhetoric is getting better but I still hear about people who are like, &#8220;Oh, I don&#8217;t use this because those people are jerks.&#8221; They were online three years ago but it&#8217;s a lot better now but when you are looking at something new and your first impression are the contributors to a project alienating others, being rude to people on Twitter, I feel like a lot of people are left out to want to be involved in that community because why would you want to spend your time outside of work or even in work in a toxic space. To me, I don&#8217;t understand why people would want to do that. I think that the rhetoric is not only better just for new developers but also for yourself, from a PR standpoint, if you&#8217;re working on a product. It’s just not a good business to be a jerk.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> So true. Last week, we had Scott Hanselman on the show and he talked about how it takes a lifetime of being kind on the internet to get a reputation for that and just one mean comment and people can remember it forever. But he has the amazing distinction of being known for a kind comment on Twitter. We talked about that last weekend. There was a civil discussion and people were like, &#8220;Oh, my God. This is the most civil discussion I&#8217;ve ever seen in hundreds of thousands of retweets.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> I know the bar is so low. I&#8217;ve never met Scott but I follow him online and he seems like a really nice, chilled guy. I was going to say about the bar is so low but the more people like him that can have civil discussion with people who are usually not civil, especially with women, the better. We all can be like our male allies. A lot of that is getting involved in discussions that are normally uncomfortable for them and bringing it back down a notch so that everybody can be at the same level and discuss these issues together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It sucks that if I have a discussion with somebody and they&#8217;ll argue with me and a guy comes in and explains to them and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Oh, okay&#8230;&#8221; It sucks that has to happen but at the same time, I appreciate it because I can argue until I&#8217;m blue in the face and it won&#8217;t go anywhere. I just have better things to do with my time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Yeah, true. We have some family members that when I disagree with them, like to my husband, &#8220;Eric you talk to him because you&#8217;re a man and he&#8217;ll listen.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Yeah, you got to choose your battles. In this landscape of tech, there&#8217;s so many battles and [inaudible] shutting going on. Sometimes, I&#8217;ll just say, &#8220;This conversation is unproductive. Let&#8217;s move on,&#8221; and it comes off very terse and bitchy if I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I&#8217;m very busy. We&#8217;ll figured it out.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Yeah, that&#8217;s the least bitchy thing you can say right there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> I think arguing on the internet is really hard because you&#8217;re not seeing the person that you&#8217;re arguing with and I think that tends to dry out into these long things where people get really mean, where maybe they wouldn&#8217;t in real life. I have a really hard time disengaging from that. I&#8217;ve been finding that like I just have to be like, &#8220;Someone said something mean and I just have to let it go. I don&#8217;t have to have the last word because my emotional health is more important than having the last word with some stranger.&#8221; But I still find that really hard to do in practice, even though I know that&#8217;s what I need to do logically. I&#8217;m wondering how you all deal with that and making that decision to be like, &#8220;I&#8217;m not going to spend my time engaging with this.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA L: </b> There&#8217;s so many layers to this. There&#8217;s &#8216;how do people argue on the internet&#8217; but then I think still the root of that initial conversation that Jenn and I were having, was about why the state of affair is that it&#8217;s so cool to talk shit about the tools that you don&#8217;t use and the frameworks that you don&#8217;t use and the languages that you don&#8217;t use, that in of itself, is cool to be that way. We&#8217;re teaching people, not even how to argue, we&#8217;re teaching people to get online and just be jerks about things that are different, which isn&#8217;t that the stupid, fundamental human flaw.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We’re all scared of things that are different. We all want to belong and feel like we&#8217;re the same as the people in our community. Our community is teaching people to fear languages and tools that aren&#8217;t yours and that it&#8217;s cool to mock them. It’s just so exhausting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> When you&#8217;re talking about things that are different and how I scared of them and I think that&#8217;s very true, I got the impression that we&#8217;re talking about languages but I think people that are different is very scary for people. I think there&#8217;s two types of being mean. There’s being mean about code stuff and languages and the things we do for work. Then there&#8217;s also being mean about each other as people and those feel different for me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Oh, yeah because earlier, Jenn was talking about how people being mean about frameworks drove other people out of these frameworks and they still don&#8217;t use them because historically, there was that meanness. As opposed to, if you get mean to someone personally, you can drive them out of the industry or Twitter entirely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Can you drive them out? I feel that because the bar is so low, that a lot of people get to stay in and I think that&#8217;s contributing to this vicious cycle.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Are you talking about driving out the people who are mean or the people who are not mean?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Driving out the people that are mean. You meant driving out the people that are not mean, the innocents. I think that in tech, it&#8217;s cool to be cruel, as opposed to cool to be kind. I see it getting better. Speaking of your earlier question about when do you know to disengage from rudeness, I involve my core group of friends in discussions that I have online. If somebody tweets at me on something I don&#8217;t like or whatever, I have a core group of local pals that I&#8217;ll send them a screenshot and I rant about it in there and keep the rant offline because I don&#8217;t need other people to see that I&#8217;m upset all the time because I don&#8217;t want the perception that people have of me to be, &#8220;Oh, she&#8217;s upset all the time,&#8221; because I think that&#8217;s detrimental to my career.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That might be stifling the problem in tech but that&#8217;s just how I feel that I can better handle my business. I think I&#8217;m also publicly angry at things enough for people to know that I don&#8217;t take much shit from others. But I&#8217;d say something in our group chat and I&#8217;ll see what their reaction is. If they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Whatever. Just move on.&#8221; I trust them to tell me, whether I should escalate or not. I think that&#8217;s very important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Of course, I happen to have a very awesome expansive core group of friends in the same industry but if you&#8217;re the only developer of your friends, it might be hard for them to empathize with us, as a woman, the concept of micro-aggressions that come with existing period, let alone in tech. but just finding a support system where you can be like, &#8220;Look what this jerk posted. Whatever, man.&#8221; I know, that sort of how I go about things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That also applies to conversations outside of tech but I don&#8217;t get nearly as much shit from people outside of the industry as I do inside but that&#8217;s also because most of my life is this industry at the moment.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> If you&#8217;re looking for a community like that, a group of friends who can support you, you might try our Greater Than Code Slack, which if you donate any amount on Patreon, even a dollar once, you get an invitation to a community Slack and people there are really nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> I agree. I&#8217;ve been in the Slack and everyone there is very nice and they ask really good questions so it&#8217;s Jenn-approved.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA L: </b> To the point earlier about if we were referring to driving out jerks or driving out the nice people who see that everyone&#8217;s a jerk, I also think there&#8217;s something to be discussed around the hero worship around individual contributors and thinking that smart people who contribute a lot but are jerks are people we still have to find a way to deal with. I really truly believe that if you&#8217;re not nice to people, then you can&#8217;t be smart and we don&#8217;t need you. Being good to people is smart.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It&#8217;s a different issue than just culturally us teaching people to be jerks about coding but still sort of within that world about what do we do with individuals who are just jerks all the time but we feel that they contribute a lot of code. I feel like, &#8220;So what? If you&#8217;re not nice, then you&#8217;re not smart.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Actually, this is a really great topic, I think to discuss because we&#8217;ve seen a lot in the past, people invited to conferences who are known in the whisper networks to be predatory, homophobic, racist, transphobic and not good people and you hear from some of them like, &#8220;This is about code. It should be about code,&#8221; and everyone is like, &#8220;It&#8217;s about code, not about other feelings. Focus on their work.&#8221; While everyone is forgetting that programming is a human thing, we are solving human problems using code. We’re not solving problems for a sentient robot that has nothing to do with society. We’re solving society&#8217;s problems. Therefore, allowing people who are bad to society to build so-called solutions, to solve those problems, sounds extremely problematic and illogical to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> The code is not central to what we do. It’s a material that we work with in our problem solving. If you were building a skyscraper, would you be like, &#8220;It&#8217;s all about the metal. I don&#8217;t care what the shape of it is. If the metal is pure, that&#8217;s all we care about.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Right and if someone designs a building that looks like it&#8217;s not going to hold enough people, this building isn&#8217;t being built for people. When you have a humane perspective on things and you care about people, you solve a problem that involves all people. Otherwise, we have so many buildings, at least in New York that are old, that are not handicapped-accessible because the people who build those things don&#8217;t think like, &#8220;What about wheelchairs?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In 2017, now we have laws that require people to think about that but it kind of boggles the mind that people have been using wheelchair for a really long time and we&#8217;ve been ignoring them. The same thing is going on the web. There are people who have been hard of sight or blind, hard of hearing or deaf, not able to use keyboards or can only use keyboards. Because many developers are abled and they just don&#8217;t think of those things, we&#8217;ve been building a really shitty world wide web for a large populations of people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Of course, you need to have empathy in order to be a good engineer because what we&#8217;re doing now is not cutting it. When there are people who are like, &#8220;It&#8217;s just about the code,&#8221; and the code is inherently about people, you&#8217;re right. Why are you arguing against me? Stop inviting racist and sexual predators to your conference.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Yeah, conferences are not about code. Conferences are all people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA L: </b> I completely agree. There&#8217;s an old tweet of Jenn&#8217;s where she just said, &#8220;Your code doesn&#8217;t matter,&#8221; and I love when it makes people mad but it&#8217;s absolutely true. Your code doesn&#8217;t matter. I can get real worked up on this but we&#8217;ve been able to do all what we&#8217;ve been able to do because unlike many other species, we can communicate with each other. I believe that all that we can accomplish comes down to how well we can communicate with each other so your code doesn&#8217;t matter.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you can communicate, if you can be nice, that&#8217;s what matters and that&#8217;s what&#8217;s going to enable us to have nicer and better things. It&#8217;s easy to not let racists and sexual predators into your conference and it&#8217;s easy to not let jerks be a part of your project because the better your spaces are, the better your communities are, the better people you&#8217;re going to get in them and the better contributions you&#8217;re going to get in the long run.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Let&#8217;s face it. Somebody else can write that code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> Yeah, I think it&#8217;s a total fallacy to be like, &#8220;This person contributes a lot so we can&#8217;t lose them. We need them,&#8221; because if someone is contributing a lot but their meanness or their bigotry is keeping 10 other people away, then those 10 people would be contributing more than that one person is anyway.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> This contrasts productivity and generativity. Generativity, I define as the difference between the team&#8217;s output with you and the team&#8217;s output without you. There are plenty of people who are personally incredibly productive and yet, their contribution to the team or the community is a net negative.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> That&#8217;s a really interesting way to think about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Jenn, I want to get back to your original story about somebody said something mean and you reacted with meanness. You reacted with, &#8220;Fuck off, dude.&#8221; That wound up being constructive because in this case, clearly it wasn&#8217;t like a serial offender. It was someone who actually did give a shit.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Yeah. He messaged me and he was, &#8220;I&#8217;m a fan of your work. I&#8217;m sorry. I was annoying.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> But it&#8217;s also productive in some ways at a community level because when we see people reacting to meanness with rejection, then we understand that meanness is rejected. This is the tolerance as a peace treaty thing. Part of enforcing tolerance is being intolerant of intolerance.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> True. He made a comment that said, &#8220;Don&#8217;t mean to mansplain but,&#8221; then he continued to mansplaining and that was the &#8216;go fuck yourself&#8217; response because it was like, you knew what you were doing and you did it and then you ended it with a smiley face emoji which drives me fucking bananas. Whatever a guy replies to something in a snarky or annoying way and ends it with the winky face emoji, I&#8217;m like, &#8220;You know what you&#8217;re doing.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> That&#8217;s like, &#8220;But I can get away with it because I&#8217;m a white dude face.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Right. On what planet do you think I find that charming? I think a lot of that has to do it, again the perception that people have of me and all of us online. I feel like a lot of the guys knew how my close friends and I, who we&#8217;re all in the same community and they want to be in that community, how we banter with each other. They’ll see it like my best friend, Brian. I messed with Brian once when I walk into a room. He’s like, &#8220;Here comes this bitch,&#8221; and it&#8217;s a joke. This is just how we talk but then it&#8217;s my meet up. One of the attendees was like, &#8220;Hey, come over.&#8221; I guess he brought some friends and he want to introduce me and he&#8217;s like, &#8220;Look at this bitch,&#8221; and I was like, &#8220;Excuse me? You don&#8217;t get to say that to me,&#8221; and he apologize but I was like, &#8220;Do you understand that if you heard that from a close friend of mine, you don&#8217;t address me that way because we have different relationships.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I was kind of worried because it was my own meet up and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;That&#8217;s not okay,&#8221; and teaching him that that&#8217;s not okay. But also understanding that this is because of how he saw me and my close friends interacting with each other so you thought it was okay. I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I&#8217;m not going to tell you to go fuck yourself because it&#8217;s my own meet up and also, I could understand why you think that&#8217;s okay but also I&#8217;m going to tell you that it&#8217;s not okay because you should know that our relationship is not the same.&#8221; It is the slippery slope that as a community organizer and a public person, I have to deal with.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Exactly. It&#8217;s a slippery slope, which we can react to proportionately, which is also part of the peace treaty is proportionate response and you responded in a way that&#8217;s corrected the misconception of what was appropriate but you didn&#8217;t tell him to go fuck himself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> &#8212; Because how do we draw that line sometimes between failed attempts at banter and actual meanness? I feel sometimes, it&#8217;s obviously one or the other and sometimes, it&#8217;s hard to tell.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Also, the venue of that interaction provides an important distinction. This was at my meet up, which I consider work. It’s part of my work so I know I have to react a certain way and act a certain way and I have a responsibility. The guy I responded, &#8220;Go fuck yourself,&#8221; to who&#8217;s mansplaining was in my Instagram comments. Instagram is what I call my chill space. [inaudible] and I post my art and he was responding to how I made my art. That’s a different venue. It’s not work related and that key word, &#8220;Don&#8217;t mean to mansplaining but&#8230;&#8221; that is why I acted that way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s hard for even me, as I&#8217;m still learning to rein it in before I make a gut reaction, especially in [inaudible] space. It wasn&#8217;t a proud moment but in my brain, I understand why I made it. Would I do it again? Maybe on Instagram because now people seen it and then it&#8217;s like, &#8220;Why are you saying that to me. You know what I&#8217;m going to say.&#8221; Again, probably one of the hardest parts of being a visible woman in the industry is learning how to interact socially with people who don&#8217;t know how to socially interact with people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Because there&#8217;s another consideration there like you talked about the venue and yeah, who&#8217;s watching? When your friend, Brian was like, &#8220;Here comes this bitch,&#8221; that had an effect on the people watching and not everyone might know that he is a really close friend of yours and they&#8217;ll get confuse and then they get the wrong signals and then you get to correct them. But correcting them is also providing information to everyone else present.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Yeah. I think the ideal situation for &#8216;this bitch&#8217; introduction would be if this guy had saw that and he went up to Brian and said, &#8220;Hey, you don&#8217;t talk to women that way,&#8221; and then Brian would say, &#8220;You&#8217;re correct. Jenn and I are best friends and this is how we interact,&#8221; and I wouldn&#8217;t be like, &#8220;Yeah, it&#8217;s fine but you are correct. That is typically how you should have.&#8221; That would have been the ideal adult utopian conversation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Yes, which gets to the things that everyone can do, that every white man can do to make this community more welcoming to everyone else. When you see that comment, when you see, &#8220;Don&#8217;t want to mansplaining but&#8230;&#8221; just say that&#8217;s not cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Yeah. I agree.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> And say it publicly so that people can see that does get projected in small ways, proportionate to how dumb it was.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> We&#8217;ve talked a lot about teaching by example in a negative way, like teaching people to be mean but I think that we&#8217;re also teaching by example in a positive way all the time, whenever we&#8217;re acting cool and reasonable. Personally, I know when I first started getting involved with tech at Twitter and following people, I was like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t want to shit post anymore because if I&#8217;m just silly and I post silly nonsense and now, I have followers and they&#8217;re going to judge me for it or whatever,&#8221; and then I saw lots of people I respected posting silly nonsense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I follow Jenn and follow and Aaron Patterson &#8212; @tenderlove &#8212; and he just shit posts all the time and everyone thinks it&#8217;s funny and it made me, not in a mean way but just in a really silly way and it made me like, &#8220;I can still post silly things and still be a professional,&#8221; and that was a huge epiphany for me in a way. I really appreciated other people on Twitter doing that kind of thing. I think it&#8217;s important to look at the ways we&#8217;re teaching people that they can be casual and be themselves and be funny and be nice too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Do post about your bread making but don&#8217;t just other people&#8217;s bread making.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Yeah or just make bread and not post about it. It’s bread. I&#8217;m trying to keep Twitter funny and you all are posting loaves and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Urgh!&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Well, put a bread on a cat.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Yeah. Keep it interesting in that way. Put the cat in the bread like one of those spinach dip, bread bowls but for kittens.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> I disagree. I want to see everybody&#8217;s bread. I think that&#8217;s &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> &#8212; is not a thing anymore. I&#8217;m so sad.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Okay, I&#8217;ll allow bread then. As order of Twitter, the website, you all can post bread but be nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> In my job, we post a lot of pizza because one of my coworkers, literally wrote a book about how to make pizza dough and there&#8217;s a lot of trading of pictures of pizza happening on my Twitter. It’s really a lot better than people yelling at each other so I recommend it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Pizza was just more interesting bread, honestly. I was telling Jess earlier that all food is a vessel for sauce so when I see people eating foods that don&#8217;t have sauce on it, I&#8217;m like, &#8220;What are you doing?&#8221; But I don&#8217;t say that because I don&#8217;t want to shit on how people live their lives but in my head I&#8217;m like, &#8220;You&#8217;re doing it wrong.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> More butter.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> It&#8217;s called self-restraint. Some people went for pizza but pizza is the ultimate vessel for sauce.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> It&#8217;s interesting to hear you talk about the different ways that you practice self-restraint because that&#8217;s not the first word that comes to mind for you, based on your satire and your Twitter.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> I always have a lot of things going on in my brain that need to get out and be expressed in some way but I also do have a huge filter. People think I don&#8217;t have one but I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Oh, no&#8230;&#8221; There&#8217;s a lot of things in my head that you will never hear or see because I know that it&#8217;s not appropriate in a current context or it&#8217;s just super extra and I&#8217;m going to rein it in. I do try to not talk shit about people unless they&#8217;re themselves are more toxic than the shitting about them. I also try not to complain about other products that people are working on. I try to reach out privately if I have an issue with something, unless it&#8217;s Verizon or Chase or like flying. But even that, I try to tone down the complaining because those are just default things to complain about. Internet, phone and flights, we get it. It all sucks so why noise up? Twitter was with that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m working on a product now, Glitch and we had relaunched right after the podcast I was last on with you all. You know, there are some people who&#8217;ve written blogs about it and we&#8217;re getting really great feedback. But then there was some that just say, &#8220;I don&#8217;t get it. Why do this? Blah-blah-blah.&#8221; I&#8217;m like, &#8220;It sounds like this could be a private conversation that we can have,&#8221; Or, &#8220;We could have a public conversation.&#8221; But I found that when people complain about things and who they&#8217;re complaining about reaches out and says, &#8220;I would love to get feedback,&#8221; it reminds that person that&#8217;s a human up there talking shit about and they&#8217;ll either ignore it or back pedal.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I love watching people back pedal. I love that moment where they&#8217;re just like, &#8220;Oh, no. I don&#8217;t mean it that way,&#8221; and it&#8217;s just like a satisfied moment where they&#8217;re realizing that somebody is a human being. This happened with me in Gamergate. They are investigating me for a very weird reason and I found out what was going on and I reached out to them on Twitter and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;If you have questions, ask me.&#8221; I&#8217;m trying to approach them like a human so that they would see me as a human and stop trying to find out where I live and it actually worked, which was very strange.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That experience made me learn that I should approach other things in that way because, I guess first priority is my safety. Second is my cats. If everybody can work that way, I feel like the world would be a much better place and we&#8217;ve got a lot of better code, honestly. We wouldn&#8217;t have to wait five years for the iPhone 4 to have a period tracker or something like that. There&#8217;s a lot more empathy for everybody that&#8217;s using the stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> We talked about earlier, reaching out as a human to a human, that&#8217;s an awesome thing to do but if you don&#8217;t get a &#8216;to a human&#8217; response, fuck that person and you are not obligated to continue being nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Yeah. That’s how I try to approach people. A lot of people say like, &#8220;You&#8217;re nicer in person that you are on the internet,&#8221; and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I&#8217;m a very nice person but if you do say something that rubs me the wrong way, I will tell you very abruptly and upfront, I don&#8217;t like how you said that.&#8221; A lot of people, especially men are not used to being told immediately and straightforwardly that they did something wrong and that&#8217;s why their perception of people like me is, &#8220;Oh, she&#8217;s not nice.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you say, &#8220;I don&#8217;t mean to mansplain but why don&#8217;t you just do it this way,&#8221; and I say, &#8220;Go fuck yourself,&#8221; I&#8217;ve seen it as mean but that me saying, &#8220;Go fuck yourself,&#8221; my overpower [inaudible] person&#8217;s offense. It’s more about me being angry and explosive than that person knowing that they&#8217;re going to mansplain and then doing it and just being able to live their life, while I&#8217;m angry on Instagram on the 4th of July.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> But I think that being straightforward and telling people when they do something on immediately is really a kindness to them. If you&#8217;re a good person, you should know when you&#8217;re coming off as a jerk right away so you can stop doing it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> I think that being straightforward and communicative is ideal. As someone who&#8217;s known for being straightforward and very communicative, it definitely screwed me up sometimes in job situations and relationships and stuff like that because people are just not used to it. It’s a cultural thing, I think because I have friends who are so used to that who grew up in a similar way that I have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I can&#8217;t teach everybody in the world how to communicate better or know so I try but that&#8217;s just something that I can deal. That’s why I say that I sort of grow in this industry learning how to interact with people that don&#8217;t know how to interact with people. I&#8217;m not dumbing down or sort of decreasing my social skills in order to be at the level of some people. I&#8217;m trying to teach them but it is very exhausting. It does lead to the consequence of some people thinking that I am very hard to work with and deal with but I&#8217;ll accept that because you can&#8217;t please everybody.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> Can I ask a weird question?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> Because it would be like weird and silly question time. What’s the most bizarre mean thing someone ever said to you on Twitter?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> The most bizarre mean thing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> Not the meanest thing but the weirdest mean thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> I posted a selfie as I wanted to do and some guy responded to something and I forget what the conversation was but it ended up him saying, &#8220;Your eyes are awful like you are also awful.&#8221; I actually have it on my website, JennMoney.biz, in my bio. I have it opened now and I said, &#8220;My visual art has been described as &#8216;neon abstract pixel erotica&#8217; and my tech satire has been described as &#8216;your eyes are awful, like you are also awful.'&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I get what he was trying to say that my eyes are asymmetrical with my eyelids and he said something like, &#8220;I look like I have crazy eyes and you must have seen some shit.&#8221; I don&#8217;t know what I responded to but it wasn&#8217;t mean and he just said, &#8220;Your eyes are awful, like you are also awful.&#8221; It was very poetic and I loved it. It was heartless to me at that point. I think that he was just uses it as a defense mechanism and just turn it into a joke.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> I think putting it in your bio is a pretty good shield.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Yeah. I also know that my eyes aren&#8217;t awful and I&#8217;m not awful. I mean my eyesight is awful but I don&#8217;t think he was talking about my eyesight.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> Maybe he was secretly your optometrist.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Getting a postcard in the mail and like, &#8220;It&#8217;s been a while. Your eyes are awful. You are also awful.&#8221; [inaudible] Dr Wong in the next two weeks through your checkup. Shouts out to my optometrist, Dr Wong.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> And Jenn you had a point there about how you can take it as hilarious because you do know you&#8217;re not awful and that&#8217;s another thing that we can do for each other in our community is to remind each other that we&#8217;re not awful because once in a while, it gets hard to remember.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Yeah and there are times that we do feel we&#8217;re awful. I have times where I feel like, maybe I am awful. If I heard that at that time, it probably we would have had a greater impact, which is why we all can do a lot better with the words that we use because you&#8217;ll never know what situation someone is going to end up in or someone is going through when they&#8217;re being mean online. Empathy is required for both the offenders and the offended, I believe.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Yeah, because usually, whenever somebody says something negative to me, I try to remember that that is coming out of their context and their day and whatever the heck ran over their foot this morning, it&#8217;s usually much more about them than me. When somebody says something positive, I&#8217;m like, &#8220;That&#8217;s on me.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Oh, yeah for sure. No one stop telling me how awesome you think I am. I mean, don&#8217;t stop.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA L: </b> Whenever I see people just generically shit posting JavaScript, I know it&#8217;s because they really are insecure and I don&#8217;t get as mad as I could get. Maybe that&#8217;s bad to say. That’s the point I got to because I haven&#8217;t been in tech for a long time. I switched career in 2012, I started working fulltime in 2013 but I knew JavaScript and worked at a giant Ruby shop and people were always talking smack again. JavaScript, it&#8217;s just like, it was so cool to just talk about how bad JavaScript was. After years of that, I just really came to realize people were just insecure. Not that it&#8217;s an excuse and that&#8217;s the whole point of this talk. It shouldn&#8217;t be cool to shit talk other things but now, I just feel like I see [inaudible] through it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> I really like it and it&#8217;s true because Ruby takes a lot of shit from people who believe in static typing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> This was in real life. This wasn&#8217;t on Twitter but someone was like, &#8220;Oh, what do you do?&#8221; and I was like, &#8220;I&#8217;m in tech.&#8221; Then, &#8220;What language do you have?&#8221; I said, &#8220;Ruby,&#8221; and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Oh, so you&#8217;re not a real programmer, then.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Oh, my God and I&#8217;m sorry. Writing Ruby is way harder than writing some other languages.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> And I was just like, &#8220;What?&#8221; And he was like, &#8220;It&#8217;s not a scripting language.&#8221; This is like a Twitter interaction happening to my face. It was so disconcerting to me that someone would say that right to my face.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> It&#8217;s like that display of judgment is a display of ignorance because if we really understood the purpose and context of something, then we wouldn&#8217;t see it so shallowly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA L: </b> If that person probably heard somebody else, insecurely joke that Ruby wasn&#8217;t a real programming language so it&#8217;s learned behavior that is just getting perpetuated.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> And I think the more absurd someone says something to me, it&#8217;s the less likely it is to upset me. If someone comes on and says, &#8220;I think you&#8217;re a freak,&#8221; I get all mad. I&#8217;m not but if someone comes on and says, &#8220;You&#8217;re not a real programmer because you write Ruby.&#8221; I can just be like, &#8220;You don&#8217;t know anything about me, obviously.&#8221; I feel like it&#8217;s easier to be like, I don&#8217;t need this person&#8217;s approval because I don&#8217;t care about them when they&#8217;re being absurd like that. Do you experience the same thing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Yeah. It’s the awful eyes thing. I mean really, what do you know about Jenn&#8217;s eyes? Unless you are her optometrist, in which case it might actually hurt.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> My eyes are in excellent health. My prescription hasn&#8217;t changed in three years. I go regularly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> One tradition that we have here at Greater Than code is reflections wherein everybody in the call name something that they found particularly interesting or that they&#8217;re going to think about more or maybe a call-to-action for them. Who wants to reflect?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA L: </b> I&#8217;ll reflect.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Reflect.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA L: </b> It&#8217;s really this reiterating this thing that keep pinging in my head about our hero worship of individual contributor and thinking their value is in the code and I just want to reiterate that it&#8217;s the only one thing you can do with code and you&#8217;re not very valuable, that you are way more evolve and valuable if you can work with humans and write code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> I guess my reflection is along those lines that we all, even myself have to not only accept that the industry means that we have to actively be learning languages, language features and frameworks and stuff like that. You have to be actively learning how to interact with people in the industry and people potentially entering the industry. It&#8217;s intense and there&#8217;s a lot to do which gives warranty to how we make so much money in doing it because it&#8217;s a very multifaceted industry and very public-facing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We also have to recognize that there are people who are not visible online and who are engineers but there are like finance companies or something like that and they might not have the support system or the close friends in the industry that we have and I have to continually remember those people when I am, either writing talks or talking to people on Twitter and knowing that they&#8217;re watching and learning how to interact with people through me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I forgot who said, &#8220;I never asked to be a role model.&#8221; I think it might have been Rihanna at some point. But in this industry, being a woman, you&#8217;re seen as a role model by default and also seen as the representation of all women, that’s something we can try to combat but it&#8217;s a thing that exists. Constantly thinking about that as well. It’s a lot of things to think about all at once. I think that&#8217;s why we burn out so easily.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> I want to reflect about something a little bit smaller that got mentioned briefly, which was Jenn mentioned how she would message her friends about people who were mean to her on the internet. I think this idea of being upset offline, instead of online has something to me because if you&#8217;re upset offline, not only are you not putting your upset-ness and your negative feelings out into the void always for everyone to see forever because nothing ever gets deleted off the internet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But also I feel having an offline in-person support network. I think it&#8217;s healthier in many ways to deal with that kind of stuff emotionally offline and in-person. I think there&#8217;s a lot of benefits to that and I&#8217;m going to try to remember that next time I get upset about something on the internet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Nice. That relates to my reflection. Coraline is not here today on the panel because this morning, she posted her story about her year working at GitHub and how that ended &#8212; tl;dr &#8212; they talk a lot of values but did not exhibit them and Coraline was like, &#8220;I have to take a day off to just deal with the blowback because I know I&#8217;m going to get a lot of blowback from that post.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This is the kind of industry we live in, where she tells her story. She’s going to take some shit for it but there&#8217;s going to be plenty of us who say, &#8220;Coraline, you were great. Thank you for posting this. I think you were right,&#8221; and the converse of Jamey&#8217;s excellent point about when you&#8217;re mad approach it offline, I have the instinct to tell Coraline privately that I think she&#8217;s great, I agree with her post. I should tell her that publicly. Something we can all do is when you want to tell somebody, &#8220;They&#8217;re awesome,&#8221; and your instinct is to tell them that privately, posted on Twitter. Make it normal for us to tell each other that we&#8217;re awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The same with responding to meanness with proportionate response, when somebody posts something that&#8217;s not cool, be like, &#8220;Dude, that&#8217;s not cool,&#8221; in public so that other people realize that it&#8217;s okay to police meanness so that we can all be nicer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> I think you&#8217;re all really awesome and cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Yay!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> You are all awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> You are cool too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA L: </b> You are also awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY: </b> I just think, everyone should just be fucking nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Right. That&#8217;s a great reflection. Jess, Jenn, thank you so much for coming on the show today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA L: </b> Yeah, thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN: </b> Yeah, thank you for inviting us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAMEY: </b> It&#8217;s really awesome getting to chat with you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA K: </b> Hooray for Greater Than Code #40!</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>* Extra super disclaimer: This episode contains a lot curse words.</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mandy Moore</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jenn Schiffer: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jennschiffer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@jennschiffer</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://jennmoney.biz/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">jennmoney.biz</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://glitch.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Glitch</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Lord: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jllord"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@jllord</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.mongodb.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">MongoDB</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “The Upcoming Release of the iPhone 4!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:36</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jennschiffer/status/859473189902135296"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Tweetstorm that Started it All</span></a></p>
<p><b>04:29 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Our Communication Skills and Curbing the Snobbery</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-020-jenn-schiffer/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greater Than Code Episode Episode 020: Sexuality in Tech with Jenn Schiffer</span></a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">“It’s just not good business to be a jerk.” &#8211; <a href="https://twitter.com/jennschiffer">@jennschiffer</a></p>
<p>— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode/status/886327495800360962">July 15, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-039-the-b-side-of-software-development-with-scott-hanselman/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greater Than Code Episode Episode 039: The B-Side of Software Development with Scott Hanselman</span></a></p>
<p><b>11:33 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Arguing on the Internet</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p><b>16:55 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Dealing with the Jerks </span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">psa: all of your code is ephemeral &amp; will one day not even matter. it probably doesn&#8217;t even matter now. how you treat your peers matters <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/2.3/72x72/1f4ab.png" alt="💫" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></p>
<p>— jennmoneydollars (@jennschiffer) <a href="https://twitter.com/jennschiffer/status/600109116019838976">May 18, 2015</a></p></blockquote>
<p><s]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>* Extra super disclaimer: This episode contains a lot curse words.</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jameybash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jamey Hampton</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mandy Moore</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jenn Schiffer: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jennschiffer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@jennschiffer</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://jennmoney.biz/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">jennmoney.biz</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://glitch.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Glitch</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Lord: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jllord"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@jllord</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.mongodb.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">MongoDB</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “The Upcoming Release of the iPhone 4!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:36</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jennschiffer/status/859473189902135296"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Tweetstorm that Started it All</span></a></p>
<p><b>04:29 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Our Communication Skills and Curbing the Snobbery</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-020-jenn-schiffer/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greater Than Code Episode Episode 020: Sexuality in Tech with Jenn Schiffer</span></a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">“It’s just not good business to be a jerk.” &#8211; <a href="https://twitter.com/jennschiffer">@jennschiffer</a></p>
<p>— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode/status/886327495800360962">July 15, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-039-the-b-side-of-software-development-with-scott-hanselman/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greater Than Code Episode Episode 039: The B-Side of Software Development with Scott Hanselman</span></a></p>
<p><b>11:33 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Arguing on the Internet</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p><b>16:55 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Dealing with the Jerks </span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">psa: all of your code is ephemeral &amp; will one day not even matter. it probably doesn&#8217;t even matter now. how you treat your peers matters <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/2.3/72x72/1f4ab.png" alt="💫" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></p>
<p>— jennmoneydollars (@jennschiffer) <a href="https://twitter.com/jennschiffer/status/600109116019838976">May 18, 2015</a></p></blockquote>
<p><s]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/jj-e1501032790274.jpeg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/jj-e1501032790274.jpeg"></googleplay:image>
										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/764/040-fck-it-and-be-nice.mp3" length="48229775" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>yes</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>Yes</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>50:14</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>Episode 039: The B-Side of Software Development with Scott Hanselman</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-039-the-b-side-of-software-development-with-scott-hanselman/</link>
					<pubDate>Tue, 11 Jul 2017 05:00:13 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=696</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[We talk to Scott Hanselman, about struggling and prevailing, instilling systems thinking values on children, and being a teacher.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[We talk to Scott Hanselman, about struggling and prevailing, instilling systems thinking values on children, and being a teacher.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scott Hanselman: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/shanselman"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@shanselman</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.hanselman.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">hanselman.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “</span><a href="https://hanselminutes.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hanselminutes</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>00:57</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story and Superpowers; Struggling and Prevailing</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The struggle is part of the journey.”</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> &#8211; Scott Hanselman</span></p>
<p><b>13:51 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Systems Thinking, Problem Solving, and Instilling Those Values on Kids</span></p>
<p><b>19:11 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– There is Value in Suffering</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812979680/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0812979680&amp;linkId=84982318e94004fe908eedbc62099b87"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb</span></a></p>
<p><b>21:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being a Teacher Over a Programmer; Ideas of Mediocrity, 10x Engineering, and Comparison to Others</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://werise.tech/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">We RISE Women in Tech Conference</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://blog.jessitron.com/2017/06/the-most-productive-circumstances-for.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr: Hyperproductive development</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://medium.com/@amandapalmer/oh-lorde-deliver-me-from-fucking-joan-17ed0a1d83e8"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amanda Palmer: oh Lorde, deliver me from Fucking Joan.</span></a></p>
<p><b>36:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Nice Online</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/RoadmanAkhi/status/877658122957008896"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scott&#8217;s &#8220;Nice&#8221; Twitter Exchange</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (1)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/RoadmanAkhi/status/877950677896617984"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scott&#8217;s &#8220;Nice&#8221; Twitter Exchange</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (2)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/RoadmanAkhi/status/878244303021015040"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scott&#8217;s &#8220;Nice&#8221; Twitter Exchange</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (3) </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/877950217550577664"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scott&#8217;s &#8220;Nice&#8221; Twitter Exchange</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (4)</span></p>
<p><b>42:29 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Teaching (Cont’d)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/NexTech-Africa/2017/Brk21"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scott Hanselman: The Social Developer @ NexTech Africa 2017</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.awesomelyluvvie.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Awesomely Luvvie</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Scott: </b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812979680/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0812979680&amp;linkId=84982318e94004fe908eedbc62099b87"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb</span></a></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">This show’s Slack community! </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Looking for others to show you the way rather than assuming you know the way.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Welcome, everybody to our today in Hanselminutes. I&#8217;m here with my great friend, Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Astrid. I know this looks a lot like Hanselminutes because we have Scott Hanselman on the show but in fact, this show is called Greater Than Code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m glad that somebody remembered that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Today, we have Scott Hanselman and Scott Hanselman is a podcaster extraordinaire. He has recorded over 500 podcasts and he actually shows up to his own show every week.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, 585 shows every Thursday for&#8230; I don&#8217;t know, 12 years.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Twelve years. That&#8217;s amazing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s a marathon.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Scott, would you like to start the show with origin stories? Can you start with the very, very beginning of how you got started and work all the way up to what you&#8217;re doing now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, wow. That&#8217;s a long time. You got 40 years?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, you can just like focus on your superpower.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. What&#8217;s your superpower and how did you acquire it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that I finally figured out after all these years that I am probably a teacher and not a software engineer. I was getting into trouble when I was 10 or 11, doing things I wasn&#8217;t supposed to be doing. There was a meeting at the school &#8212; back in the day, do you remember when teachers had time to do meetings like that &#8212; about what are we going to do with this child and they said that they would loan me the computer. It was &#8216;the&#8217; computer because we didn&#8217;t have one per room or one per kid. There was just one computer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> On Friday nights, my dad would take his pickup truck and he would back it up to the building and we would steal the computer. It was one of those wink-wink, nudge-nudge things because if they did it for me, they have to do it for everybody. Then as long as I had the computer back by Sunday at 5PM, then it would be cool and we could have it set up for school on Monday. That kept me off the street away from the bad kids I wasn&#8217;t supposed to be hanging out with because we had a gang problem in my neighborhood and I was making fake IDs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And that was before you had a 3D printer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was voted most likely to be convicted of a white collar crime. I would have been a gangster but I wouldn&#8217;t have been the gangster’s accountant.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The point is that if a teacher hadn&#8217;t decided to loan me this Apple II, I would have been like the parrot from Aladdin. I would have actually been Jafar but I would have definitely been Gilbert Gottfried. Then after a couple of months of that, it was clear that I had some ability with computers. Then one day, I got home and my dad&#8217;s van was gone. I was walking up an empty driveway and I was like, &#8220;Oh, crap. What&#8217;s going on?&#8221; They had sold the van and bought a Commodore 64.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then it became a problem of not getting me outside like I wouldn&#8217;t leave the house. They had to build in a ratio for a house where for every one hour inside, I had to be outside for an hour, then I would be on the computer for an hour and then they would push me out the door and I have to sit on the porch in the sunshine for an hour until they would let me in again.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow. Where that first early obsession with computers come from?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t know because there&#8217;s no background. No one in my family had done any college education. My mom was a zookeeper. My dad was a fireman who drove an oil truck so there was no STEM background or science. My brother is a fireman. My grandmother was a nurse. There is no context for it so I think I just came out this way. I don&#8217;t know why. I will say to my dad took stuff apart. One of our family hobbies was going to the dump. I don&#8217;t know, I was taught this was a thing people did, apparently it&#8217;s not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But now, it&#8217;s good though, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I don&#8217;t go now because I don&#8217;t want to get dirty but going to the dump was a weekend thing. People dump stuff there and like, &#8220;Why would you not?&#8221; I remember one of my best memories of my dad, like a classic my dad thing is we went to the dump and somebody like three cars down was throwing out a barbecue. My dad was like, &#8220;Stop! What are you doing? That’s a perfectly good barbecue,&#8221; and then he has to convince the people at the dump to let him take it out because it&#8217;s supposed to be a one-way thing. You&#8217;re not supposed to take stuff out of the dump.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> He took that barbecue off that guy&#8217;s truck and took it home and then sandblasted it and painted it and we ate on it that night. That frugalness, I think it&#8217;s a very Scottish thing. Our family is a Scottish. Last name, Hanselman is German name but we&#8217;re all Cormac&#8217;s and Lawson&#8217;s from Carnoustie, Scotland. Our family gatherings are bagpipes and kilts and it&#8217;s very Scottish. The Scottish people are notoriously cheap. Amongst my uncles, there&#8217;s this, &#8220;You&#8217;ll never catch a cold from a Scot because a Scotsman doesn&#8217;t gives anything away.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We were cheap, cheap, cheap people. Now, it&#8217;s Goodwill for me but junkyard trips and being generally frugal, which is cool because my wife is super cheap.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;re compatible that way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Everything she has is Goodwill and what&#8217;s cool is that she wears really bright colors and she can find those outfits that no one else could pull off and she gets them all at Goodwill. She&#8217;s like, &#8220;I just got all these compliments at work and this outfit cost me $6.&#8221; That&#8217;s us. Our first conversation always starts with like, &#8220;How much that cost?&#8221; This was only $5 and let me tell you why because it&#8217;s the hunt as much as it is the capturing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Fast forward, I became a software engineer because I couldn&#8217;t handle it. I couldn&#8217;t hack it at college. After a bunch of college visits, I ended up going to Portland Community College and it took me 11 years to graduate. I graduated in 2003 but I started in 1992.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What did you study at community college?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was the first year that Portland Community College had software engineering and they were juxtaposing it and they made a big deal out of it. This is a big deal because there was a feud between the computer science department and the software engineering department, because each one thought that they were the one true religion and the juxtaposition that they made was that software engineering is the practice of making software, which they didn&#8217;t believe was being taught in schools, while computer science was teaching everybody Compiler Theory and a bunch of stuff that ultimately didn&#8217;t help them ship.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It makes sense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was the first year of the software engineering group.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And also in the next 10 years.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And then I did two years and was working at night. My first job was doing Visual Basic. I was making $10 an hour. I remember the negotiation process as I made $12. I was sitting in a Subway sandwich shop and I was like, &#8220;I&#8217;m doing really good work and I learned how to call C Code from Visual Basic and you should pay me two more dollars an hour.&#8221; I can remember that negotiation process. Then, I started to feel bad that I had never done my four-year degree. My wife has several degrees. She&#8217;s got three or four degrees.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m looking up at the wall here because there are all my wife&#8217;s degrees. She&#8217;s got a master&#8217;s degree and she went back to school and became a nurse. I just wanted to get another degree &#8212; not another degree &#8212; I want to get &#8216;a&#8217; degree. I want to finish a four-year degree. I want to finish. I want to be done. She supported me by letting me go to school at night and I did that for six or seven years until I got a call that my credit was expiring because after seven years, your 101 classes and all that stuff, that falls off the other end because you&#8217;re going to have to finish your four-year degree in seven years.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I made a deal with the dean that if I taught classes at the college, they would waive that. I was teaching C# and testing while I was simultaneously taking classes and then finally, I finished in 2003. I&#8217;ve been doing software for 25 years but I only got my degree a little bit ago.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So you were both teaching and taking classes in addition to working?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. It was basically like 8AM to 10PM every night for six years or seven years. But you got to that. You&#8217;ve got to. The struggle is part of the journey.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s true.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m not trying to disrespect other people&#8217;s journeys but I&#8217;m happy with my journey because that means the catering jobs and the short order cook jobs and those things matter. I, sometimes get a little frustrated when I see other people&#8217;s journeys where it&#8217;s like their feet never touch the ground and they went straight from their parent’s minivan to Stanford to a job. I&#8217;m like, &#8220;That&#8217;s fine.&#8221; That&#8217;s their journey.&#8221; They didn&#8217;t control their journey necessarily but at the same time, there&#8217;s character in sifting through a dump. One of my jobs was making salsa in a 50-gallon garbage can. I had to put on these big rubber things and clean and mix the salsa. When you have jalapenos juice squirting in your eyes and you&#8217;ve got rubber gloves on and you&#8217;re trying not to get your hair on the salsa, that&#8217;s &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right there. Again, no disrespect if whoever&#8217;s listening, your feet never touch the ground, that&#8217;s fine but at the same time, I don&#8217;t want my kids to float right into &#8216;$100,000 a year job.&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think you&#8217;re making a really good point, Scott about some people. They have a much more smooth transition but some people have to struggle and really, really pushed for some of the thing and that becomes a part of who you are and it becomes a part of why you do what you do. That story doesn&#8217;t always get told.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right and I find also that in this time where we want to be more inclusive and get more people into technology, it is sometimes problematic but also sometimes useful when a cisgender straight white guys says, &#8220;I had struggled too.&#8221; The trick is not to make it about comparisons and not to try to make it about the oppression Olympics because one shouldn&#8217;t use their come up as a justification to be mean to somebody or as a way to juxtapose, &#8220;What do you think you had? Difficulties as a black woman? Let me tell you about the time I&#8230;&#8221; It&#8217;s not the oppression Olympics.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This was my story. This is my struggle but while there were financial issues, one of the things that&#8217;s worth pointing out about the degree thing is that no one really needed me to get the four-year degree. People always say, &#8220;Why do you need to do it?&#8221; You were already 10 years into the industry. It was for me. I have women and people of color on my team who are still getting questioned about their degree and where they went to school even though there are years in. You her what I&#8217;m saying?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So you had that option?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had an option. I would argue that I did not need to go back and finish the degree because no one has ever asked me about my degree in the last 20 years of the 25 I&#8217;ve been doing software. I know that there are people who are getting asked about their degree even now. I think that&#8217;s why for some people, getting a degree at a Northwestern or at a fancy school matters more. I don&#8217;t think I would even need to put my degree on my resume now that I have so many years in the biz. That I think is a privilege that I have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As a teacher, it makes a difference that you have a journey that wasn&#8217;t smooth, that has some jaggedness in it that other people can relate to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things I try to explain to my kids who are black &#8212; they are mixed but they&#8217;re young black men &#8212; is that they are going to have different struggles than I did. They won&#8217;t have the financial struggles. I like to say to my sons that their crown was paid for and they just need to put it on, to give them a sense of what has been done for them versus what hasn&#8217;t. There&#8217;s a lot of reminders of what you have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We went to dinner yesterday and they were complaining about the food. My wife and I, still have &#8212; and we&#8217;re married for 20 years &#8212; issues about food security. When we&#8217;re sitting around, we&#8217;re thinking about our blessings. You have those moments. Those quiet, calm moments where you&#8217;re just like, &#8220;Oh, man. We&#8217;re just really lucky. There&#8217;s food in the house.&#8221; I was reminiscing with someone when I was in Atlanta a couple days ago and we&#8217;re talking about like who had the most [inaudible] dinners. We used to have eggs and oranges.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> &#8220;What do we have in dinner?&#8221; Well, I got some eggs and we had some oranges. Maybe we have some bread. Twenty-five, 30 years, 40 years later, we still think about those things. When you say that to people they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Oh, you&#8217;re just being falsely humble. You&#8217;re just being silly.&#8221; No, that will mess you up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That stuff is part of you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Then, when the nine-year old is like, &#8220;Oh, Indian food again?&#8221; You are welcome, sir!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> &#8220;I don&#8217;t want to eat this.&#8221; Well, then you don&#8217;t have to eat. You&#8217;re old enough to go to bed without a meal.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> &#8220;Well, you can&#8217;t send me to bed without a meal.&#8221; I didn&#8217;t say that. Food is here. You choose not to eat it. Step off.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> &#8220;I want to go home and I&#8217;m going to eat something.&#8221; No, you eat this or you go to sleep. You have to have an appreciation of like, &#8220;Wow, do you think these chickens slaughter themselves? That this spices were shipped here?&#8221; And this is where comes into systems thinking, &#8220;Think about the systems that were in place from the people who made the stove, to the people who killed the chicken, to the people who brought this spices from India to make this meal that you&#8217;re complaining about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Does that help?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It does. It actually is two-fold. One it makes them realize that food doesn&#8217;t make itself. That&#8217;s why we have a garden. We go to my brother&#8217;s farm so that they understand that nothing is simply granted to you. Someone is digging that potato up. While you complain about the fries, let&#8217;s think about the person who doesn&#8217;t have health insurance because they&#8217;re digging potatoes. Then it helps them think about systems thinking, which I think is more important than coding, which a little bit of an orthogonal conversation but an interesting one, to debug a system. One needs to realize that there is in fact a system.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Toaster doesn&#8217;t work. The entitled child is like, &#8220;Toaster is broken. Blech! Let’s buy a new toaster.&#8221; The systems thinking child is going to think about, &#8220;Is it electricity? Is it the knob? Is it the outlet? Is it the fuse? Is it the ground fault interrupters?&#8221; Think about all the systems that are there to make the toaster turn on and that turns into these really interesting science conversations that will go on for an hour in our house because the toaster didn&#8217;t work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My reaction would be, &#8220;I could use the oven or the stove,&#8221; and that&#8217;s also systems thinking because if the electricity is out, then the oven is not an option.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I heard what you&#8217;re saying. I think we agree though, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Also, I think systems thinking is both the biggest thing that we&#8217;re coming to in code and that helps us more than anything with creating software systems. It&#8217;s also a fascinating thing that&#8217;s coming out of code because we finally have the opportunity to really study systems because we can change them so fast. My secret hope &#8212; well, it&#8217;s not very secret &#8212; is the software industry can change the world by teaching all of us more about systems thinking.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that those are very reasonable thing to hope for. I think that we need to catch the kids before they&#8217;re 10 because after having now raised two kids up to 11, I realized that a 10-year head start is an eternity. You can&#8217;t snatch a 20-year old out of school in a trade and make them the same developer. You could make them developers, put them in a bootcamp but they will be different people with different paths. It&#8217;s hard to teach systems thinking if one has spent 20 years of their life, not thinking about systems. Bootcamps will teach you &#8216;for&#8217; loops and syntax but you&#8217;ll always be a little bit behind, unless it&#8217;s naturally coming to you. My kids can&#8217;t code. It&#8217;s too early. I keep them off the computer as much as possible.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But they can problem solve.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>They can problem solve. There are systems thinking. I have conversations with my nine-year old because we listen to a podcast in the car, listen to Marketplace which is his favorite podcast. He will talk to you about currency fluctuations and how the dollar here goes against South African Rand and stuff like that and why those things matter but I couldn&#8217;t write &#8216;for&#8217; loops to save his life. I would argue that they can pick up the syntax at some point but you have to get systems thinking early. We need to teach systems thinking at first grade and second grade.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really like the focus on the systems thinking and the problem solving because I think it is way more inclusive. I think there is a lot of people who are very intimidated by the idea of trying to learn how to code but they are solving problems and making decisions all the time and I don&#8217;t think that they realize that those things are related. They think they&#8217;re very separate things and they don&#8217;t see that if they can bring them together, it&#8217;s a very powerful thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well said, and they&#8217;re not giving themselves credit for that as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This reminds me when I was young and I didn&#8217;t know as a kid that what my parents said was like work or important was different than my play, which I thought was also really important. I didn&#8217;t understand why I would get in trouble for being loud.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, play is important but it can go to the other room.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well to me it was like adults who were just getting to play at stuff that I didn&#8217;t get to play at like stuff I wanted. I used to have an obsession with getting mail, like I really wanted mail.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, I remember those days.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because I wanted somebody out in the world know I existed and want to talk to me and my parents would be like, &#8220;You don&#8217;t want mail because that was mostly bills,&#8221; but I didn&#8217;t know that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. They want to tax you to get your money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wanted money too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, we made them little accounts that we put $5 in every month just so they get mail that shows their money is growing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s so cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So you made the bank spend the money to save it for $5?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Again, it&#8217;s systems thinking. They don&#8217;t do home-ec anymore so how does someone going to learn how to balance a checkbook if they never seen a checkbook? Then someone might say, &#8220;Oh, I don&#8217;t need checks.&#8221; How do you manage your money? You started to think about it on a ledger, which is interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Here&#8217;s an interesting question. I believe that there&#8217;s some value in suffering. Sometimes trite, sometimes manufactured. But mine are suffering and then you lift them above it. That might mean teaching someone see before you teach them Java, make them allocate their own memory and they go, &#8220;Ah, don&#8217;t worry about that.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And that&#8217;s antifragile, right? Antifragile is a book by Nassim Taleb and the concept is something is antifragile if a little bit of stress makes it stronger.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is now my favorite thing and I&#8217;m going to talk about it all the time and take full credit for it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Antifragile, I&#8217;m going to pick that up. That&#8217;s a really good idea. What doesn&#8217;t kill you makes you stronger. I like it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, but like you said, if it&#8217;s too much stress then that can damage a person or turn them off from ever trying.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Which is interesting. When I said before that maybe the kids won&#8217;t eat tonight, that&#8217;s not appropriate for a three-year old or a five-year old. But if a twelve-year old willfully refuses to eat the meal because they find it offensive, when it&#8217;s clearly not, missing one meal is not abuse. It is parenting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, the three or five-year old is still unable to calm their emotions enough to really see the option of eating or not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And they aren&#8217;t given the option. You don&#8217;t send a three-year old away. Well the twelve-year old it&#8217;s like, &#8220;Here&#8217;s the food. Finish it but there won&#8217;t be any food later.&#8221; That&#8217;s the trick. Sometimes the kids are like, &#8220;Oh, I&#8217;ll just eat oranges,&#8221; and I can work the system. No, you don&#8217;t eat the whole plate but eat until you&#8217;re done but here&#8217;s the food. It&#8217;s good food. I like that, antifragile. Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;re welcome. My kids, they would totally get away with fixing themselves dinner later because I don&#8217;t care what they do if they do it themselves and don&#8217;t ask me to make the food.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I try to make things collaborative. We make our dinners together and I try to get them to make it with us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You are a better parent than I am.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I think I may just not have been broken yet but maybe in the next year or two. I think that at some point, I&#8217;m getting to that like, &#8220;Guys, just go to bed!&#8221; You know, that level of frustration which is born after 10 or 15 years of childbearing is why by the time they&#8217;re 20, it&#8217;s like, &#8220;Just get out of my house.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You talked about your software development career but you said you&#8217;re actually a teacher.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah. There&#8217;s this ridiculous kind of myth of the 10X programmer and the myth of the rockstar programmer and just because I happen to start a blog 20 years ago and it&#8217;s still happening and just because I started up the podcast 12 years ago, because I am still here, people somehow ascribe longevity to, &#8220;Oh, Hanselman is an amazing programmer.&#8221; I&#8217;m a perfectly competent average programmer. I may be a B+ programmer. Being loud isn&#8217;t necessarily being a good programmer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When I meet people who are like, &#8220;Oh, my goodness, your blog. Your podcast. You&#8217;re such an amazing programmer.&#8221; Well, you have me right up until the programmer part but you have no actual proof of my skill. You are ascribing those attributes to me because of my visibility. There&#8217;s all kinds of amazing athletes who have tons of money but it doesn&#8217;t mean that they&#8217;re experts in finance. You must have a lot of money. You must be really good at finance because you have all this money. No, those things are unrelated. Correlation doesn&#8217;t equal causality. Then I finally figured out the issue is that I have a blog and the podcast because I just am overflowing with enthusiasm for certain topics to the point where I have to tell people that sounds more like a teacher than a programmer. I decided that that&#8217;s what I am.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you think that teaching talent makes you more valuable on a team?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It is, also because when you have an argument on a team, when you&#8217;re trying to &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Consensus?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, consensus building. Like you want to create tension, create lowercase A arguments and then bring everyone together in the scope of the 45-minute class. &#8220;That is an interesting question but that&#8217;s against what little Johnny just said so Anna, why don&#8217;t you back up your &#8211;&#8221; and then you [inaudible] them against each other, again in a gentle and safe place where they think they&#8217;re having an argument but you ultimately know the direction of the class that is going to go. &#8220;Oh, we&#8217;ve all learned a lot so it turns out you all were closer in your opinions than we thought,&#8221; and then we all be friends. That&#8217;s what we have been doing in team designing features for the last 20 years.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So do you wind up moderating these discussions?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If there&#8217;s one thing I&#8217;m good at is panel moderation and I say that, as someone with impostor syndrome who is just now learning to say that I&#8217;m good at certain things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, good job.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Seriously. This is a big deal. The last 500 episodes of my podcast, the last 85 have been pretty awesome. At the last 85, I feel pretty good about it. Just being able to say that my podcast is a good podcast has taken me 20 years of emotional&#8230; I don&#8217;t know. I know what I&#8217;m good at and that&#8217;s a little bit important to be able to accept that. Yeah, I am good at that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You clearly don&#8217;t get your validation externally. You got your degree for your own purposes and it took a while for you to decide that your podcast was [inaudible]. Everybody else was &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I need to lie down on the therapy couch here. You&#8217;re reading my life here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a lot of podcasts and I know people tell you all the time that your podcast are awesome and you get invited to keynote all the conferences and you do a great job of that, by the way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If you ask anyone who knows me&#8230; Well look, okay let&#8217;s talk about this. I was at a conference last Thursday in Atlanta, a fantastic conference. You should go to next year it&#8217;s called WeRise.tech, &#8216;We Rise, Women in Tech in Atlanta.&#8217; It&#8217;s a women&#8217;s conference and they asked me to give a little opening to one of the keynote panels and I freaking agonized about that. I want to be a good ally but I&#8217;m a man. I&#8217;m going to be the women&#8217;s conference, how can I be the best male that I can be at the women&#8217;s conference.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I sat with my friend, Safia Abdalla, she&#8217;s been amazing. She&#8217;s Captain Safia on Twitter and she went over my slides and emotionally held me for two days as I agonized over this 10 minutes to introduce this panel. Afterwards of course, everyone&#8217;s is gushing that I went great and like, &#8220;You&#8217;re amazing,&#8221; or whatever and I talk to Safia, she&#8217;s on a come up right now. She&#8217;s 20 and she&#8217;s about to graduate from school. She gave an actual one-hour keynote and I was like, &#8220;And that&#8217;s what a freaking out before keynote looks like.&#8221; She&#8217;s like, &#8220;I had no idea that that&#8217;s what people did,&#8221; and I was like, &#8220;Everybody does that.&#8221; The amount of effort required to make something look effortless &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a lot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Immense. She&#8217;s like, &#8220;I didn&#8217;t know that you freak out.&#8221; I said, &#8220;I freak out every time because if you don&#8217;t, it&#8217;ll look half-assed. It&#8217;ll look like you half-assed it,&#8221; so I went through that whole thing. I double checked every joke. I double checked every clip art. I went through the whole thing, multiple times. We were looking for punctuation towards the end of this process together. The other thing is I didn&#8217;t do it alone and this is really important. I actually thanked her on Instagram as being my conference buddy because we were balancing that whole introvert-extrovert thing and was like, &#8220;Are we introvert? Are we extrovert?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We skipped the lunches because it was just too much and then we went across the street and had tacos just to be elsewhere, to get our brains in the right way. I appreciated her ability to help me thread the needle at this conference as I tried to be a benefit as opposed to being a, &#8220;Why are you here?&#8221; And all of that comes from a place of insecurity that is ultimately driven by wanting to do the best that one can do. I know it&#8217;s a long answer but it&#8217;s the truth.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So the insecurity is also part of the journey?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that everyone has to feel a little bit in over their head. Treading water makes you a better swimmer. This gets to your antifragile thing, which I&#8217;m adopting as my thing now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When you say the earlier that just because you do something a long time, it doesn&#8217;t make you really good at it. I understood what you were saying but then, as you&#8217;re talking about things like after your 500th episode of a podcast, it also feels like you wouldn&#8217;t have made it that far if you weren&#8217;t good so it&#8217;s hard to reconcile this idea that just because you&#8217;re doing it a long time, you&#8217;re not necessarily good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Why couldn&#8217;t I just be mediocre for years?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because I think mediocracy is more than just your one instance of ability. It will start to bring you down because you won&#8217;t have the other pieces that it takes in order to keep going past mistakes. A lot of what makes people become really great is because they make mistakes, they learn from those mistakes and they keep going. People who are more mediocre, they don&#8217;t keep going, which is why they don&#8217;t increase their abilities.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I would say though that I&#8217;ve met some PhDs that were not very smart and I was shocked that this person got a PhD. I asked my wife how they did it and they said that no one ever told them to stop and sometimes getting an advanced degree just shows that you won&#8217;t give up, not that necessarily naturally talented. I always have this little pity thing that I talk about where, &#8220;Do you have 20 years’ experience or do you have the same year 20 times?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes but I think there&#8217;s a difference between when you are basically being supported by an entire other entity. If you&#8217;re in a program like that, it&#8217;s not just you. It&#8217;s also all the people who are working with you who are on the line for that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I see, who are supporting your mediocrity over time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, I think through with blogs and with podcasts and stuff, one could just blindly host their own thing and just march forward.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But you wouldn&#8217;t have listeners.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t know how many listeners I have. I don&#8217;t look at the stats. If I look at the stats, it&#8217;ll freak me out so I just don&#8217;t look at them. I haven&#8217;t thought about how many listeners I have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, you don&#8217;t necessarily have to know how many listeners you have but the fact that they&#8217;re talking to you means that whatever you&#8217;re doing is enough for them to come out of their way to make sure about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But I only get two or three emails about the podcast a week so I don&#8217;t know how many people are listening. It&#8217;s the emails that tell me. Comments matter more than the views. You guys are trying to make me feel better about myself. It&#8217;s not going to work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I was thinking what you said about how ridiculous it is, this concept of a 10X engineer. I was thinking about why that could be ridiculous. I think there&#8217;s this thing that we do, especially in America where we have this idea of a self-made man and you&#8217;re supposed to be super-intelligent and able to do everything all by yourself and the more you can do by yourself, the more like a hero you seem to become. But that&#8217;s not the truth about how we do things for real in this country.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Usually what happens is that a group of people who are not all like superheroes. This group of people who are little bit better than average do something incredible. That&#8217;s what normally happens but we kind of have this fairy tale about how this one person who has all these super abilities made the world changed.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s a true American myth. Walt Disney built Disney World by himself, with his own hands.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, exactly. The 10X engineer thing that you think is ridiculous is because so what? You do that all by yourself. You can&#8217;t build a community around you, then it doesn&#8217;t really do anything.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that myth, though gets perpetuated when those people, in fact do exist. Linus is that good. He balance it out, of course because he&#8217;s a jerk. But then someone says, &#8220;That anecdote proves that there are 10X engineers.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So there are? I could be the anti-Scott Hanselman here because I&#8217;ve heard a blog post about 10X engineer on Sunday and I can tell you that this morning it crossed 35,000 views.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What did you say, Jessica?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I said that absolutely 10X engineers exists. They&#8217;re the ones that know the code inside out and backwards and forwards, usually because they wrote it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, okay that&#8217;s different. You saying, TLDR says the productive development happens when one person knows the system intimately because they wrote it. That&#8217;s true and this is the brilliant part of her thing. This is in conflict with growing a system beyond what one person maintains. That&#8217;s very smart. A 10X engineer definitely exists if they&#8217;re working on their own software and they&#8217;re the only one that&#8217;s ever worked on it. That&#8217;s deep. I like it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And it&#8217;s true and sometimes that&#8217;s useful in what you want. This doesn&#8217;t preclude the idea that some developers are 10 times more talented or whatever or have a larger working memory and can hold a larger system in their head. Personally, I like being a person who can figure out somebody else&#8217;s system because that&#8217;s way harder than [inaudible] development. That&#8217;s entertaining.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess my point is that it&#8217;s not healthy to chase the myth. Let&#8217;s rather than making declarative statements like it doesn&#8217;t exist. I think that they&#8217;re not as common as we think they are and it&#8217;s not a thing to go for. I&#8217;m going to toy real with you. I&#8217;m going to bring it down to be real. I&#8217;m a little pissed off that Ryan Reynolds has my career. From the time he was on Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Shop, I knew that that was my role. I was supposed to be famous and then he became Green Lantern and now he&#8217;s an A-level star and I&#8217;m just like, I&#8217;ve got like dead bod and I&#8217;m in Portland and I&#8217;m sad about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> He is the 10X person and I am not and that&#8217;s fine and I can&#8217;t fixate on Ryan Reynolds, that jerk, who has my career. If one is absolutely like, &#8220;I&#8217;ve got to be hyper productive,&#8221; it&#8217;ll chew them up from the inside. Do you think that we should put them on pedestals or should we just accept that there are some occasional unicorns and we just let Ryan Reynolds live.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think we should recognize that having a 10X developer holds the rest of the team back and it&#8217;s a tradeoff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I agree.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like it. Now, I have to destroy Ryan Reynolds.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay. Did you tell me that Amanda Palmer post about Joan this week, about Fucking Joan?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, I will find this and link it. It&#8217;s about exactly what you&#8217;re talking about. It&#8217;s about that one person who is what you feel like you should be but of course, you&#8217;re comparing your insides to their outsides and they have their own problems. It&#8217;s just not about comparison. It&#8217;s a great post. I find myself experiencing this right now with you, Scott because you are a great podcast, you&#8217;re a speaker and keynoter and teacher and you&#8217;re a great parent and you&#8217;re super humble about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. I&#8217;m learning how to say thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s like what my VP of Engineering, he&#8217;s one of the 10X developers on our team, told me today, he knows the system inside and out but I wrote a good blog post the other day.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m not sure if that&#8217;s helpful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I&#8217;m pretty proud of my blog post because clearly, it gave people words for something they already knew.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s the formula right there for a good blog post. You crystallize what we all knew in our DNA.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. Everyone has experienced this. They&#8217;re like, &#8220;These are the words for it,&#8221; and like antifragile.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, which totally change my life. I&#8217;m going to incorporate that into everything I do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There you go. You have a new name, for something you already were. Now you can feel good about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think the other thing about the whole 10X engineering concept is that it&#8217;s not replicable. You can&#8217;t just take a 10X engineer and put them with other engineers and make more 10X engineers. That doesn&#8217;t happen. It&#8217;s nice that you do have that they exist and they can do great things but they can&#8217;t grow themselves. Whereas somebody like you Scott, who&#8217;s a teacher, exactly what you do is you put you with other people and then you can make them better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think in the big picture, that&#8217;s way more important because it&#8217;s very hard to be able to take information, synthesize it, put it in a way that another person cannot only digest it but also can take it on as their own and then grow from there. That&#8217;s a really hard thing to do but that is the process of how you make new things. Not necessarily that one person who can do everything because the user cannot teach that skill.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Ten-X developer is still only plus 10 but a teacher is multiplicative.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t like having to constantly justify being nice online. I&#8217;ve got into arguments with other engineers like, &#8220;Talk is cheap. Show me the code. I don&#8217;t need to be nice,&#8221; because I&#8217;m always emphasizing how important niceness is and they&#8217;re always saying, &#8220;Nice doesn&#8217;t compile.&#8221; Do you really want to go to work with a 10X who is mean? That&#8217;s the unicorn. Can we be 10X productive and also 10X nice? Why are those things not always connected?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, at Atomist we have three 10X&#8217;ers in different parts of the system and they are all as nice as can be and it&#8217;s fine. It a startup. It&#8217;s supposed to take risk and if Christian gets hit by a bus, it&#8217;ll be a long time before we can modify Rug CLI but we can take that risk and it doesn&#8217;t cost us much because he is super nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Did you know that I went viral for being nice last week?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, it&#8217;s actually a thing. Take a look at this tweet and look at the numbers on them, on the likes and the retweets. As of the time of this recording, it has 83,000 retweets and 184,000 likes. This young woman name, Halima Aden from Somalia was on the cover of Allure in her hijab. This fella shows up and basically is mean saying, &#8220;You&#8217;re wearing a burka and you&#8217;re oppressing, blah-blah-blah-blah.&#8221; I replied &#8212; if you go to the next picture and I said, &#8220;Well, that&#8217;s silly. It was a hijab not a burka. Watch the video interview with her.&#8221; Literally, the entire video is her talking about her decision to put the hijab on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then the guy says, &#8220;Oh, well. I&#8217;m guilty as charged. I didn&#8217;t watch the video and I don&#8217;t know the difference between a burka and a hijab,&#8221; and then I said, &#8220;Thanks.&#8221; Then I provide a little context like, &#8220;Well, a burka is when you&#8217;re covered in black and a hijab is a headscarf. It&#8217;s quite fashionable,&#8221; and then someone else, a third party as with Twitter jumps in and says, &#8220;Well, actually no. A burka is not covered in black. It&#8217;s a cloak and covers the face, including the eyes and using a mesh through the face.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I replied and I said, &#8220;Oh, thank you for the additional info. I&#8217;m sorry. I was trying to get the point across somewhat quickly,&#8221; and then the third person goes, &#8220;Oh, no worries. I was trying to clarify, just in case.&#8221; Then the tweet that went viral was, &#8220;I have never in my life seen an argument being settled so calmly and respectfully.&#8221; Think about what it says about our national discourse &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is a remarkable Twitter exchange.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Scroll down. There&#8217;s picture that&#8217;s like [inaudible] gives the people crying. People settle this like two adults and then the other tweets around this tweet went viral like, &#8220;Are they Canadian?&#8221; and they were like, &#8220;They are not Canadians.&#8221; Then one of the people came through and said, &#8220;Oh, well actually I am Canadian.&#8221; Then the guys are like, &#8220;We have a Canadian. We repeat! We have one Canadian.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This tweet has gone so viral that I sent a winky face to the guy who did the screen shots and that tweet has 1200 likes. It&#8217;s the craziest thing and all I did was not be crisp with someone on Twitter. What does that say about our worldwide discourse that simply not being a jerk online is 200,000 likes?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re starved for kindness.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We are and to pop it all the way off the stack, to what you were talking about before, I feel like that tweet is just a tweet and it&#8217;ll be forgotten next week but I feel like it validated the last 25 years of my experience online because I don&#8217;t give bio a permalink. There&#8217;s no URI that you can find where I&#8217;m being mean. I might be poking jokes at the Skype team or the Outlook team for making crash-y software but there&#8217;s no vindictive URL and you can say, &#8220;Look at Hanselman for being such a vindictive jerk.&#8221; I tell that to everyone that what you&#8217;ve got to do is be kind and do it for the long haul and it will come back to you eventually. My point is that people are like reading people online, reading them hard like, &#8220;Oh I wish &#8211;&#8221; and then they go off and those permalinks stay forever. They get screenshot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So you have a point that one piece of meanness is forever whereas kindness pays off in the long haul.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My wife thinks that it gets us better parking spaces. We call it parking karma. I have, amongst my many privileges, the most amazing parking karma that you will ever see and this isn&#8217;t a one-time thing. This is driving into a concert five minutes before it starts, just as someone&#8217;s backing out and I&#8217;m three slots from the first parking row. Every single time, my wife just goes, &#8220;I have no idea how this possible.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So you can find a parking space in San Francisco?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can find a parking space anywhere and I can do it in 10 minutes. I told her, I think it&#8217;s because we&#8217;re nice and we&#8217;ve been doing it. Now, I live in fear of not being nice because I don&#8217;t want to lose my parking karma because it&#8217;s really &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Fear is also part of the training.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. Everybody else is afraid like, &#8220;I must be nice or I&#8217;ll go to hell.&#8221; No, I really need my parking karma.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So how is top of the parking garage?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have never seen the top of the parking garage because I park &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Jessica. That&#8217;s how nice he is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I do the opposite. I go straight to the top of the parking garage.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And I&#8217;m worried that it&#8217;s going to collapse. I guess, you&#8217;ll just surf your way down when it collapses.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ll get some exercise on the way down. That&#8217;s my theory. You said that you&#8217;re a teacher, you teach with your podcast, you teach on your team, you team at conferences, what&#8217;s your favorite thing that you&#8217;ve ever taught.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like life lesson type stuff more than teaching software. At the conference last week, I did a whole thing on personal branding and I localized it to women and ran it by a bunch of women to make sure that it wasn&#8217;t garbage. It&#8217;s the idea of how could I be successful and visible while still being safe online. I really enjoyed that. It used to be called like personal branding or personal marketing but more, it&#8217;s just like maintaining your online resume as a software developer. The talk is called the Social Developer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I really like that because I always open it up to questions and then it makes it better talk. My blog is okay but my comments are great. I curate my comments very much and the commenters on my blog are better than my blog. They don&#8217;t even realize it but they&#8217;re what makes the blog go, like my friend Luvvie has this blog Luvvie.com but the LuvvNation, which is all of her followers are as funny or interesting as her blog because she has cultivated that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Having a good talk, where you talk at people is one thing. I like talking to groups of 50 people and then having it devolve into me moderating a talk show, where all of the people do that. When I gave my talk on the Social Developer, I keep in mind that I&#8217;m in a women&#8217;s conference, I come out and I said, &#8220;Hey, I&#8217;m Scott. I want to give this talk on being a Social Developer online,&#8221; and I realize that there&#8217;s a certain irony where there&#8217;s 50 women here at a women&#8217;s conference and I happen to be a man. By nature of the fact that this is a conference where I&#8217;m presenting, I am going to basically mansplaining here for an hour and how can we make that a positive experience for you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I say, &#8220;What you can do is you can interrupt me. If anything I say doesn&#8217;t fit your experience, interrupt and let&#8217;s have that conversation.&#8221; I think, I got 10 or 15 minutes into my talk until someone said, &#8220;Well, I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s really true,&#8221; and that was moderated and they were kind because I had set them up for kindness and it was amazing. It ended up going 90 minutes and it was only a 60-minute talk. They wouldn&#8217;t leave and we eventually got kicked out of the room. It felt like we all had an experience together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m patting myself on the back a little bit. I don&#8217;t want my cape to get too heavy but I feel like I set up a safe space, I told them it was okay to interrupt me and that defuse the whole &#8216;dude in the space&#8217; issue and the result was my talk was multiplied by their input. It wasn&#8217;t a whole series of each of us, &#8216;well, actually-ing&#8217; each other. They could have done that. It could have been like, I&#8217;m going to make a bunch of declarative statements and a bunch of people the audience are going to be like, &#8220;Well, actually&#8230;&#8221; which hurts in any direction but instead it was, &#8220;Here is my experience online. Here are the things that you need to do. Here are the things that women I&#8217;ve talked to have said about their experiences online on what you need to do to be safe,&#8221; and a couple of people are like, &#8220;Well, that wasn&#8217;t my experience.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Their experience is valid so then the question is, &#8220;How many experiences can we get out in the scope of the talk, such that people can go and make their own decision?&#8221; That&#8217;s the great thing about advice. You don&#8217;t have to take it and it was great.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You don&#8217;t have to go to bed without dinner if you don&#8217;t &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You don&#8217;t have to go to bed without dinner, look at you. That was brilliant. Doing talks like that about life talks, productivity talks, helping people explore, how they found success and leading them toward success are kind of like a less slimy Tony Robbins. Those are the things I like doing: my talks in productivity, my talks on personal branding, my talks on team building are more fun than my talks on coding.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because they are Greater Than Code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was a best tweet. Stop right away.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So Scott, we usually end our show with reflections, where each of the three of us gets to say what it was about the show that they&#8217;re going to takeaway and think about or preferences or points of action.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, anti-fragile was my takeaway. I&#8217;m going to go read the book.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cool. I have one from just a last few minutes. Scott was talking the community of comments on his blog. My favorite thing about this podcast, as much as I love the podcast, I love the Slack community. We have a Slack community where everyone who donate any amount to our Patreon gets an invitation to the Slack and people in there are just so nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And they have interesting conversations. They help each other out. It&#8217;s just nice to watch. My takeaway is I really like the approach that you&#8217;ve taken to how you built your career, Scott. I really like the way that you tend to look around you, for others to show you the way, as opposed to assuming that you know the way, which I think makes people want to follow you. I like that there&#8217;s a certain kind of completeness to that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I appreciate that. Thank you. That is a very nice compliment and I think it&#8217;s one, unlike compliments that make you feel awkward and uncomfortable, I think I will own that compliment and I thank you for it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yay!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome. This has been a great conversation. Thank you so much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SCOTT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. This was cool.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scott Hanselman: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/shanselman"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@shanselman</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.hanselman.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">hanselman.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “</span><a href="https://hanselminutes.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hanselminutes</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>00:57</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story and Superpowers; Struggling and Prevailing</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The struggle is part of the journey.”</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> &#8211; Scott Hanselman</span></p>
<p><b>13:51 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Systems Thinking, Problem Solving, and Instilling Those Values on Kids</span></p>
<p><b>19:11 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– There is Value in Suffering</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812979680/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0812979680&amp;linkId=84982318e94004fe908eedbc62099b87"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb</span></a></p>
<p><b>21:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being a Teacher Over a Programmer; Ideas of Mediocrity, 10x Engineering, and Comparison to Others</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://werise.tech/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">We RISE Women in Tech Conference</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://blog.jessitron.com/2017/06/the-most-productive-circumstances-for.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr: Hyperproductive development</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://medium.com/@amandapalmer/oh-lorde-deliver-me-from-fucking-joan-17ed0a1d83e8"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amanda Palmer: oh Lorde, deliver me from Fucking Joan.</span></a></p>
<p><b>36:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Nice Online</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/RoadmanAkhi/status/877658122957008896"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scott&#8217;s &#8220;Nice&#8221; Twitter Exchange</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (1)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/RoadmanAkhi/status/877950677896617984"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scott&#8217;s &#8220;Nice&#8221; Twitter Exchange</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (2)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/RoadmanAkhi/status/878244303021015040"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scott&#8217;s &#8220;Nice&#8221; Twitter Exchange</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (3) </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/877950217550577664"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scott&#8217;s &#8220;Nice&#8221; Twitter Exchange</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (4)</span></p>
<p><b>42:29 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Teaching (Cont’d)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/NexTech-Africa/2017/Brk21"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scott Hanselman: The Social Developer @ NexTech Africa 2017</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://w]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scott Hanselman: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/shanselman"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@shanselman</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.hanselman.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">hanselman.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “</span><a href="https://hanselminutes.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hanselminutes</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>00:57</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story and Superpowers; Struggling and Prevailing</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">“The struggle is part of the journey.”</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> &#8211; Scott Hanselman</span></p>
<p><b>13:51 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Systems Thinking, Problem Solving, and Instilling Those Values on Kids</span></p>
<p><b>19:11 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– There is Value in Suffering</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0812979680/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0812979680&amp;linkId=84982318e94004fe908eedbc62099b87"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb</span></a></p>
<p><b>21:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being a Teacher Over a Programmer; Ideas of Mediocrity, 10x Engineering, and Comparison to Others</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://werise.tech/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">We RISE Women in Tech Conference</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://blog.jessitron.com/2017/06/the-most-productive-circumstances-for.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr: Hyperproductive development</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://medium.com/@amandapalmer/oh-lorde-deliver-me-from-fucking-joan-17ed0a1d83e8"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amanda Palmer: oh Lorde, deliver me from Fucking Joan.</span></a></p>
<p><b>36:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Nice Online</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/RoadmanAkhi/status/877658122957008896"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scott&#8217;s &#8220;Nice&#8221; Twitter Exchange</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (1)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/RoadmanAkhi/status/877950677896617984"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scott&#8217;s &#8220;Nice&#8221; Twitter Exchange</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (2)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/RoadmanAkhi/status/878244303021015040"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scott&#8217;s &#8220;Nice&#8221; Twitter Exchange</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (3) </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/shanselman/status/877950217550577664"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scott&#8217;s &#8220;Nice&#8221; Twitter Exchange</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (4)</span></p>
<p><b>42:29 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Teaching (Cont’d)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/NexTech-Africa/2017/Brk21"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scott Hanselman: The Social Developer @ NexTech Africa 2017</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://w]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/scott.jpeg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/scott.jpeg"></googleplay:image>
										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/696/episode-039-the-b-side-of-software-development-with-scott-hanselman.mp3" length="46705895" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>48:39</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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					<title>Episode 038: Category Theory for Normal Humans with Dr. Eugenia Cheng</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-038-category-theory-for-normal-humans-with-eugenia-cheng/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 05 Jul 2017 05:00:38 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=677</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Dr. Eugenia Cheng joins us to talk about math, and even more specifically, category theory. Then we talk about changing the terminology around gender to focus on character traits instead.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Dr. Eugenia Cheng joins us to talk about math, and even more specifically, category theory. Then we talk about changing the terminology around gender to focus on character traits instead.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Dr. Eugenia Cheng: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/DrEugeniaCheng"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@DrEugeniaCheng</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://eugeniacheng.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">eugeniacheng.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Shopping is Hard; Let’s Do Math!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”; Eugenia’s Introduction</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Books:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465097677/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0465097677&amp;linkId=0d495c591e20d50802c3fa80ef30775d"><span style="font-weight: 400;">How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465094813/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0465094813&amp;linkId=1c8d256e9484319b7631615ccc857fd1"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>YouTube Channels:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/TheCatsters/featured"><span style="font-weight: 400;">TheCatsters</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">TheMathsters</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Articles:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/science/eugenia-cheng-math-how-to-bake-pi.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Eugenia Cheng Makes Math a Piece of Cake</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.wsj.com/news/types/everyday-math"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Everyday Math</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
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<p><b>01:54</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Getting Into Math: Is math useful? Is that the point?</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart</span></a></p>
<p><b>20:17 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_theory"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Category Theory</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Textbooks:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0387984038/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0387984038&amp;linkId=fb86951beaddc97589ea491f060216ce"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Categories for the Working Mathematician</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0199237182/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0199237182&amp;linkId=770e13783e791421d55ca1d5fa69038e"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Category Theory (Oxford Logic Guides)</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/052171916X/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=052171916X&amp;linkId=522bb5da8da065199edb56d83edb1f8a"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Conceptual Mathematics: A First Introduction to Categories</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">   </span></p>
<p><b>38:17 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Changing the Terminology Around Gender to Focus on Character Traits Instead: Congressive and Ingressive Behavior</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Prisoner’s Dilemma</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
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<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, I&#8217;m Rein Henrichs. This is Episode 38 of &#8216;Shopping is Hard. Let&#8217;s Do Math.&#8217; I am here with the wonderful Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning, Rein. Shopping is hard but this show is called Greater Than Code and I&#8217;m thrilled to be here today with Coraline Ada Ehmke.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning everybody. We have an amazing guest with us today and I know I say that every time but this time I really, really mean it. We have Dr Eugenia Cheng, who is a scientist in residence at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. She won tenure in pure mathematics at the University of Sheffield in the UK, where she is now an honorary fellow. She previously taught at universities of Cambridge, Chicago and Nice and holds a PhD in pure mathematics in the University of Cambridge.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Alongside her research in category theory and undergraduate teaching, her aim is to rid the world of math phobia. Her first popular math book, How to Bake Pi was published by Basic Books in 2015, the widespread acclaim, including from New York Times, National Geographic, Scientific American and she was interviewed around the world, including on the BBC, NPR and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and I have to confess I watched that clip today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Eugenia was an early pioneer of math on YouTube and her videos been viewed over a million times to date. Her next popular math book, Beyond Infinity will be published this year. Eugenia is also a math columnist for The Wall Street Journal, a concert pianist and founder of the Liederstube. Eugenia, it sounds like you&#8217;re a big slacker.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I&#8217;m really lazy. I never do anything.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Your work with math has got some slight attention of some form, what got you interested in math at the beginning? Were you one of those kids who is just like really, really in a math your whole life?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was really into lots of things my whole life and it wasn&#8217;t like I just sat around doing math the entire time. I was not the kind of kid who just read math books. But my mother really got me into thinking cool things and she showed me the coolest stuff about math, just as part of life. The whole time it wasn&#8217;t like, &#8220;Now, we&#8217;re going to sit down and do math and then we&#8217;re going to go and play.&#8221; It was always there so I never thought of math as something separate. I just always have this natural assumption that it was really fun and exciting and I had the most fantastic ideas in it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then I went to school and school wasn&#8217;t very interesting. I basically didn&#8217;t find anything in school, particularly interesting especially not the math. I understand why many people can&#8217;t stand math because of the lessons that they had at school. But because my mother showed me these really fun, interesting things, I held out hope all the way through that there was something better waiting for me at the end and indeed, there was. When I finally got to start doing research, I discovered the stuff I had been waiting for. A lot of it when I was going to graduate and there were little bits of it all day long but really, I found home when I got to make my own things up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think it&#8217;s sad that it took all those years through the drudgery of school and tests and homework before I was allowed to make my own things up. I think that that puts a lot of people off of math so people who like making their own things up, it sends them into other things like music or art or cooking or maybe coding or something where you do get to make your own things. That&#8217;s the message that I decided to try and give everyone else that it&#8217;s not necessarily just that thing you do at school, where you have to answer questions and get the right answer. You also get to play and experiment and create.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have to confess that I was one of those kids that struggled with math in school. To challenge myself in my senior year, I took an AP Calculus course and it was the only B I ever got, which was devastating and caused me the valedictorian position.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, this is a really tragic story.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But I did find that it got easier when I started taking physics classes because suddenly, I had a practical application for the math so the pure theory wasn&#8217;t doing it for me and it wasn&#8217;t sticking and I struggled with it a lot. But when I had something practical that I could apply it to, then everything started clicking a little bit more. Do you find that to be a common experience?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have the opposite experience and I think that for many people, it&#8217;s about practical applications but the trouble with that is that many people aren&#8217;t interested in the types of practical applications that get presented. For people who are maybe more like artists and I see artists all the time now because I teach them at School of the Art Institute, they also aren&#8217;t interested in physics applications and they&#8217;re not really interested in engineering applications and they&#8217;re definitely not interested in business and finance applications. For those people there&#8217;s something else which I&#8217;m showing which is it&#8217;s about understanding how things work and it&#8217;s about showing what the deep structure is inside thought processes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I want to reach those people because I feel that they&#8217;re the ones who are the most left out at the moment because it&#8217;s true that applications do help a lot of people but they don&#8217;t help me to like math. On the one hand, maybe I am an entirely unique person but I doubt it. I suspect, if that doesn&#8217;t help interest me, maybe there are a whole lot of other people who also aren&#8217;t necessarily interested by direct applications but rather in more broad thought-based ideological applications where it&#8217;s about understanding how to use your brain really well, rather than how to use the theory to solve this particular problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you want to give an example of that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the surprising example of that is how I understood my life and therefore, quit my job. That, I really felt was something that I thought about mathematically by focusing really carefully on things that are relevant and things that aren&#8217;t relevant and following chains of causation. I did an analysis of it, of my life. It was at New Year of 2013, at the beginning of 2013, I sat down and I wrote a list of everything that I think I&#8217;m good at and I wrote a list of everything that makes me happy and then I compare that with what my current life consisted of. I just didn&#8217;t feel like it used enough of the things that I think I&#8217;m good at.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I really believe in life, for me, it&#8217;s important to find all the things you&#8217;re good at and figure out how to use them in combination in the best way you can to contribute to the world in some way that you want you. I sort of axiomatized myself basically because I&#8217;m a mathematician, I like systems where you boil everything down to some very basic principles and you see how everything else follows from those principles.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I axiomatized myself, I found the things that I think I&#8217;m good at and I tried to figure out how I could get a life that used more of those things and I realized that a normal academic job as a professor in a normal academic university was just probably not going to do it. I had tried for a number of years because I really wanted to contribute to the education system in England that had given me everything that I have basically and it just wasn&#8217;t doing it so I thought about what I would do. I saw various constraints so I just try changing a few constraints to see what it have, which is a very mathematical thing to do, where you look at a situation and then you try generalizing it by saying, &#8220;What if I just relapsed this rule?&#8221; What kind of world would I create without that law, which doesn&#8217;t mean that you can because in real life, you can&#8217;t just get rid of laws. But it helps you to understand what&#8217;s making things function in the world that you have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you imagine getting rid of some law and saying, &#8220;What would happen?&#8221; then you can think about it that&#8217;s sometimes I go, &#8220;What would I do if I had tons of money?&#8221; I can&#8217;t just have tons of money but imagining a fantasy world, in which I have tons of money, helps me understand what my real desires are. I think that&#8217;s a mathematical process if the thought process comes from the idea of abstraction where in math, you take the real world, you forget some ideas, you move into the abstract world of ideals and then you think about what works in that world without the details and that helps you understand the world that&#8217;s got the details in it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I realized that if there were no such thing as countries and borders and visas and passports, I realized I would simply move to Chicago and figure something out. I realized that the big hindrance was just that I needed a visa so I then had to think about how to get a visa. That&#8217;s how I started the process of quitting my tenure job and becoming essentially freelance and living in Chicago my best life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow. That&#8217;s beautiful. In the relaxation of constraints, you&#8217;re able to see over the wall of those barriers that you didn&#8217;t let yourself think past otherwise.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I love that image because you see through the walls, you see what&#8217;s on the other side and then you can focus on how to get over that wall. Or you get an overview of the wall so you can see maybe where the lowest point is or where would be the best place to construct a way of getting over it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I love that analogy and that reminds me of there was a time where I was reading a bunch of computer science papers to try to figure out what was going on in this world. I was really struggling to make my way through these papers. They were just in front of me and they were a huge challenge. I don&#8217;t have a formal background so they were this huge edifice that I was trying to climb and a friend of mine who comes from a similar background but has been very successful said, &#8220;You have to pick a fight with the paper. If you have to look at its assumptions and the chains of logic that follow them and say, &#8216;What if this one was different? Why is this one necessary for their result?'&#8221; Doing that gave me the motivation and sort of the path through this forest. What I realized later is that this applies to basically every challenge that I faced in my life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And that is a great way of approaching math in a way that makes it more personal because the trouble with math is often that when you&#8217;re studying it, it feels like a bunch of rules that have simply been imposed on you and you have to follow them. But actually, if you think about why those rules are there, then you can just imagine one of them going away and seeing what happens and that helps you understand the system better. It also makes you feel like you have some agency in it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things I love as you said, there are two possible outcomes, either you understand the paper or you have a new result.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a kind of related thing to that, where sometimes I read a paper when I&#8217;m trying to go to sleep on the plane for example and I think, there were two possible outcomes, either I&#8217;ll understand the paper or I&#8217;ll get some sleep.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love the way you talked about mathematics as being a creative process and not just a rote. I reminded of a Paul Lockhart&#8217;s Mathematician&#8217;s Lament. One of the quotes I love from that is that mathematics is the music of reason, which really speaks to me. It seems like if you wanted to build a system that was designed to make people hate mathematics, it would look a lot like our current education system.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think you&#8217;re right. I think when you&#8217;ve done a really good job of building of really getting people to hate math and sometimes, I fantasize about the fact that if we simply stop teaching any math at all, we would probably achieve more than we&#8217;re doing now because at the moment, we&#8217;re achieving negative. If we just didn&#8217;t do it, we&#8217;ll achieve zero and because we know some math, we know that zero is more than a negative number.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I thought I hated math until I read Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter and that spoke so much in me. I saw for the first time a relationship between math and music. I&#8217;m a musician. I saw for the first time the relationship between math and models of human intelligence, which sparked my work in AI, which I&#8217;ve been doing for 20 years now. It just opened my eyes so much and I wished that that book had been my textbook, instead of the boring calculus book that I actually had in my high school.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know but calculus altogether is such a strange thing to teach people in high school. It&#8217;s definitely, dare I say, it&#8217;s very American. I don&#8217;t think other countries do that and it&#8217;s such a weird introduction to difficult mathematics because the structure of it is not, I think exactly illuminating so it puts off a lot of people who don&#8217;t just want answers, they won&#8217;t to understand. For me, there&#8217;s a real difference between a proof and an illumination because a proof is a step by step series of logical justification. But an illumination it sheds light on why something works. A calculus proofs, if you even get to them, don&#8217;t really shed light on what&#8217;s going on there. It&#8217;s kind of a trick to say, &#8220;I can&#8217;t shed light on its own. I&#8217;m just going to do this little trick and ping! I get to the other side. Huh?&#8221; I think that that is a strange introduction to the beautiful world of logical reasoning.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you present it in another way, then it&#8217;s a really amazing introduction because it&#8217;s a way of getting around the problem of infinity that is really difficult to get around but it&#8217;s never presented like that, rarely anyway. When I taught it, I&#8217;ve presented it like that but usually, it&#8217;s some kind of weird set of manipulations and you just learned how to do tons of manipulations for no apparent reason. In the UK, where I&#8217;m from, there isn&#8217;t an obsession with teaching calculus. In fact, we don&#8217;t teach calculus until quite high up in an undergraduate math degree so I found it very surprising when I moved here for the first time and discovered that everybody does calculus and that&#8217;s the thing that you do, if you&#8217;re good at math, you do calculus. Then when you gets to university, the thing you have to do is you do calculus.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I was talking to another European person about this, &#8220;Do you understand why there&#8217;s all this focus on calculus?&#8221; And he said and he was just maybe a tiny bit cynical, &#8220;You know, what I&#8217;ve learned about this country, if you can&#8217;t understand why something is going, ask yourself where the money is coming from.&#8221; I thought, &#8220;Ah, yes. Calculus textbooks. They make people tons of money. They are really heavy and expensive and they make another edition every two years so everyone has to by a new one.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Since math changes so quickly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. Exactly and if you think about the number of people who are forced to buy those textbooks, I read an article about one of the calculus textbook authors who died recently and apparently, he&#8217;s very famous around here but I don&#8217;t know many calculus textbooks. He was so rich from calculus textbooks that he built himself something like an eight million dollar house with its own concert hall in it. The reason that I read an article about his house, it was ostensibly an architecture article and the house had calculus principles in it and he loved music so he built this concert hall. I just loved it and I thought, &#8220;Maybe, I should be writing calculus textbooks.&#8221; Then I remembered that I&#8217;m not primarily driven by money and that&#8217;s why I&#8217;m not writing calculus textbooks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There are obscure subjects that I&#8217;m interested in, where the only way to learn about them is to either read a bunch of papers, which is very undirected and most of them are behind paywalls or to buy an obscure textbook and they cost $400.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I think that I love the idea of somehow trying to break the stranglehold that the publishing houses have on those textbooks but can you imagine the amount of pushback there would be if we tried to say actually, no, which is not going to teach calculus anymore.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We get pushback in trying to put evolution in textbooks so I don&#8217;t think you&#8217;re going to change the textbook publishing world any time soon.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It is changing. My 12 year-old doesn&#8217;t have a lot of textbooks and she does have a lot of online material that she uses.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right and I love the fact that with the internet, there are all sorts of problems with the internet. But instead of focusing on the problems of the internet, let&#8217;s remind ourselves of the great things about the internet and the amount of information that can be shared without having to go through those old gatekeepers. Of course, the old gatekeepers want to keep things the way that benefits them. But guess what, we don&#8217;t have to go through them anymore and that&#8217;s why I started making videos on YouTube because suddenly, I had always wanted, I had always dreamed of making a textbook &#8212; for category theory, which is my research subject &#8212; and I think about category theory isn&#8217;t involved a lot of visual diagrammatic reasoning. It&#8217;s very difficult to show that statically in a book because you have to see how the diagrams grow as you&#8217;re thinking.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I always fantasize about writing a textbook that had a DVD at the back. That was like those language textbooks where you have a DVD of native speakers speaking it. I really wanted to just include a DVD so that everyone could watch the lectures with the text but to see the diagrams growing. But back in those days, millions of years ago, when we were young that it was really expensive to make DVD. You have to get a video team or something and then someone invented the YouTube and webcams and suddenly, it became possible to just point a webcam at a board and make a video and then just shove it on the internet and everyone could see it. I just had this amazing vision that everybody would have access to me teaching category theory.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The thing is at the time, hardly anyone was actually teaching it so as you say, loads of people were stuck with trying to learn it in from textbooks and the only textbook at the time was Categories for the Working Mathematician which is so dry and I don&#8217;t know how anyone ever managed to learn category theory.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I could tell you what I did. I would read a paragraph of Mac Lane and then I would read five pages of Awodey. Then I would read the chapter of Conceptual Mathematics that would explain that to me. I would work paragraph to paragraph. Each paragraph in Mac Lane would be a forcing function that would require me to spend a week with other sources.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And the thing is that when I started making the YouTube videos, there weren&#8217;t that many other sources. I can&#8217;t remember when Conceptual Mathematics were in but Awodey&#8217;s book was years away from being written yet, I think anyway or maybe just a little bit away from it. But certainly, because I did my PhD in Cambridge, there was a category theory course there and then I went off into the world and met other people who had not had access to that. I saw that, because they learned category theory from Mac Lane, they had a, I want to say, slightly strange view but they could do lots of technicality without knowing quite what the point was.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>They have wrong proof but not the illumination?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. Thank you. They have the proof but the elimination. I think that is how so much of math is taught at all levels that people are trained to do manipulations and computations and to get answers that consist of a number here or a number there. But without the illumination, it doesn&#8217;t make that much sense to them plus it means that they&#8217;re not able to see why math is wonderful. They just see it as a series of manipulations and this happens at every level. It happens with high school math. It happens in elementary school math and everybody. It happens with math for scientists. Some scientists I&#8217;ve met, many of them actually, especially engineers, think of math as just something to help them answer their questions. They don&#8217;t see why research in it has any point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But then it happens even inside math so category theory is like the math of math so it does for math what math does with the rest of the world, in a way. But then some mathematicians don&#8217;t see the point of that and they think of category theory as just some manipulations that don&#8217;t really have a point. Or they think that you only do it if you need to reach a particular answer, rather than doing it in order to illuminates what is going on in mathematics. The thing that I always want to do with my brain most is illuminate what is going on, just in anything: the world, math, my kitchen, music, anything.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Eugenia, you said that category theory does for math what math does for everything else and you mentioned earlier that what math does for everything else has explained how the world works so just category theory explain how math works?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it does, at least at certain aspects of it. It&#8217;s important, I think to remember that math doesn&#8217;t explain how everything about the world works. What it does is it illuminate certain aspects of it. Anything that makes a connection between something and something else is a potential place where math can help because it&#8217;s really about looking at two different situations and saying what these two situations have in common and that part that they have in common is an abstract thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that there are times when, for example if we think about how we should treat minorities, then you can think about how we treat one kind of minority and then we can think about, whether that would be appropriate if we did something similar to another minority that maybe we&#8217;re more used to treating equally. For example, sometimes people say really stupid stuff about, for example gay people and then people sometimes people try to illuminate that how stupid it is what they said by replacing that with imagine that they&#8217;ve said that about African-Americans.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then maybe they realize that that sounds really stupid if you said it about African-Americans and offensive and dumb. Then you go, &#8220;See, then why are you saying it about this other minority when you wouldn&#8217;t say about this minority,&#8221; and that process is a process of analogy between two different situations. You&#8217;ve moved into an abstract world, instead of talking about a specific minority, you&#8217;re talking about the concept of minorities and how we should treat them. That is kind of mathematical and that&#8217;s making an analogy between two different situations and finding what they have in common. That&#8217;s what category theory does for mathematics.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It says, &#8220;I&#8217;m looking at this situation where something seems to be happening, kind of freely without constraint and I&#8217;m looking at this other situation where there&#8217;s also something happening freely without constraint,&#8221; or the concept of things happening freely without constraint is therefore, something these two different mathematical situations have in common so that&#8217;s a more abstract piece of mathematics. Then category theory will produce a theory of things operating freely without constraint. Then we can put that back into algebras working freely without constraint or topological spaces working freely without constraint or logical systems working freely without constraint. Having made the theory, that&#8217;s at a different level.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My interaction with category theory came from Hofstadter&#8217;s latest book, Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking and I tried to do some research in the category theory and found it impossible to find a starting point. But I did finally find a series of lectures that someone had done. One of the ideas that came, I think from the lectures in part and in part from my own realization and as an expert in category theory, I&#8217;m taking advantage of your expertise here, it seemed to me that from the beginning of rational scientific thought, the approach that people were taking starting early on probably with the great philosophers, was the idea of breaking things down into small problems, solving small problems and composing a larger solution from that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It struck me that category theory does the opposite of that. It doesn&#8217;t look at the details. It blurs the details and looks at larger systems in the way that larger systems can be compared to each other so instead of the atomization that we saw in scientific research and I think in mathematics for a long time, it seems to be favoring the abstract over the concrete. Do you think that&#8217;s an accurate sort of perception of what&#8217;s going on with category theory?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s a really interesting observation but I think that that&#8217;s two different dimensions. Actually, I think there&#8217;s one thing which is splitting things up into small parts, decomposing them into small parts and fitting the parts together. There&#8217;s another which is abstraction, which is moving levels. I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s about sticking things together to make bigger things. I think it&#8217;s about, as you say ignoring details so you get some kind of zoomed out picture. I might call it the bigger picture but I don&#8217;t mean that in the sense of sticking small pictures together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I mean it in the sense of overview and you can do both at the same time so within category theory, there&#8217;s still a big focus on decomposing things into small parts, understanding the small parts and then working out how those small parts fit together. Then you can de-abstractify back to the small parts as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think, one of the good analogy for this is what happened in Google Maps when you zoom them out. They don&#8217;t show the streets anymore. They show the highways and things like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah. I think that&#8217;s a great analogy because when you zoom out on Google Maps, it still is some small pieces stuck together. You just see more things at once because you zoomed out but with less detail. You could still deconstruct it into small bits stuck together and then when you zoom in, it&#8217;s still also small bits stuck together. I think it&#8217;s two different points of view on how to understand a problem further. But I think that you&#8217;re right that if you start at the very zoomed-in level, then breaking into small parts and zooming out are two different things. I don&#8217;t think they&#8217;re opposites. I think they&#8217;re orthogonal.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Someone who will go into category theory will do both under [inaudible] space?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, I do that all the time. What I will do and what I do in my own search is that I zoom out to try and find the essential structure. But then after I&#8217;ve started thinking about the essential structure, I will break down the essential structure into small parts to try and understand the parts separately before understanding how they fit together and then understanding the relationship between the small parts, the fitting together and the zooming back in again.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is there a mechanism for detecting which details when you are at the zoomed in level matter and I&#8217;m thinking here of like work that I did with categorization using Random Forest algorithm to determine what traits decisions tree made on and which ones they could not be made on. Is there a mechanism like that that you [inaudible]?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s such an interesting question because thinking about it, that&#8217;s something that I have to do all the time. It&#8217;s really hard because it&#8217;s not an automatic process. It&#8217;s not an algorithmic process at all. When you&#8217;re figuring out what&#8217;s important, that&#8217;s one of the hardest parts. I think it&#8217;s something that is sometimes done quite badly, which is why sometimes people think of, they call it abstract nonsense because abstraction when it&#8217;s done just for the sake of abstraction, kind of is pointless. Whereas abstraction when it&#8217;s done for the purpose of illuminating what the point really is, is really amazing. But there isn&#8217;t a formula for how to figure out what&#8217;s really important and I think that &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, you mentioned one earlier.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I did?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. You said change the rule and see what happens.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. Thank you. I did and that is one way of doing it so you can try changing something and seeing if it affects it. When you&#8217;re making a good analogy and this happens all the time, when I&#8217;m having an argument with someone and I&#8217;m trying to be really logical, I will often try and find an analogy. If I think there&#8217;s something absurd about their argument, I will try to find an analogous situation that highlights how absurd their argument is by making it really absurd in another situation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> To find a good analogy, what I do is I retreat into the same part of my brain that does mathematics, I think. I play around and I trying to feel for what is really making the absurdity happen. I try ignoring some details of the situation or changing some details to see whether that absurdity still happens. If I find what I think is a really good analogy, usually the person will go, &#8220;But the different.&#8221; And I&#8217;ll go, &#8220;Yes, of course, it&#8217;s different. It&#8217;s an analogy. That&#8217;s the whole point of analogy. It&#8217;s different but the [inaudible] parts are the same.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then you have to convince someone that what&#8217;s crucial about the situation has remained the same, even though some surface details have changed. But then sometimes people make analogies because they think that they&#8217;re making a really good analogy but I think they&#8217;ve changed the crucial aspects of it so they haven&#8217;t actually eliminated the situation. There completely changed the situation but it&#8217;s very subtle and I think that is a fascinating aspect of how abstraction works and the nuances in our amazing human brains.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s interesting you said you went to a mathematical place to from analogies. One of the things that Hofstadter talked about in his book is focuses on analogies and he talked about a mysterious process by which our brains are categorizing things in such a way that we can make analogies. One of the examples he gave was a family who took their son to the Grand Canyon and the mother and father are looking out at the sweeping vista of the Grand Canyon before them and they say to their son &#8212; I forget his name like, Chris, &#8220;Isn&#8217;t this really beautiful?&#8221; and looked over and Chris is fascinated with some ants crawling around on the ground.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Chris grows up and he ends up taking a vacation with his parents to Egypt and he discovers that in Egypt, glass soda bottles are prevalent and there are bottle caps everywhere so he decides to start a collection of bottle caps. They&#8217;re going to the temple at Karnak and he sees a bottle cap that he hasn&#8217;t seen before on the ground. He makes a big deal out of this bottle cap while he&#8217;s standing in front of the Temple of Karnak. His father is like, &#8220;That&#8217;s exactly like when &#8211;&#8221; It&#8217;s really mysterious how our brains can categorize things with enough abstraction that we can even say this situation is analogous to that other situations.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and I think that our brains are amazingly naturally wired or something to abstraction, even though a lot of people go, &#8220;I can&#8217;t do abstract math. I was fine with math until the numbers turn into letters. That&#8217;s too abstract,&#8221; and the thing is that numbers are already so abstract because numbers aren&#8217;t things. Numbers are analogies between groups of objects so you go, &#8220;Here&#8217;s three books and there&#8217;s three cookies and three bananas. What do those things have in common?&#8221; It&#8217;s the number three. It&#8217;s the concept of three. What is three?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When you&#8217;re teaching it to small children, you have to show them three of this thing and three of that thing and three of that thing and then you can&#8217;t tell them what three is. At some point, they have to make a leap and understand that three is a thing that those groups of objects have in common.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s a story I tell in my first book, which I love which is about a mother who I used to help in an elementary school in England. I did it for years. There&#8217;s one mother who also helped there and she was complaining. She had a three-year old time and his friends&#8217; mothers they all say, &#8220;Oh, my child can count to 20. Oh, my child can count to 30.&#8221; She said, &#8220;My son can count to three but he knows what three is,&#8221; and I thought it was great because when you say that a child can count to 10, mostly you just mean they can recite the words one to ten, which is the start but that&#8217;s not what numbers are. Numbers are amazing concepts and somehow we have brains that can do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> You know, language is already an abstraction from objects because when we say, &#8216;cat,&#8217; we kind of know that cat is refined to some fluffy animal with four legs and things and we&#8217;re able to hold that abstract thing in our brain and know that it&#8217;s referring to various concrete things. The fact that we can do language, I think is already a sign that we have innate powers of abstraction inside us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And I can tell you that trying to marvel that in code is so difficult. I have my AI side project and trying to model things in such a way that you can concretely refer to them using linguistic terms but also understand how they relate to each other in a more abstract way is very, very difficult. When I learned that Leibniz was an alchemist, in addition to being a natural philosopher, that gave me some courage and I actually started exploring different classification systems from different areas of human endeavor, including Kabbalah where people have been working on the problem of classification and categorization for thousands and thousands of years and wasn&#8217;t all mathematicians and scientists doing it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and I think classification is so interesting because we humans seemed to be desperate to classify things all the time and really, in order to groups things together so that we don&#8217;t have to process so many things in our head. I think that comes from, I&#8217;d like to say, laziness but in a way, it&#8217;s trying to be efficient, trying to have this so much data in the world around us that we have to process, that if we temporarily consider some of those things to be the same, then there&#8217;s just less data to process. I think that&#8217;s what analogy is doing in a way and I love the insight that we can get from trying to figure out how to get a computer to do a thing that we do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then we start realizing how weird it is, that our brains can do these things and there&#8217;s the classic example of how to get computers to recognize handwriting because there are all these things that we recognize as being the letter A, sort of spontaneously but they&#8217;re so different physically and the how that we can even say they&#8217;re different topologically and we can make an A with a gap in it and we can still know it&#8217;s a letter A, it&#8217;s just amazing when we realize that somehow the letter A is already abstract but even more abstract than that is the fact that all these different representations of it, we still recognize as being a letter A. Our brains are doing that all the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that if we couldn&#8217;t do that, we would be completely overwhelmed by the amount of information that we have to process all the time. I think the process of becoming an adult, one of the things that we have to learn to do is to do that more because we&#8217;re trying to process more and more information all the time so children can get really upset about the difference between that cookie and that cookie because they can see how different this cookie is from that cookie and if you give them up that one, instead of that one, they&#8217;ll scream.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then we grow up and relax a bit and realize that they&#8217;re basically the same, those two cookies. They&#8217;re both chocolate chip cookies and we accept that some more things count as the same. In a way, what we&#8217;re doing all the time is learning how to ignore details that aren&#8217;t relevant but we have to make decisions about which details are relevant in the situation and which ones aren&#8217;t.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had an experience like that when I was young, when I was learning to count, apparently I had trouble saying that is two of the same thing because to me there are very distinct. When you said, &#8220;Three people,&#8221; I was like, &#8220;How can you have three of the same thing? It&#8217;s impossible.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s fantastic. For other children, they get confused if you say, &#8220;If you take one banana and one cookie, then can you add them together? What do you get?&#8221; You still get two things but you have to abstract further from the place that you started. Then when numbers turn into letters, you have to abstract even further so that one plus two can become part of the same concept as six plus seven. Then when you do category theory, you abstract even further from that. Every time you go further, some people kind of fall off or hit a ceiling because they&#8217;re not comfortable with forgetting even more details.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I sort of love forgetting more and more and more details. Sometimes, I think that there&#8217;s two directions that the world is going in, with the human interaction is going in, where on one direction, everyone is trying to show how unique they are and how different they are and how their identity is completely different from everyone else. But on the other hand, because of what I do as a mathematician at category theory, I love seeing how everyone has things in common and what we all have in common and if you get abstract enough, we&#8217;re all just people and we&#8217;re all really the same. There are different levels of difference that you can find so in a way, everyone is different. Or everyone is the same and everything else, every [inaudible] classification we make is just sort of some arbitrary decision in between those two things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For me, part of adulthood is being conscious of that, being conscious of what you&#8217;re grouping together and where you&#8217;re drawing your life with distinction.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. That is so important. One of the things that category theory does is it says that you should always be clear what context you&#8217;re in right now and you can always change context but you shouldn&#8217;t mix up contexts. You shouldn&#8217;t be in one context but act like you&#8217;re being in another. If you&#8217;re always aware of what context you&#8217;re in, then it just enable you to think more clearly about things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Eugenia, when I met you at Empire Elixir the other day, you taught me some amazing words. Would you define ingressive and congressive for people?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can, yes. It starts with the fact that I think that the words masculine and feminine are redundant and more than that, they&#8217;re actually abstractive. It doesn&#8217;t make any sense to talk about anything being masculine and feminine, except that a male person is if inherently, they call themselves male, they&#8217;re masculine because that&#8217;s all pertaining to male. I realized this because I had a narrative about my mathematical life that basically I went like this. When I started as a mathematician, I didn&#8217;t want to show any signs of femininity because I didn&#8217;t want people to have a chance to say that I wasn&#8217;t good at math because I was a woman.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But then when I became established in my career and I have tenure, I felt like it was okay to show some femininity but I only did it outside of work because I&#8217;m still afraid and then I gradually started letting in. Then I thought, &#8220;This doesn&#8217;t make any sense because I am a female,&#8221; so everything I do is feminine and why should some aspects of a career to be called feminine and some others not, as if there&#8217;s something wrong with me if I don&#8217;t show those aspects because I&#8217;m female but I&#8217;m showing masculine characteristics. I realized that what we really need is new words to talk about the actual character traits and separate them from the questions of gender because it&#8217;s really the character traits that may or may not cause people to think about things differently.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This is aside from the prejudice that people apply to people who present different genders. It&#8217;s just about character traits that are actually there that are different so I decided that we should have new words to replace masculine and feminine and I brainstorm with an amazing friend of mine for ages about this. We finally came up with ingressive and congressive. Ingressive is to replace masculine and congressive is to replace feminine.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The idea is that ingressive is about going into things and not being waylaid by what people think or by emotions and congressive is about bringing people with you and bringing people together and unifying and making connections between things. Maybe that ingressive behavior is traditionally associated with men and that congressive behavior is traditionally associated with women. But I think that when you make new words, then you can realize that both men and women and all genders of people can be ingressive and congressive at different times and in different situations. It doesn&#8217;t mean it&#8217;s right or wrong for one person to be one thing or another because of course, the trouble with masculinity and femininity as words is that they sound prescriptive so that it automatically sounds like women as supposed to be feminine and that therefore, if they&#8217;re described as showing masculine characteristics, then something is wrong. There&#8217;s a dissonance because they&#8217;re doing the thing that is associated with the other.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Similarly, if men show feminine characteristics and that this is problematic for all genders of people, there is the fact that male people then feel under pressure to do things like not show emotions and not cry and not worry about people&#8217;s feelings. Then female people, if they&#8217;re ambitious or powerful or they express opinions or they&#8217;re too strong, then people say that they&#8217;re being too masculine and there&#8217;s something wrong with it. Whereas if you think about ingressive and congressive instead, then you can actually think about which characteristics are good for different situations.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For example, I think that broadly speaking, I&#8217;ve come to think that congressive behavior is basically better for society but that ingressive behavior is rewarded more by society because society is based on competition. It&#8217;s based on how you present yourself so for things like competing for a job, you have to be ingressive to put yourself forward for promotion and to talk about how great you are. Whereas, when you&#8217;re actually doing some work with people, then it&#8217;s really helpful to be congressive because then you bring people together, you understand people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that mathematics is usually presented in a very ingressive way so in high school, it&#8217;s about getting the right answer. If you&#8217;re good at it, then young people are put into competitions, where you have to solve as many problems as possible, as fast as possible and score as many points as possible. If you get it wrong, then you&#8217;re lost and you get a big red check mark against your work. Whereas, at research level, it&#8217;s congressive because it&#8217;s not about getting things right and wrong. It&#8217;s about understanding how things work and building structures. I think that sport is quite inherently ingressive because it&#8217;s about winning and beating the other people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I realized this during last fall, I was teaching my art students, as usual and there was that thing that the Cubs won&#8230; Some kind of sports, I understand and the whole of Chicago was going nuts about it, except apparently me and all of my art students. We were talking about it and they just said that they were really not interested in it. I realized that I&#8217;m not interested in winning. I&#8217;m much more interested in learning and understanding and building things together. Not only I am not that interested in sports, I&#8217;m kind of put off by it because the whole idea of beating somebody else is something that I find really distasteful. I would much rather we all built something wonderful together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That’s why I like music because in music, you&#8217;re not trying to beat someone else. You&#8217;ll all come together and you mix music together. Even in music, the process of getting to that point is often ingressive because you have to win competitions and you have to beat people in a competition in order to be selected to, say go to music school. We have all these ingressive hurdles that we put people through in order to reach things where congressive behavior would be much more beneficial. When I think about it like that, I can think differently about my interactions with other people and I can think differently about my interactions with myself actually and the fact that I am motivated by helping people, I&#8217;m not motivated by winning things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If I try to motivate myself with reward, it doesn&#8217;t work. If I motivate myself instead with what I can do to help people, then it does work. I also realized that so many of my most frustrating interactions with other people come because they are being very ingressive. The behavior I have learned by being in the world and wanting to be successful is I have learned to basically fake ingressive characteristics because I know that and I see that that&#8217;s what&#8217;s rewarded. I have learned in the process of being a mathematician and being an academic, I have learned how to be ingressive right back at people when they&#8217;re being ingressive.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> What happens when I do that is I&#8217;m very good at it and then I go home and I hate myself because I don&#8217;t want to be like that. That&#8217;s one of the reasons I quit my job because I discovered that, I didn&#8217;t have the terminology to say this at the time but now I do realized in retrospect what was happening was that I had to be ingressive in order to be successful. I felt I had to be ingressive to be successful and I didn&#8217;t like it. What I realize now is that you don&#8217;t have to be ingressive in order to be successful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There are ways to be congressive and deal with ingressive behavior. It&#8217;s just hard and I&#8217;m figuring them out as I go along and what I hope is that we can gradually getting more in touch with our congressive side and find a way of diffusing ingressive behavior so that congressive behavior can be more valued because the trouble is that ingressive behavior is kind of louder. It&#8217;s like the fact that the loud people are always the loudest. They&#8217;re the ones who get heard. While ingressive people aren&#8217;t in charge of everything, they will continue to reward ingressive behavior as well. I think that is one of the big reasons why women are underrepresented in politics, in management, in academia, and dare I say it, also in crime because I suspect that ingressive behavior is also related to really, really being focused on winning and not really caring about losing. That&#8217;s why ingressive people, I think like playing sport because the idea of winning is really fantastic.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> People say, sports teaches you to be a good loser and that&#8217;s a general assumption that that&#8217;s a good thing. But I think it&#8217;s kind of dangerous if taken too far because if you don&#8217;t mind losing, then you take risk, because you don&#8217;t care about the possibility of failure and people who take big risks will also do things like commit crimes because their idea of being arrested and going to prison doesn&#8217;t put them off. The idea of &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or start businesses.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, or start businesses. Or tell lies because the idea there is that they could succeed and they don&#8217;t really mind they fan out. But for me, this also includes the idea of being wrong because if somebody shows me that I&#8217;m wrong and gloats over it, that&#8217;s the crucial thing. I don&#8217;t mind if someone shows me I&#8217;m wrong and then we all learn something together. That&#8217;s a congressive thing. But if an argument is about someone trying to beat me by showing that I&#8217;m wrong and they&#8217;re right, I hate losing and that&#8217;s the only reason that I don&#8217;t like being wrong. I think that this is related to why people get put off at math because at a certain point, math becomes about being right and wrong and some people don&#8217;t like been wrong and they feel stupid so they go away to something that&#8217;s more obviously congressive.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But the ingressive people aren&#8217;t put off by being wrong. They&#8217;re really spurred on by the joy of being right and that, I think means that there is an accidental filter that puts off congressive people and keeps ingressive people in. I think this could lead to why women are still underrepresented in math. I think that we can change that by presenting math in a congressive way early on, instead of an ingressive way. There&#8217;s so many mathematical outreach activities that I look at them and go, &#8220;That&#8217;s really ingressive and there are ways that you could turn it into something congressive.&#8221; But you know, if you said that about boys and girls instead of ingressive and congressive, you would sound ridiculous because then you would end up saying, &#8220;This outreach activity appeals to boys and not girls.&#8221; Doesn&#8217;t that sound stupid? Whereas if you &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It may be true.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; Ingressive people rather than congressive people. But if you talk about the activities that appeal to boys instead of girls, then you end up with stupid things like pink Lego.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think you didn&#8217;t mentioned specifically. I&#8217;m thinking about things in terms of ingressive and congressive behavior, it makes a lot of sense to me. I just went through an interview process and interviews definitely rewards you for being ingressive.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Even the so-called pairing exercises, there is a power imbalance and you are not truly working together to solve a problem. What you&#8217;re actually trying to do is demonstrate your ability and that is competitive and you get a reward for being good at interviewing: you get a job. I remember one of the companies I worked for. I was one of two remote employees so I was already at a disadvantage because this company was not very remote-friendly and I was one of only two women on the team. The team had this approach of strong opinions they usually held which led to lots and lots and lots of argumentation. Argumentation was how decisions are made.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The two of us, first of all, we&#8217;re not able to get the same level of body language, cues and so on at the people physically present were able to do and we were not comfortable interrupting. We were not comfortable shouting and we were excluded from those conversations and I actually got dinged in a review for not participating in discussions enough and I was like, &#8220;That is not my communication style. I cannot possibly be successful in this role,&#8221; and I end up moving on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, there are so many things to response to that one. One is about interrupting, which I think is really interesting. I heard a segment on NPR the other day. It was the usual thing about how men tend to interrupt women a lot. Someone called in and said, &#8220;If someone interrupts and I just say, &#8216;I&#8217;m still speaking, actually.'&#8221; I was thinking about it and I thought, I don&#8217;t have too much trouble with people interrupting me because if they do, then I can ask them to say that I&#8217;m still speaking but what I have noticed is that sometimes men won&#8217;t let me interrupt them but they will let men interrupt them. Then, if there&#8217;s a group of men who all want to speak, I can&#8217;t get a word in because they will only allow interruptions from men. If I wait for them to finish speaking, it never happens because they only stop speaking when they&#8217;re interrupted by a male person.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I haven&#8217;t thought of it quite like that before but I think in a way, interrupting is very ingressive and a more congressive approach is to hear everybody and to take everyone into account and not be trying to show how clever you are. I think that it is very ingressive to want to demonstrate how clever you are all the time. Whereas, I realized that what I really want to do is to help other people understand things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There are two kinds of argument &#8212; well, there are lots of kind of argument &#8212; but there&#8217;s an ingressive argument where everyone is trying to win and the way you win is by showing that you&#8217;re clever than the other person and that they&#8217;re wrong. Whereas, I really like congressive arguments where the aim is to understand something. Then it doesn&#8217;t matter who is right and who&#8217;s wrong because whatever happens, you learn something and you&#8217;ve understood it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I have realized that I am so much more congressive than I thought because I&#8217;ve been trying to emulate ingressive behavior to such a long time. I think a lot of the writing about how women can be successful is about teaching them how to be ingressive so that they can compete with men. That works for some people and I&#8217;ve met plenty of really ingressive women who become successful at that and who are proud of themselves for having done it. But I think there&#8217;s another way, which is to find ways of congressively dealing with ingressive behavior and I fantasize, and this is a kind of abstract dream again, where I fantasize about not an all-women institution. I&#8217;ve worked in all-women institutions and all that happens is there are ingressive and congressive women and the ingressive women take control and that&#8217;s that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> What I fantasize about is an all-congressive institution, where everyone is chosen because they&#8217;re congressive and everyone works together congressively and though, staff are working at congressive, I&#8217;m not quite sure what it would be like because it so far from things that I know. But I&#8217;ve tried to set some things up small microcosms like that for myself. For example, any class I teach is very, very congressive. I try to make it explicitly congressive so that it&#8217;s all about understanding things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I say to my students, there are two types of question. There&#8217;s the type where it trying to show how clever you are and there&#8217;s a type where you&#8217;re trying to understand something and I will not accept the first type and I will accept all of the second type so it doesn&#8217;t matter. You don&#8217;t need to think the question is stupid. If you&#8217;re trying to understand something, it&#8217;s valid and if you&#8217;re trying to show how clever you are, it&#8217;s not valid and I won&#8217;t have that kind of question.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The other really congressive environment that I&#8217;ve set up is the Liederstube and my music saloon where we share music. I really like to think of it as sharing music, rather than performing it because performing is kind of ingressive and there&#8217;s a big risk of failure where it might go wrong. Whereas, when we just share it, all we&#8217;re trying to do is share our love of something with somebody else. We&#8217;re all doing it together. We&#8217;re not trying to be better than other people because there are so many performance situations where if you have five people performing in a row, then they&#8217;re all trying to be better than the others to show how good they are. No, we&#8217;re just all going it together to share something that we love and it&#8217;s not about judging how good someone is. It&#8217;s about doing something together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Idealistically, I would love to do more to see more formal research into psychological aspects of this and what happens with these characteristics in education, in business, in politics, in human interaction. I think that I can see how self-help can run along these lines where if ingressive behavior is coming at you, you find ways of diffusing it. But also to think about when ingressive behavior is useful, I can think of a very, very small number of situations. It is, I think that ingressive behavior is better for people-selves. If you are ingressive, then it means that you will not be so upset by things going wrong or people being horrible to you and things like that. There&#8217;s that disgusting word, resilience which I really hate and I realized I hate the idea of being resilient because I think that resilient is ingressive. To me, it gives me the image of bad things happening to you and you don&#8217;t even care because you&#8217;re sort of oblivious.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I know that resilience is as in the common sense, for being really great but I prefer to think of transformation. I don&#8217;t want to be resilient to bad stuff. I want to be able to take bad stuff in and transform it into something good, which I think is completely different from resilience. I think it&#8217;s a congressive approach to dealing with things, as opposed to resilience, which is like learning how to be a good loser. I don&#8217;t want to learn how to be a good loser. I don&#8217;t want to just accept failure and defeat. I think first of all, we should get to a situation where there is no failure or defeat and everything is a process of transforming stuff for the better, the how idealistic do I sound.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As you&#8217;ve been talking about this, I have figuratively and literally watched a series of light bulbs go off in my brain and this has been amazing. I thought I&#8217;d share a couple of them that may be relevant and may spark some discussion. One is that if you look at this from a game theoretical perspective, ingression wins. Ingression is about the success of the individual over the success of the group and conversely. But look at the frame that what was just presented, if what you care about is the success of the individual, then caring about the success of the individual wins.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Someone on Twitter told me, &#8220;Capitalism is math,&#8221; was the quote and I had no idea what this means but I&#8217;ve figured it out now. If you set up the system so that what you care about is individual success, i.e. Game theory, at least the common presentation of game theory, then the agents in the system that care about individual success will always beat the ones that care about group success. This is a sort of prisoner&#8217;s dilemma where the individuals do well at the expense of the group.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, but then, the fact in the prisoner&#8217;s dilemma, the individuals don&#8217;t do well either.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, the result, yes, is that the group as a whole does worse so they do worse. But some of them actually succeed so it&#8217;s not exactly in all cases. But then &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right but the basic prisoner&#8217;s dilemma is that ingressive behavior actually causes individual loss as well as group loss and that its congressive behavior that succeed. That&#8217;s amazing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re all going to die because of climate change so in the end, we all lose. The other thing that I was thinking about when you talked about setting up a congressive environment is that the way that you mitigate ingressive behavior is having a power structure or relationship between participants such that you can stop the ingressive behavior. If that ingressive person was in a position of power in the group, they couldn&#8217;t be stopped. Or something them would be more difficult. But you are both in a position of power, sort of de facto as a leader, as the teacher and motivated to mitigate ingressive behavior.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or you set it up so that people can&#8217;t succeed individually. They need each other. I read somewhere that a team is defined as the people who can&#8217;t move forward without moving forward together. You can set that up in an organization.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I agree but I also think that it requires maintenance. You can set up a team that way but that team could change to be something else.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah just look at our government.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right so it requires both setting up, that framing and maintaining it over time and the people doing the maintaining are those who have the power to do the maintaining.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, the thing that I said about having an entirely congressive institution is that if all the people are congressive themselves, then that happens anyway. There are some tiny situations, I mean my friend Greg, who helps me come up with the words ingressive and congressive is the most spectacularly congressive person. Whenever I&#8217;m with him, I just feel like he&#8217;s one of the people I know who is explicitly more congressive than me. It&#8217;s so illuminating I would learn so much and I always feel so safe in that situation and that, if there were more people like Greg or if there were an entire environment, an institution that was entirely run by people like that, you almost wouldn&#8217;t need formal structures in place to make sure it carried on like that because everybody would be doing it anyway.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Of course, in order to try and really transform the world, we have to get more people to do it. But I have a suspicion that a lot of ingressive behavior is learned like mind was and that maybe people aren&#8217;t actually as naturally ingressive as that. People, especially little boys and especially in this country are taught to be that way because that&#8217;s how men are supposed to be and that &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re taught that in math class.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, all of the structures of when we were growing up and educated lead towards that. Together with the emphasis on sports, the emphasis on right and wrong subjects. All of those things, children developed the things that are valued because that&#8217;s, like you say if you&#8217;re in a society that rewards ingressive behavior, then the ingressive behavior will succeed the most so people learn those behaviors. If we can gradually unlearn them and I have been on a really interesting journey of unlearning ingressive behavior in the last couple of years since I got this [inaudible]. I feel like the best things I&#8217;m doing in my life at the moment are because of that. I&#8217;m so much happier but like a prisoner&#8217;s dilemma, it&#8217;s not just individual benefit. I think I&#8217;m doing more good for the world at the same time, as also being happier. I think that all from unlearning the ingressive behavior and getting really in touch with my natural congressive roots.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I have another friend who I talked to a lot about this, who is an executive coach and she still really thinks that being a hybrid of ingressive and congressive is better but it&#8217;s interesting because she interprets some of the things I do as being ingressive. Although what I think she&#8217;s doing is she is ascribing ingressive personality to that behavior because most people who do that, do it ingressively. For example, the fact that I quit my job and just struck out by myself might appear to be ingressive because it might appear to be risk taking and it might appear to be doing something for myself. But it was very far from it because it came from a position of going deep inside myself and going, &#8220;How can I help more people and myself at the same time?&#8221; And it wasn&#8217;t a risk at all because I did it so safely. I didn&#8217;t just quit and go.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I took sabbatical. I had a one year job at University of Chicago. I wrote a book and it wasn&#8217;t until I had a promise from the School of the Art Institute that they wanted to keep me there, that I had my book was doing so well, that I felt secure, that I could earn money with that but I got myself a green card so I knew I could stay in this country. I spent three years transitioning from having a full time academic job to being freelance. I think that was an extremely congressive way of doing it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> She think that ingressive behavior is good because you step out of your comfort zone and that&#8217;s how you grow and achieve more things. I say, you can&#8217;t claim that I haven&#8217;t grown and achieve more things across my whole life but I have never stepped out of my comfort zone. What I have done is I have understood my comfort zone so that I can understand how to stretch it so that I&#8217;m always inside it. I never step outside it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s totally interesting that you talked about succeeding in parts by figuring out where your ingressive behaviors and tendencies were and kind of rooting them out, making a deliberate choice to be more congressive and I saw a parallel with that in my own life as a transgender woman before I transition full time. I was living kind of a double and I was trying very hard to present masculine and I tried very hard to be a man and failed spectacularly at it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When I realized that I needed to transition, I decided I was pressing the big red reset button of my life and I could change whatever the hell I wanted to at the same time because the timing was good. Through the lens that you provided me now, I see that the people that I admired, they were not competitive, they were not people who cared about winning and losing. They were people who cared about other people. I made a deliberate effort to try to reshape myself into a person like that. For me personally, I have been exponentially more successful and more impactful since I took on or normalized the congressive behaviors and tendencies that I had in myself that I had repressed for all those years.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is an amazing insight and I have tingles going on down my spine that you share that through the lens of these words that I&#8217;ve come up with because I really believe that when you have words for things, you can think about them differently and that opens us up to new ways of thinking. On the one hand, it&#8217;s just words but on the other hand, the words are a starting point for how we think. Just like in other languages, there are words or concepts that we don&#8217;t have and therefore, it&#8217;s hard for us to think about those emotions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I remember the first time I heard the word, &#8216;schadenfreude,&#8217; and I just thought, &#8220;Oh, my goodness. That&#8217;s fantastic,&#8221; and that&#8217;s not a word that we have so we just have to use the German word. I have always felt that once we have a word for something that we can think about it more clearly and I have not done anything as brave or dramatic as your transition but I have also gone through a small version of that where I wanted to get rid of the ingressive behavior. I realized while I was doing that, that many aspects of my previous life couldn&#8217;t continue, including my previous job.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just want to share one more thing if I can because I had another light bulb go off that is brighter than all of the other bulbs previously, cumulatively because you&#8217;re talking about having a new word, shapes, the thought that you can have. What I just now realized is that I&#8217;ve spent pretty much my entire adult life working towards this concept that I just now have the words to describe. This is why I have been interested in socialism because for me, the closest thing I&#8217;ve found to a philosophy in practice of building congressive organizations.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> What I&#8217;ve discovered for myself just now is that&#8217;s actually the thing that I care about and socialism is a proxy for that for me. It&#8217;s a proxy for expressing in terms of how do we build congressive societies. But all of the work that I&#8217;ve done, consulting with teams in organization that trying to build good teams, has been trying to shift teams toward to being more congressive so that they work better together. I&#8217;ve just now realized that what I&#8217;ve been doing my whole career is that. Now, I have the word for it and I am so happy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s amazing and it reminds me of one of the many amazing things that I heard Jessica say at the EmpEx Conference about if we think linearly, then we get to a point where we think about blame and we blame individuals for things. Whereas, on the way I interpreted it, was if we think ingressively, then we think about blame. But if we think congressively, then we see a system as a whole. Then we realize that it&#8217;s a system that we should be thinking about, not the individuals. I think that&#8217;s a congressive way of thinking.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is why I cared so much about systems thinking. I&#8217;ve made that a focus of my career. I&#8217;m going to be thinking about this, probably for years.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think this is what category theory is. It’s about thinking about the whole systems as units, instead of individual things inside them and that&#8217;s what I think about society. I think there&#8217;s an ingressive view which is the one that look after themselves and there&#8217;s a congressive view which is that society is one whole, that we should always be thinking about that whole.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s a great place to wrap up. This has been a stunning and transformative conversation. We’re actually going to skip reflections because we sort of arrived at consensus via little chat window while we are recording that we need more time. We need to internalize this more and think about this more so maybe we&#8217;ll blog our reflections this time around.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Eugenia, this has been an amazing conversation. You’ve really given me tools for thinking about things in a different way that I hadn&#8217;t thought of before. I love your perspective and thank you so much for being with us today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EUGENIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you for having me. I think it has been amazing and I have so many things that I want to think about as well and I hope you&#8217;ll continue the conversation too.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
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]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Dr. Eugenia Cheng: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/DrEugeniaCheng"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@DrEugeniaCheng</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://eugeniacheng.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">eugeniacheng.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Shopping is Hard; Let’s Do Math!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”; Eugenia’s Introduction</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Books:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465097677/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0465097677&amp;linkId=0d495c591e20d50802c3fa80ef30775d"><span style="font-weight: 400;">How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465094813/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0465094813&amp;linkId=1c8d256e9484319b7631615ccc857fd1"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>YouTube Channels:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/TheCatsters/featured"><span style="font-weight: 400;">TheCatsters</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">TheMathsters</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Articles:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/science/eugenia-cheng-math-how-to-bake-pi.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Eugenia Cheng Makes Math a Piece of Cake</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.wsj.com/news/types/everyday-math"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Everyday Math</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
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</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p><b>01:54</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Getting Into Math: Is math useful? Is that the point?</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart</span></a></p>
<p><b>20:17 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_theory"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Category Theory</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Textbooks:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0387984038/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0387984038&amp;linkId=fb86951beaddc97589ea491f060216ce"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Categories for the Working Mathematician</span></a></p>
<p style="text-ali]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Dr. Eugenia Cheng: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/DrEugeniaCheng"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@DrEugeniaCheng</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://eugeniacheng.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">eugeniacheng.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Shopping is Hard; Let’s Do Math!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”; Eugenia’s Introduction</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Books:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465097677/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0465097677&amp;linkId=0d495c591e20d50802c3fa80ef30775d"><span style="font-weight: 400;">How to Bake Pi: An Edible Exploration of the Mathematics of Mathematics</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465094813/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0465094813&amp;linkId=1c8d256e9484319b7631615ccc857fd1"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Beyond Infinity: An Expedition to the Outer Limits of Mathematics</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>YouTube Channels:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/TheCatsters/featured"><span style="font-weight: 400;">TheCatsters</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">TheMathsters</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Articles:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/03/science/eugenia-cheng-math-how-to-bake-pi.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Eugenia Cheng Makes Math a Piece of Cake</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.wsj.com/news/types/everyday-math"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Everyday Math</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p><b>01:54</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Getting Into Math: Is math useful? Is that the point?</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">A Mathematician’s Lament by Paul Lockhart</span></a></p>
<p><b>20:17 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_theory"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Category Theory</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Textbooks:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0387984038/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0387984038&amp;linkId=fb86951beaddc97589ea491f060216ce"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Categories for the Working Mathematician</span></a></p>
<p style="text-ali]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Eugenia.jpg"></itunes:image>
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					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>01:09:22</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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					<title>Episode 037: Failure Mode with Emily Gorcenski</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-037-failure-mode-with-emily-gorcenski/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 21 Jun 2017 05:00:48 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=654</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Emily Gorcenski talks about data science, failure modes in software and in democracy, and open data and open science.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Emily Gorcenski talks about data science, failure modes in software and in democracy, and open data and open science.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Emily Gorcenski: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/EmilyGorcenski"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@EmilyGorcenski</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://emilygorcenski.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">emilygorcenski.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.simple.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Simple</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Diamonds Are For Gender” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>00:56</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story, Superpowers, and Data Science</span></p>
<p><b>04:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Diversity and Career Paths in Data Science</span></p>
<p><b>10:51 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Ethical Debates Within the Data Science Field</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553418815/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0553418815&amp;linkId=0ed7c081ef2baa2e5a6f33a076e2929b"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Therac-25</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/process-analysis-tools/overview/fmea.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">FMEA (Failure Mode Effects Analysis)</span></a></p>
<p><b>17:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Software Development and Engineering; Failure Modes in Software</span></p>
<p><b>21:44 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Failure Modes in Democracy; Voting Machine Software</span></p>
<p><b>33:37 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Working for a Government Contractor</span></p>
<p><b>36:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Data Patterns and Tampering</span></p>
<p><b>39:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Open Data and Open Science</span></p>
<p><b>45:59 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Falsifying Data</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag, </b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you? Join or Slack community and support us via </b><a style="background-color: #ffffff; font-size: 1.8rem;" href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>To jumpstart these efforts, we are very excited to announce that we have been selected for this month’s </b><a href="http://joinfundclub.com/"><b>Fund Club</b></a><b> project!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Coraline: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Considering all the ways something can fail.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> The world that I live in and the kind of software development practices that I take for granted are extraordinary niche.</span></p>
<p><b>Emily:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Tech conferences and their decadence vs academic/corporate conferences.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to Episode 37 of &#8216;Diamonds Are For Gender.&#8217; I&#8217;m Sam Livingston-Gray and here is my co-host, Coraline Ada Ehmke.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Your co-host on Greater Than Code, Sam. Just a gentle reminder. We have an incredible guest today, Emily Gorcenski is joining us. By title, Emily G. is a senior data scientist at Simple but by practice, they are transgender activist, hockey player and technologist, passionately working in the intersection of computing and society. Their passions include technology ethics, regulation of computing and of course, posting selfies on Twitter. Don’t we all love that? Hi, Emily.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How&#8217;s it going? Thank you for having me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s going great. What should we know about you for people who don&#8217;t already know you from Twitter fame? What makes you unique and special and what are your superpowers?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t really know what makes me unique. I think my superpowers is I&#8217;m very good at complaining very publicly and that&#8217;s really what my Twitter is all about. But I guess the thing that makes me unique is I&#8217;ve just had a very strange kind of career enter in tech and being in tech, I didn&#8217;t study computer science. I didn&#8217;t plan to be a data scientist. I just stumbled into this and along the way have managed to gather really unique array of experiences that have pushed me towards where I am now and what I&#8217;m working on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Most of my background is in, actually abstract mathematics, which is not the most common thing that we use code for. But I&#8217;ve turned that into weird kind of work experience like epidemiology and clinical psychology. I&#8217;ve ran clinical trials and stuff like that so it&#8217;s a different path than what most people take come into data science.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Was data science something that always interested you?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Honestly, no. I wanted to build airplanes. I wanted to be a fighter pilot when I was a kid and that was never going to happen because my vision, because I didn&#8217;t work hard enough since school to get into the academy or anything like that. I decided that I wanted to build a fighter planes so that&#8217;s what I went to college to study. When I was there, I fell in love with math instead and using computers to solve math problems that humans can&#8217;t. That&#8217;s really what I focused on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> My goal was I was going be a math professor. I was going to write fancy computer algorithms to solve complicated problems and turns out that it didn&#8217;t really happen either. I never went to grad school. I ended up getting really sick as an undergrad and taking a bunch of time off. When I came back, I said, &#8220;I cannot do this grad student salary for seven years. There is no way.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I entered industry and I did eventually get to work on fighter planes and it turns out that working on fighter planes is exceptionally boring. Also, kind of stinks and I realized I was building weapons and just decided that I didn&#8217;t want to be doing that anymore.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What&#8217;s your first data science job?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a complicated one. I guess the first time I had the position title of data scientist was at Simple and I&#8217;ve only been there for about nine months at this point. But I&#8217;ve been working in data for 15 plus years. We just call it different stuff: signal processing, quantitative analytics, data engineering, database-whatever. The term data scientist itself has an interesting very recent origin because when companies started realizing that they had the ability to both generate and store data at scale, they realized that they didn&#8217;t have people that knew how to do anything with it and most of those people were in academia so they threw a bunch of money at them and said, &#8220;We can still call you a scientist. Just come work for us.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I imagine that the employment situation in academia is such that works pretty well?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, it&#8217;s a really big difference when you&#8217;re doing your fifth year of a postdoc or whatever and making 35K and somebody dangles six figures in front of you and says, &#8220;You can work 40 hours a week, not 140.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can see why that might be a motivating factor, definitely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the interesting things to me about data science, I&#8217;ve been interviewing a lot lately and a couple of the companies that I have talked to have data science departments. I&#8217;m seeing, at least on the gender access, a lot more diversity in data science than in general tech. Has that been your experience too?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That has definitely been my experience in tech-oriented companies that have data science teams. Even my team is very diverse that I work with now. That&#8217;s not been my case for people who had the traditional role coming up through traditional engineering companies like the aerospace firms, that kind of thing. But I do think that a lot of what&#8217;s new, what&#8217;s being developed in data science now has to do with computer vision type problems, things like self-driving cars and algorithms that can process images to classify, to judge what is the style of this object or whatever.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A lot of that work is motivated by work in cognitive psychology and visual neuropsychology or studying the visual cortex. A lot of people are coming over from that space because they&#8217;re working with convolutional neural network there. They&#8217;re working with all this technology. They&#8217;re familiar with the Python libraries. A lot of them tend to be women. A lot of people that are working in that field in academia are women so I think there&#8217;s been some migration from that area. I think that has helped encouraged more women who are very talented to see like, &#8220;There is career in technology that works for me and I can do this.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m curious about the role that background and training plays in all of this. Are there multiple career paths into data science? Is it pretty much straight through math or do you get to recruit from STEM all over the place or what?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s STEM all over the place. I know people without college degrees working in data science. I know people with PhDs working in data science. I know people have PhDs in psychology. I know people with degrees in economics and accounting and all sorts of fields. Math is one aspect of it but data science is a really broad field with a lot of different requirements. I don&#8217;t think that there is a single best career path to go through.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> You’re not going to do great data scientists if you just hire seven computational mathematicians. They&#8217;re just going to do the same thing. There&#8217;s a lot of exploration. There&#8217;s a lot of diversity needed to get to the answers and the insights that a team is supposed to deliver.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s really interesting. I guess, whenever I see data science, I think of Python and statistics and I have enjoyed Python in the past and my stats classes that were algebra based for fun but the calc one was really, really hard for me. I think that&#8217;s something that I could do in another lifetime but that&#8217;s really interesting to hear.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve only dabbled in data science, working on machine learning algorithms but I found it fascinating. But for me, the math was a really barrier because math is definitely not my strong point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, it&#8217;s an interesting space because you do need to know some math or at least understand it, to understand the output but the way that data science tools are maturing now, I guess the best analogy is you can be a JavaScript developer and you can be a very good JavaScript developer without needing to know anything about the stack or the heap or underlying memory models or assembly code or anything like that. You don&#8217;t need to know all of the intricacies of linear algebra to understand what principle component analysis is. You just need to know this is the output, here&#8217;s how I use the APIs. There is definitely a lot of maturation that is happening within the field and that is certainly something that has enabled more people to be able to come into data science and to do things. The technology, I don&#8217;t think is super mature yet, but it&#8217;s definitely getting to that point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s pretty much the approach I was taking. The algorithms I was using were implemented generally in C and Ruby so I got it talking to C libraries. I didn&#8217;t have to understand the mechanics of what the algorithms were doing. I just had to interact with them. I just select them, of course and understand conceptually what they&#8217;re doing. But it was mainly a matter of interfacing via APIs and giving the data that I wanted and treating them as a black box.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You still have to know what questions to ask and what questions it&#8217;s possible to ask, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, absolutely. There&#8217;s a lot of domain knowledge that you need to know in order to drive towards the right insights. Certainly, being able to know what the weaknesses of a certain algorithm versus another is a help. But I think that&#8217;s why data science works. It&#8217;s a really compelling team-oriented approach for a company. If you have a good team that has somebody that really [inaudible] all the math but somebody else that is really a domain-savvy with the insights, that&#8217;s a perfect pairing because the domain-savvy person can point like a pre-filter for the signal, from the noise.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then, the math person can go and say, &#8220;We don&#8217;t want to use a PCI for this. We want to use K-means clustering because of blah-blah-blah-blah-blah,&#8221; that there&#8217;s a lot of good opportunities for having that diversity, having that range of experience on a team.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How is data science use at Simple?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to be careful about how much we say here because Simple is in the finance industry. There&#8217;s not much that we can reveal. What I can say is that as a data scientist at Simple, I work on product development. I have a product team and we&#8217;re always looking to understand how people use money, save money, spend money. Our mission as a company is to help people feel comfortable with their money. One of the things that we do is we look at how do we help them with that, how do we drive better customer experiences using data and how do we understand our customers based on the data that we have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess not a lot of other companies, maybe in the financial space especially for fraud prevention as well and then another spaces for recommendation engines, things on those lines.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, there is definitely a lot of use of that. There are companies out there that specialized in building things like fraud metrics. They have access to massive data stores where they can look and see what the difference between a fraudster and a non-fraudster is. There is definitely some use for that within the finance space. But also, even things like retail space, people do retail fraud. That&#8217;s still a thing that exists. Yeah, there are companies that work on that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting. Mentioning the use of data science in retail, for example makes me think of my own personal threshold for when it&#8217;s okay to work at a company. Obviously, you decided that working in construction of fighter jets was not for you. I&#8217;ve haven&#8217;t formalized it but I feel like my own personal line is somewhere right around selling people stuff they don&#8217;t need. I wonder, how much in the field of data science crosses that particular line and I guess more generally, are there ethical debates within the field? Are there areas of discussion around that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There are, yes. Data science is a field that is one of my passions that has amazing ability to do unintentional harm. There&#8217;s dozens of case studies out there. I&#8217;m sure you all know Carina Zona, she gives a fantastic talk. Cathy O&#8217;Neil has an amazing book called, &#8216;Weapons of Math Destruction,&#8217; and that goes into some case studies of that. I&#8217;ve done some work in this space on my own but data science does raise some interesting ethical questions because you&#8217;re essentially inferring things about a person that may or may not be true, that have material impact on what they experience and how they experience your product and how they get to move through the world. It is a very tricky space to work in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As far as debates in the field, there are definitely people talking about it but I want there to be more. I don&#8217;t think that there&#8217;s enough talk about, &#8220;Are we doing things ethically? Are we able to use these algorithms safely? Do we have ways to protect users from harm?&#8221; I do a lot of work in tech ethics and the way that I define that is that ethics is about the analysis of risk in the mitigation of harm. That is something that comes from my experience working in medical devices and in doing clinical research.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s not about never doing the wrong thing. It&#8217;s not about getting 100% accuracy. It&#8217;s about making sure that we have, as a team or as a company or as technologists, established transparent practices for assessing what the harm profiles are, taking steps to mitigate them and having a framework for remediation when those things do go wrong. I think that data science is still a lot better at that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>With medical devices, I guess there&#8217;s the obvious case of the machine that delivers orders of magnitude more radiation than it should because of programming error but how does that come up when you&#8217;re doing data analysis?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was Therac-25, for anyone that wants to look that up in Wikipedia. That was a device back in the early 1980s. It ended up killing four people. When we look at data, there&#8217;s all sorts of ways that we can learn from that case study. One of them being that a consequence of Therac-25 in medical device regulation is that, in order to put software on a medical device, depending on its risk profile, you don&#8217;t have to go through the specific process but you have to do a failure analysis.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you don&#8217;t do failure analysis, the FDA will not allow you to sell a medical device. Data science could really benefit from that and there is a process called FMEA. I believe it stands for Failure Mode Effects Analysis. It&#8217;s a really fascinating thing that I really do wish that we could do more, not just in data science but software engineering in general, where you basically gather your team, go through a brainstorming session and you think of all the ways that something could fail.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It could be something like somebody pulls the plug out, somebody drops their phone or whatever. Then you rank each one of those failures on three axis from one to 10. The first being the severity of harm: what goes wrong if this failure happens, how severe is the harm, given that it occurs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> What&#8217;s the probability of harm, if it happened? Say, your failure is that your battery explodes, what&#8217;s the probability that harm happens if the battery explodes. That might be like 100%, right? But if the power goes out, that harm might be like 1%, it has to be like a confluence of factors in order for harm to actually occur. The probability of harm, the severity of harm and then, the important one is that detectability of harm if it occurs. How do you detect the failure if it occurs?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In medical device, a great example for this is you have an IV monitor and your failure mode is the power cord &#8212; somebody trips in the power cord. The severity of that could be very severe, like if the pumps stops pumping medicine, the person might die. As for detectability, how do you detect if the power cord is out. If you are just designing the device, you might be like, &#8220;Oh, no. That&#8217;s bad.&#8221; It would be almost impossible so that&#8217;s going to be like a nine or a 10.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then you go back through your design process and you say, &#8220;This is a really bad score. Let’s build in a fail-safe,&#8221; so the fail-safe that we have in hospitals is if the power goes out for an IV pump, it makes an audible sound. It starts beeping really loudly, really annoying. Using a battery backup, that takes that detectability score from like a nine down to like a three.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That’s a process that we could learn from a data science and software engineering in general, like what are the ways that this algorithm could fail and harm people? Well, maybe it gets trained on bad data so now, you have an algorithm running in the wild and it adapts to bad data. Now, all of your customers [inaudible], all of your credit scores are bad so they get charged a higher interest rate or something like that. That&#8217;s a really evident way of harming somebody and it might be hard to detect because it&#8217;s really hard to validate encrypt data but it is something that could happen. If we go through those exercises, we can start developing safer algorithms.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that model could be adapted even when the consequences of something going wrong, just involve system downtime or just involved availability of the service. The scope isn&#8217;t just limited to life or death situations or situations that severely impact an individual person&#8217;s life. But it sounds like they have more to do with just general resiliency.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. In physical engineering spaces, we go through processes like this all the time. If you build a bridge, you go through a process like this. If you&#8217;re building a factory or some power plant or anything like that, you definitely go through these like what are the failures? It&#8217;s an iterative process and you take all three of those scores and they&#8217;re all rank from one to ten, you multiply them all together and that gives you an idea of where the highest risk things are. You start with the highest risk things and then you kind of work your way down until you run out of money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s interesting what software development part from engineering and what is doesn&#8217;t. We definitely want to consider ourselves engineers that has been a long time habit of software developers and about software engineering. But it seems we like to skip the hard parts, the parts that actually require discipline and actually require hard work like planning for failure conditions, like detailed software is very opposed these days to detail planning of any kind, documentation. All of these things are hard and we just simply avoid them but they&#8217;re really a core to true engineering as a discipline.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It very much is and software is different by nature than physical engineering. I know that people have rehashed this debate over and over and over but I still fail to see any valid arguments that say that things like documentation are not part of software developers job, things like risk analysis need to be part of that process. Our industry has evolved around this idea of rapid deployment, rapid delivery, go-go-go-go-go. If you&#8217;re not iterating fast enough, if you&#8217;re not disrupting, you&#8217;re not being productive enough. My answer to that is if our entire industry is built on skipping these necessary steps, then we don&#8217;t really have an industry. We just have an accident waiting to happen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A distributed series of accidents, really.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, pretty much. There are great people out there doing site reliability stuff, doing operations stuff that have built in lots of safeguards when things go wrong and that&#8217;s great and every operations engineer that I&#8217;ve ever talked to would really love to sit a dev down and say, &#8220;Stop coding for a week.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just heard a story yesterday about a friend of mine does dev ops work and there was all sorts of pressure on him to get the code that was developed during the current sprint deployed so that sprint velocity was maintained, sort of like playing the numbers there and the Chef framework that he is using in his job is not very resilient and whenever he goes to deploy something to staging, it&#8217;s turning problems that could come back to bite the company in the ass when it comes time to move to production. He&#8217;s filling this pressure to get things deployed but he has no confidence in the infrastructure at all and the development team doesn&#8217;t want to take the time to beef up that infrastructure because they&#8217;re so busy delivering features and that just sounds like a recipe for disaster.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, certainly it can be. Cycling that back to data science, we have things like that all the time. The problem is it doesn&#8217;t really work like you can patch a feature in software, you can write a hack and you write your comment be like, &#8220;This is a hack. Get this out by Friday,&#8221; and then you put it into your tech that column and in data science, that&#8217;s often not the case like you train these algorithms and you can&#8217;t patch the training of them because under the hood, we don&#8217;t know how they work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They say, &#8220;Here&#8217;s data. Here is output. Okay,&#8221; and then something happens like the self-driving car gets into an accident and they want to fix just that. Well, it&#8217;s really hard to go and just fix that part of the algorithm that made that decision. It&#8217;s almost impossible to do that. That rapid iteration, like people are really trying to do that in data science but if you pay attention to just any services that you use, you&#8217;ll see those failures top up and in stuff that is built on machine learning. Just look at the ads that you get. You take an ad blocker off and look at some of the absurd ads that you get every once in a while.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My favorite was when Amazon had a recommendation for me, it said, &#8220;Because you bought the Zombie Survival Guide &#8211;,&#8221; and it recommended a speculum to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a screen shot. I have proof because it was so absurd and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;What led to this particular recommendation? What data fed into this algorithm and decided that those things were related?&#8221; I have no idea.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It is certainly more entertaining than the classic, &#8220;You just bought a fire extinguisher. Let us recommend ten more fire extinguishers to you.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, there is that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s great.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Emily, we&#8217;ve talked about failure modes in software and I would argue that what we&#8217;re experiencing today is a failure mode in democracy and there are lots of components of that from secret cabals working on health care reform to not allowing reporter&#8217;s access to firing people who are investigating you. But the issues actually go back further than that with the voting process itself. We&#8217;ve seen not enough discussion of disenfranchisement of voters but even those who do manage to vote are not safe from failure modes. I know you&#8217;ve done a lot of analysis of this. Would you like to talk about that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, absolutely. This is a really interesting part of my life and part of my work. Electronic voting machines are pretty ubiquitous. I just voted at with one yesterday here in Virginia. My medical device experience has taught me a lot about how software is regulated. Working in that space and working for the government for so many years, I have an ability to be able to quickly navigate through government documents and find where they are.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I spent my Thanksgiving break last year and this was right around the time that there was lots of allegations of possible impropriety and Jill Stein was doing the recounts and all that. I decided to look into voting machines and to see if they&#8217;re regulated by the federal government and to what extent they are and what the software process is. What I ended up finding was that &#8212; and some other people have looked into this prior to me doing so &#8212; they are actually regulated. There is a set of voluntary guidelines that are out there. It&#8217;s up to the states to decide to what extent they implement them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Several states, I believe that there are 12 states don&#8217;t implement or don&#8217;t mandate any certification process. Then, there are some that require full compliance to the&#8230; Is it VVSG? I forget exactly the acronym, the voting standards for voting machines. I dug into this and I went through and I started reading the test reports. These manufacturers, in order to get them certified, they don&#8217;t have to do certification if they want to use them and say Michigan, which doesn&#8217;t require anything. You can just sell a voting machine to Michigan. That&#8217;ll be like, &#8220;Great. This is awesome.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But if you want to do it in a state that does have requirements, you have to go through this process. You have to have independent labs accredit the entire machine, not just the software but the hardware. They want to check to see if things like, &#8220;Do they work in improper humidity like high humidity? How much force is it take to break open the box to get its paper ballots?&#8221; All sorts of stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Part of that process is reviewing the software so I started looking into the software review process and found that it is near to non-existent. It is effectively the same as running the software through a code linter. The things that they&#8217;re looking for are things like line length violations. They&#8217;re looking for functions that have too many arguments. Is nesting too deep? There is no auditing of the vote handling pathways. There&#8217;s no security audit mandatory and in many cases, the inspectors do not actually review the source code itself. They only review the comments.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There are a small handful of companies that build better machines. There are a small handful of labs that test them. Those companies that build them, they&#8217;re generally small businesses and they have to report what their tech stack is and there&#8217;s these devices are built with a mix of C#, C++, Java, COBOL. Visual Basic is in the stack. It&#8217;s a mess. The fact that something so critical to our nation&#8217;s infrastructure can be so easily compromisable is a real concern.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is there evidence that compromises [inaudible]?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting. There&#8217;s a certain evolving situation that&#8217;s actually in the news this morning. There&#8217;s all sorts of allegations about Russia&#8217;s involvement in election tampering. We know that they spend up lots of media efforts. Even back in January when the first CIA/NSA report was published, they did say that Russia had attempted to explore voting systems and our voter registration rolls.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Recently, it has come out that they&#8217;ve also targeted the machines themselves. Now, I saw a report that&#8217;s unconfirmed, that there may have been some efforts to modify vote tallies in these machines. None of that is for certain. I still maintain the stance that vote tallies have not been modified because I don&#8217;t see any evidence of it in the outcome. But it would be really, really easy to shift in such a subtle way that it would be impossible to detect. Wisconsin was won by 20,000 votes out of millions of people. All you need to do at that point is shift a small percentage of votes in every machine in order to get that. That would be almost impossible to detect.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Let’s say, you shifted five votes per machine for 10,000 machines or for 5,000 machines or whatever it might be, that could have a huge impact but you would never ever detect that through statistical methods. It&#8217;s really difficult to tell. Lots of people have looked into voting machines security and have said this is really bad. We know that Russian hackers are very good so it&#8217;s actually possible that they looked into it and they&#8217;ve managed to hack the machines.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> All of that work is great, I think that the people doing that are super intelligent for me. If I were Russia and I want to get bad code into the machines, I would profile every single person that works at ES&amp;S and Diebold and figure out who&#8217;s in financial trouble, who&#8217;s got gambling debts, who&#8217;s doing something unsavory in their personal lives and offer them, &#8220;Here&#8217;s $5,000. Put this code into the machine,&#8221; and the thing is that&#8217;s super easy to do because if you look at the test reports for all these machines and I&#8217;ve read all 31 test reports that were available up to November of last year, the fact that things like line length violations are getting flagged by software auditors, it tells me that there are not adequate development processes in place.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I can write a five-line Python script that will tell me if my lines are too long. It&#8217;s a trivial amount of work to put that into a CI system. If you&#8217;re not doing that, that to me means that you don&#8217;t use CI properly. It means that you don&#8217;t have proper peer review practices. It means that you&#8217;re probably not using version control properly. It would be trivially easy for somebody to take a bribe from the Russian government to put a DLL or something into that software that would modify those totals.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And then, boom! You compromised everything from that manufacturer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And not only that but it would pass the bill checksum so you would never be able to do the forensics after the fact. The only way you catch it is through source code analysis and these are all closed-source machines.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That brings to mind, I did see some talk of open source in voting machine software. Open source is of course not a panacea but making your algorithms in your code public is pretty intrinsic to security work in general because like a secret algorithm is considered less safe, less reliable than a public algorithm, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, definitely. At the very minimum, the vote handling pathways need to fully vetted. They need to be open. They need to be independently audited. The fact that they&#8217;re not, it&#8217;s astonishing. It would be like getting on an airplane where nobody looked at the flight control code. You would never ever do that. Flight control code isn&#8217;t open source either but we have processes, we have regulations for how that gets built. We have faith that it&#8217;s probably not going to fail and if it does fail, it&#8217;s going to fail in some way that is detectable and safe.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Voting machines is kind of a Wild West. There&#8217;s no way validating like where&#8217;s the failure coming from? Is it coming from the scanner that scans a paper ballot? Is it the database? Think of how many times you&#8217;ve had a postgres error. Lots of these machines are taking those that&#8217;s scanned and just shoving it to postgres.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and that&#8217;s assuming there even is a paper ballot to work with. I mean, a voter verifiable paper trail is seems to me to be like the bare minimum that you could possibly do and it&#8217;s a really important fail-safe but it&#8217;s also a really expensive fail-safe if you have to go back and employ an army of people to manually do a recount on paper, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. You know, random paper trail audits for the ballots would be mandatory. Random audits would go a long way and you just build that into the expense of running an election. For me, that&#8217;s a trivially small cost for securing voting, securing democracy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s right. I totally hadn&#8217;t considered that sampling approach. I was thinking more of like in the event of an actual recount. But yeah, you&#8217;re right. That&#8217;s much simpler.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You said a lot of the manufacturers of voting machines are small businesses. Diebold, of course is an exception to that but who are the people working there and why is it that companies that are in the retail space can afford to pay six figures for a software developer to make sure that Amazon recommendation engine works as expected and yet, we&#8217;re not hiring those people to write something that&#8217;s fundamental to the health of our democracy?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. That&#8217;s interesting. I often talk about this when I&#8217;m in a ranty mood, how there&#8217;s two different software industries or two different tech industries. There&#8217;s the one that we&#8217;re probably most familiar with, which is web-focused and very public and Silicon Valley and ping-pong and beer and all of that. Then there&#8217;s another tech industry, which is the offshoot from engineering, the offshoot from your typical, like your GE&#8217;s, your Lockheed&#8217;s and stuff like that. I think that those companies still have strong recruiting pool. Those industries don&#8217;t overlap a lot. You can talk to a 20-year Java developer and have no idea what they&#8217;re talking about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Likewise say, you would tell them about all sorts of deployment, scripts and like I&#8217;m using Chef and Puppet and they&#8217;d be like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know what you&#8217;re talking about,&#8221; and you could even be writing in the same language. You could be writing in a lot of the same technology. I think that companies like voting machine companies, I&#8217;m sure that their software developers are very good but culturally, it&#8217;s very different. It doesn&#8217;t have the same Silicon Valley mindset. They&#8217;re still rooted in very much the old top-down waterfall management processes for the most part.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you look at some of the Glassdoor reviews for some of these companies, employees report things like documented bugs being left into production, even if they&#8217;re possibly fatal bugs because they don&#8217;t want to go through the expense of re-auditing the software. You do have definitely some issues with regulatory structure that need to be worked on but I strongly think that we need to re-evaluate how we handle that. But it&#8217;s a different world and I just think that a lot of the practices that we&#8217;ve developed has not translated over there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would actually argue. I started software development in the 90s and I grew up with waterfall, basically. I would argue that voting machine software is probably well-suited to waterfall development, if you can handle the expense of waterfall development because waterfall to me brings up test for very specific requirements, lots of planning, lots of documentation. That&#8217;s what I want from voting software. I don&#8217;t want voting software that&#8217;s written in one week&#8217;s sprints.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, absolutely. There&#8217;s certainly something to that but the penalty of waterfall is that you end up getting to that late cycle where you have to leave bugs in, where you have to leave flaws in so there needs to be something in between Agile and waterfall. People have developed things and to varying extents but it definitely is interesting like if you took a developer from any of the big tech companies out there now and you put them in that environment to work on voting machines, they would last a week and be like, &#8220;I can&#8217;t deal with this. I can&#8217;t deal with a world that doesn&#8217;t have a proper CI practice. I can&#8217;t live with the world that doesn&#8217;t have that structures and plans in this way.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For me it would be pair programming, I&#8217;m sure. I&#8217;ve been surprised to find out that was a common practice. I&#8217;m curious about their career path for people who work in these companies too. I imagine that the incentives are much more aligned towards people who work in the same job for five or ten years, don&#8217;t move around a lot, don&#8217;t necessarily go to a lot of conferences. That&#8217;s just my own personal bias. I don&#8217;t know if there&#8217;s any way to check that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I get that sense very strongly myself and my experience there is I spent eight years working for a government contractor that was very much like that. We had six years to vest our 401k. We had flexible hours and all sorts of the perks like that and even though they claimed that it was not a hierarchical structure, it is very hierarchical structure. Lots of people that worked at the Northrop Grumman, things like that say, how great it was, how lucky you millennials are to have a place like this and you should be grateful for the money that we&#8217;re giving you, type of thing is a very old school mentality.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Leaving it was hard because they do make it difficult to move around. They do lock you in and it&#8217;s hard to get career exposure. I&#8217;ve struggle a lot with exposure when I left and was trying to find a job because I didn&#8217;t have any experience in the typical tech industry or the industry that we&#8217;re familiar so nobody knew what to do with my resume, nobody knew what to do with who I was, what my background was. It was definitely a struggle. I had to get permission to go to a conference. I just submit things to conferences now like I just go and I work remote so I&#8217;ve been probably working from states that my company doesn&#8217;t even know that I&#8217;m in at the moment or something like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or countries.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, or countries. I spent a month working from Prague. I spent three weeks in Germany. It&#8217;s totally a different experience.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I crack up just a minute ago when you said nobody knew what to do with my resume because of course, for years I worried that my resume, I grew up with this advice that you didn&#8217;t want to have too many short jobs on your resume because it would show that you are a job hopper, that you aren&#8217;t committed.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m doomed.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. The longest I&#8217;ve been anywhere was Living Social where I was at for two years and I think seven months. It&#8217;s hilarious to me to hear that when you came out of this company that you worked out for eight years, nobody knew what to do with your resume. It&#8217;s just so totally backwards. I love it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s a generational thing or what but there&#8217;s definitely some hilarity in that space and I think, kind of cycling back to the voting machines, I don&#8217;t know anybody that works for them. I don&#8217;t want to slander their business or their developers or anything like that but when you read what they have to say on Glassdoor and when you look at just the evidence that&#8217;s out there, you can see a manifestation of a very different form of development thought.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was curious earlier, you were talking about statistical methods of detecting vote tampering and there has been threads on Twitter about people finding curious patterns in some of the data that they&#8217;ve looked at. I wonder how valid any of those are? How would you be able to tell if votes looked weird?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If you were to ask five different statisticians you&#8217;ll get ten different answers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Probably.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, probably. I think it&#8217;s very difficult. I don&#8217;t know what method I would use. I don&#8217;t know how I would go about doing that, looking at that data but there is interesting stuff out there. It&#8217;s easy to get into a trap when you see things that tell you things that you want to be true because you look at data and you see a pattern in that data that fits what you want to believe. You believe that the data is subjective so it&#8217;s very easy to be like, &#8220;Look at this. This precinct has a vote ratio of exactly 3:2. What are the chances that out of 13,000 voters, it&#8217;s going to be exactly three to two? That&#8217;s obviously evidence of tampering.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Well, maybe. Maybe that ratio is super weird but you need to weigh that against every precinct in the country in every possible outcome and the [inaudible] that are impossible. Then you also have to wait against the fact that you expect a Russian hackers to be so smart, they can remotely break into our voting machines software when these things sit in the basement of the community center in the middle of Peoria or whatever like that, that they have intelligence &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Powered off.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, powered off but they have the intelligence to do these massive cyber hacking or whatever operations and not the intelligence to [inaudible] up the vote the numbers so it doesn&#8217;t look like a perfect ratio? Come on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, is there value in opening that data up and playing in the open and sort of blowing at interested parties who are able to do that data analysis and maybe don&#8217;t have the same bias toward, &#8220;Yes, this looks like exactly what I was expecting.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There are some people that do that. I don&#8217;t know if voting data is made public universally but there, definitely are people that do that. Open government people do a lot of that work. There is definitely efforts to do that. It&#8217;s very difficult. These things aren&#8217;t storing data in nice JSON blobs. It&#8217;s very messy. It&#8217;s very hard to reconcile, system to system, precinct to precinct. People are different working in that space but I think it would be great if we could invest some time, money and energy into that. But we are not currently at the place.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I don&#8217;t even know where that money would come from.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Federal government would be ideal.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But there is value in doing statistics in the open and data analysis in the open and science in the open.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, open data and open sciences is an amazing nascent field. There&#8217;s a lot that&#8217;s happening in that space. I&#8217;m actually giving a talk soon about the role of open science and open data and it&#8217;s an interesting corollary to open source technology. There&#8217;s a lot of similarities and there are some key differences in how we approach it. It&#8217;s not necessarily universally true that the more data, the better because not all data really needs to be in the open or should be in the open. But the more people that can independently assess the data and the results, generally tends to be better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Does that basically a variation of, &#8220;Many eyes make all bugs shallow?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, pretty much in a sense. What it really does is it expands the process of peer review and it challenges the traditional academic model of peer review. In doing so, it allows for better processes to be developed on how we review science, how we promote science, how we cite science. There are a number of challenges to this and this is one narrow part of the scientific research process that we&#8217;re trying to retrofit to something that looks like a software engineering practice but we also have to do all of the other stuff. It doesn&#8217;t work to just do this one part and not all the rest.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There are some really interesting people working on that. Brian Nosek is the Director of the Center for Open Science, which is actually here in Charlottesville. He&#8217;s also a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and he&#8217;s in a lot of work in the replication crisis that&#8217;s happening in the field of psychology right now, where many key results, key findings in the field of psychology are not able to be replicated. His whole career is&#8230; I wouldn&#8217;t say his whole career but a lot of his work is driving towards making tools available for researchers to stem this off at the past and prevent these kinds of issues from cropping up because they can be damaging, really long term damaging. People’s careers are being found to have been wasted because they chased a thread that was false for 30 years.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would imagine there&#8217;s some institutional resistance to open science, especially in academia where a lot of studies are published in paywall journals. The peer review process is very steep in tradition so there must be a tremendous amount of resistance to any effort to open that up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It is. This is a very uphill battle against the publishers, who are very resistant to open access. It&#8217;s a barrier to the tenure model in academia and it&#8217;s certainly a big challenge for getting people on board with how to verify data. But what&#8217;s happening is there&#8217;s more and more success stories that are coming out of this model that are making it really compelling. There&#8217;s still some people that doubt that there&#8217;s a replication crisis in psychology to begin with but the evidence is leaning against them. But there is some interesting things that have come out of this. To transition what I was talking about earlier with my talk, one of the things that has happened last year where a self-proclaimed researcher published a study in OkCupid Data.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Now, this is interesting because OkCupid periodically uses their blog to publish internally studied phenomenon for their users. How many users are straight? How many users are gay? What do men respond to most in a message versus women, that kind of thing? What happened last May was that somebody dumped a bunch of data and studied a bunch of OkCupid users. This got publicized on Twitter. We took a look at it and I was one of the first people to actually take a look at this data because I was bored and I was leaving my job and I didn&#8217;t have much to do so it was great.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As it turns out, this student &#8212; he&#8217;s a Danish student &#8212; he scraped 70,000 users’ data and then put it on a CSV and uploaded it to the Open Science Framework without anonymizing it. He basically doxed 70,000 users and published a pre-print along with it. Reading the pre-print, it was even more heinous. What he was doing was he was trying to use OkCupid Data to justify a hypothesis that religious people were less intelligent than non-religious people. On that basis, Muslim refugees should be denied entry to Denmark. He was using this open science framework to justify a really phony psychology study with really racist objectives. In doing so, he violated research ethics. He violated just the scientific method in general and he actually violated European privacy law in the process, allegedly. I don&#8217;t know what the results of that investigation were.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But also, it had a lot of ripple effects because it brought up the question, &#8220;What is the role of the repos in protecting user data? What is the role of the repos in ensuring that research is done ethically?&#8221; What happened was I looked at this report and I wrote up a blog post and shared my findings and a couple of other people looked at the report and came up with similar analysis that the research was unethical, it was wrong, it was immoral and, &#8220;By the way don&#8217;t dox 70,000 users. What the hell is wrong with you?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In receiving this criticism, he tried to hide behind this wall of, &#8220;But I have made my research open. It&#8217;s open data. It&#8217;s open science. You can&#8217;t criticize me for ethical violations. I have liberated the data to the world,&#8221; and that becomes an interesting question because that&#8217;s an ethical dilemma, like we want to liberate data, we want to make things open but how far is too far? And when do we draw that line? It’s a really fascinating thing that I thought was a very small thing when I got into it and it ended up turning into being a huge story in the open science world, that ended up changing policies on how the repos act.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When you say the repos, you mean the open source data repositories that are storing all these stuff?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. Open Science Framework is one of them, run by Center for Open Science and there are a couple others out there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s remarkable to me, even that has been scrubbed and anonymized, there was a study that I remember hearing about on NPR last year about some company that released demographic data that was supposedly anonymized and someone actually went through the data and was able to identify individuals just based on demographic characteristics. I know for me, myself personally, if you knew my first name and the fact that I&#8217;m transgender and I live in Chicago, you can find out everything you want to know about me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yep. Same thing with me. It&#8217;s really interesting those people that are experts on de-identification and it&#8217;s a hard problem. It&#8217;s an interesting problem because HIPAA requirements have anonymization requirements and there&#8217;s a question of like, &#8220;At what point are we doing good enough? At what point do we just say the statisticians will always win?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Probably.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Probably.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What about data that still overtly tampered with? What kind of impact can that have?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s an interesting problem. In the science world, that&#8217;s not a new problem. You know, falsifying data is considered to be a grievous ethical violation of every academic principle and science has certainly dealt with this for years &#8212; decades, well, actually longer than that &#8212; but it&#8217;s interesting in the machine learning world because you have algorithms that are very sensitive to training data and you can really screw with an algorithm by giving a bunch of false data.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> People are doing that. We know that there are hackers out there that are wanting to take advantage of algorithmic systems so they flood them with bad data in whatever way they can, knowing that that system will adapt to that bad data and give them favorable outcomes in return. You can argue that high frequency trading is doing just that legally but definitely, people are absolutely, positively doing this. People are spending up lambda instances on AWS and throwing data at systems at scale to do this.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Could you give me an example of a consequence of something like that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Search engine say they&#8217;ve adapted to whatever is being linked to the most, that kind of thing so people will use this knowledge to spin up pages that have these links and wait for Google to index, some of them take them down so that it can bubble up a site to the top. That&#8217;s part of how the fake news stuff works, where stories have happened and if you know that the story is about to break, you can pre-populate all of that so that when people Google like, &#8220;Did Hillary&#8217;s emails expose her?&#8221; or whatever, you&#8217;ve already forced the link that you want to be at the top to the top and it&#8217;s all garbage data. It&#8217;s all bad data.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Other examples of this are like if you want to try to block log-ons from a certain region, you can spam a log-on service. It could be a financial institution. It could be a medical institution, knowing that their systems will look at the traffic and start denying traffic from that region. If you wanted to lock somebody out of, say their investment account, you could do that if you knew that the log-on systems for that institution were using machine learning to try to squash denial of service attacks, that kind of thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s one of those situations where people are not looking at [inaudible] so this system is rebuilding.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s very much reactive. It&#8217;s very hard to project all of these things. We&#8217;re often just deploying and we&#8217;re asking for forgiveness later, or asking our ops and security people to bail us out. When I say, &#8216;we,&#8217; I mean as industry, not as a company. I don&#8217;t speak for Simple.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, you may have noticed that Greater Than Code is no longer a weekly show. We&#8217;ve moved to a bi-weekly format because we&#8217;re having money problems. We need to raise more money to sustain a weekly show. There are a lot of things that we want to do with that money, including fairly paying our editor and producer. But we also want to do things like listener perks and swag that [inaudible] people in our Slack community who go above and beyond.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We want to do conference appearances. We&#8217;ve talked about doing a lot of podcasts at a conference. We have a lot of big plans but we need your help. If you can pledge at any level at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode, every donation is appreciated. We are proud of the fact that we&#8217;ve been listener-funded for 37 episodes. We&#8217;re also open to corporate sponsorships. If your company cares about the things that we&#8217;re talking about and wants to invest in the kind of conversations that we have, they can go to GreaterThanCode.com/Sponsors. Please talk to your companies about this. We want to continue delivering great content and have a conversation that no one else is having but we definitely need your help to do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We are very excited to announce that we&#8217;ve been selected as this month&#8217;s Fund Club Project. Each month, Fund Club emails members their new pick, a project, initiative, event or organization focused on diverse communities in technology. Members give $100 to that month&#8217;s selection. Fund Club doesn&#8217;t manage your money or ask for it up front. You submit payment directly to the recipient project. Fun club so far has raised nearly $200,000 for projects like ours. We&#8217;re so delighted to join the ranks of projects that Fund Club has helped, including Trans H4CK, People of Color In Tech, I Need Diverse Games, Write/Speak/Code and MotherCoders. If you want to sign up for this amazing program, you can find more information at JoinFundClub.com.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think we can go to reflections then. Reflections is when we look back at the conversation that we&#8217;ve had and talk about what was [inaudible] or call-to-action or in any way made us think. I&#8217;ll go first. I think what you talked about with the brainstorming sessions to consider, all the ways that something can fail, ranking failures on severity of harm, probability of harm, when a failure occurs and detectability of fail and harm as it occurs. That&#8217;s something that I want to personally work at to bring to the projects that I work on at work and outside of work that kind of systems thinking and planning for bad outcomes. As we discussed is not something that happens often enough in our field. It should. I think I&#8217;m going to do what I can to institute practices like that at my next job. Thank you for that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m definitely going to have to go back and listen to this entire episode again because I have a feeling there is a lot I&#8217;m going to learn when I do so. Our conversation about what it&#8217;s like to work in, say a military contractor or what it might possibly be like to work for somebody making election software was really an interesting and useful reminder to me that the world that I live in and the kind of software development practices that I take for granted, really are extraordinarily niche, more so than I like to think about. I&#8217;m going to have to contemplate what it might take to bring some of these practices that I find useful out into the broader world. At the same time, what I might find of value in what I think of as the dark programming universe that might be useful to me. Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>EMILY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, no problem. I like reflecting on that dichotomy when I&#8217;m at tech conferences because tech conferences tend to be really decadent, especially the big ones. I was at JSConf in Berlin and they had this wild opening sequence and flashing lights and drum and bass and it was just really extravagant and interesting. It was such a difference from coming from that academic corporate world, where conferences were like in the banquet hall of the Holiday Inn, outside of the airport. It was everyone wore suit and tie and it was the same people that have known each other for 30 years and the same grudges that go back 30 years.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For me, it was a really stark difference between the industries. I like to reflect on it when I&#8217;m in that because obviously, I prefer the decadents and the dance music but it was an interesting path for me to get from one place to the other.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, thank you Emily. This has been a really fascinating conversation and I&#8217;ve really enjoyed getting to talk to you for a little bit, more than we do on Twitter. To our listeners, thank you again for sticking with us through another episode and I hope that you have learned something as well and we&#8217;ll be back at you in two weeks. Bye everybody.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
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]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Emily Gorcenski: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/EmilyGorcenski"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@EmilyGorcenski</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://emilygorcenski.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">emilygorcenski.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.simple.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Simple</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Diamonds Are For Gender” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>00:56</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story, Superpowers, and Data Science</span></p>
<p><b>04:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Diversity and Career Paths in Data Science</span></p>
<p><b>10:51 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Ethical Debates Within the Data Science Field</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553418815/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0553418815&amp;linkId=0ed7c081ef2baa2e5a6f33a076e2929b"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Therac-25</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/process-analysis-tools/overview/fmea.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">FMEA (Failure Mode Effects Analysis)</span></a></p>
<p><b>17:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Software Development and Engineering; Failure Modes in Software</span></p>
<p><b>21:44 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Failure Modes in Democracy; Voting Machine Software</span></p>
<p><b>33:37 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Working for a Government Contractor</span></p>
<p><b>36:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Data Patterns and Tampering</span></p>
<p><b>39:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Open Data and Open Science</span></p>
<p><b>45:59 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Falsifying Data</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag, </b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you? Join or Slack community and support us via </b><a style="background-color: #ffffff; font-size: 1.8rem;" href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>To jumpstart these efforts, we are very excited to announce that we have been selected for this month’s </b><a href="http://joinfundclub.com/"><b>Fund Club</b></a><b> project!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Coraline: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Considering all the ways something can fail.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> The world that I live in and the kind of software development practices that I take for granted are extraordinary niche.</span></p>
<p><b>Emily:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Tech conferences and their decadence vs academic/corporate conferences.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Emily Gorcenski: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/EmilyGorcenski"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@EmilyGorcenski</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://emilygorcenski.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">emilygorcenski.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.simple.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Simple</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Diamonds Are For Gender” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>00:56</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story, Superpowers, and Data Science</span></p>
<p><b>04:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Diversity and Career Paths in Data Science</span></p>
<p><b>10:51 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Ethical Debates Within the Data Science Field</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553418815/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0553418815&amp;linkId=0ed7c081ef2baa2e5a6f33a076e2929b"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Therac-25</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://asq.org/learn-about-quality/process-analysis-tools/overview/fmea.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">FMEA (Failure Mode Effects Analysis)</span></a></p>
<p><b>17:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Software Development and Engineering; Failure Modes in Software</span></p>
<p><b>21:44 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Failure Modes in Democracy; Voting Machine Software</span></p>
<p><b>33:37 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Working for a Government Contractor</span></p>
<p><b>36:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Data Patterns and Tampering</span></p>
<p><b>39:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Open Data and Open Science</span></p>
<p><b>45:59 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Falsifying Data</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show, buy and ship you swag, </b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you? Join or Slack community and support us via </b><a style="background-color: #ffffff; font-size: 1.8rem;" href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>.</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>To jumpstart these efforts, we are very excited to announce that we have been selected for this month’s </b><a href="http://joinfundclub.com/"><b>Fund Club</b></a><b> project!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Coraline: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Considering all the ways something can fail.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> The world that I live in and the kind of software development practices that I take for granted are extraordinary niche.</span></p>
<p><b>Emily:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Tech conferences and their decadence vs academic/corporate conferences.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b]]></googleplay:description>
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					<itunes:duration>40:44</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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					<title>Episode 036: Metaphors and Microservices with Matt Stine</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-036-metaphors-and-microservices-with-matt-stine/</link>
					<pubDate>Thu, 08 Jun 2017 00:09:20 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=636</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Matt Stine joins us for a conversation that starts out about consulting and morphs into a meta-conversation about rigorous communication, ubiquitous language, metaphors, and microservices.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Matt Stine joins us for a conversation that starts out about consulting and morphs into a meta-conversation about rigorous communication, ubiquitous language, metaphors, and microservices.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span> <a href="http://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Matt Stine: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/mstine"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@mstine</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.mattstine.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">mattstine.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Chinchilla Chat: Where It’s All Chinchillas&#8230;All The Time&#8230;” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show,<br />
buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><b>03:10</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Matt’s Origin Story in Software Development</span></p>
<p><b>09:04 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Business of Consulting</span></p>
<p><b>16:24 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Empathy in Consulting</span></p>
<p><b>20:07 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Rigorous Communication and Shared Language; Microservices</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ludwig Wittgenstein</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.dictionary.com/browse/sapir-whorf-hypothesis"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226468011/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0226468011&amp;linkId=eb1e64309e20b18e5700df50e48890ae"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Metaphors We Live By</span></a></p>
<p><b>39:05 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://martinfowler.com/bliki/UbiquitousLanguage.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ubiquitous Language</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465018475/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0465018475&amp;linkId=acbb83bfae39114efe5369b300142f68"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking by Douglas Hofstadter </span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czvgHSYKkNU"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke: Metaphors Are Similes. Similes Are Like Metaphors.</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein%27s_ladder"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Wittgenstein&#8217;s Ladder</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://thesis.honors.olemiss.edu/230/1/mstine-senior-thesis.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Performance of Genetic Algorithms For Data Classification by Matthew Stine</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Are you Greater Than Code?</b><b><br />
</b><b>Submit guest blog posts to </b><b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com">mandy@greaterthancode.com</a></b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Matt: </b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ludwig Wittgenstein</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and language games.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The shortcomings of pattern-matching.</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Using evolution as a model.</span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143121359/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0143121359&amp;linkId=dfe7874f3279a5a815af5a3d1dc7c8bd"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations That Transform the World</span></a></p>
<p><b>Janelle:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Language as a mechanism of control.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Building a bridge of understanding with progressively less incorrect metaphors.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to &#8216;Chinchilla Chat: Where It’s All Chinchillas… All The Time…&#8221; I&#8217;m Sam Livingston-Gray and here with me is my fellow chinchilla, Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Producing squeaking sounds.]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m not going to correct you, instead I just like to say how happy I am to be here today with Astrid Countee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Jessica. I will remind you Sam that it is Greater Than Code, just to put that out there and I&#8217;m here with my great friend, Rein Henrichs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Astrid, it&#8217;s my great pleasure to introduce Coraline Ehmke.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hey, everybody. For a long time listeners, you may be comfortable and used to a weekly show and we really want to be able to do weekly shows but unfortunately, with the level of support we&#8217;re getting from Patreon right now, that&#8217;s no longer possible. We&#8217;re announcing that we&#8217;re moving to a bi-weekly format. There are a lot of things we could do with extra funds and this can come from individual Patrons, as well as corporate sponsorships.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Beyond sustaining a weekly show, we&#8217;d like to focus on listener perks and swag for the people in Slack community who go above and beyond and are themselves, greater than code. We&#8217;ve also talked about doing conference appearances, which of course brings travel costs into the picture. If you are not yet supporting us in Patreon, I encourage you to do so at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode and if you want to sustain the conversations, we also encourage you to talk to your employer about possibly sponsoring the show and we have information at GreaterThanCode.com/Sponsors.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Also, can we say that it&#8217;s really exciting that we do have enough Patreon supporters to fully finance two episodes a month of this fantastic editing and transcription and website and social media, etcetera?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yay! That’s really wonderful, actually. One of the things that we really were hoping for when we started this show was to be able to continue to employ Mandy in doing the work that she does so well. I&#8217;m really glad that we can do that at least twice a month. I&#8217;m also here with Janelle Klein.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a lot of people on this call today and I am introducing Matt Stine whom I really excited to have here today. I met Matt a few years ago really just being a participant in No Fluff Just Stuff tour and he&#8217;s always been one of my favorite speakers just because he&#8217;s so anchored and pragmatism but so knowledgeable from software architecture standpoint and just being able to see so much scope and problems and patterns across the industry. He&#8217;s been one of the most fascinating people to listen to a talk to so I&#8217;m super excited to have Matt Stein with us here today. Welcome Matt.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Very excited to be here. I love podcast composed entirely of chinchillas so I&#8217;m really excited to see what happens.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Jessica is making more chinchilla noises.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I got a question for you Matt, as soon as we can calm the chinchillas down here but I was just wondering how did you originally get into software development. Where did all of your excitement about this come from?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How did I originally get into software development? It depends on which starting point we come from. If we start with say, I was&#8230; what? Seven years old? I don&#8217;t know. My dad woke me up and brought me into the dining room and there was this Atari 800 connected to a TV, sitting on the table and said, &#8220;Hey, I got a computer.&#8221; I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Cool. What&#8217;s a computer? You mean like the thing on Star Trek?&#8221; He&#8217;s like, &#8220;Well, not quite,&#8221; but he showed me some stuff and then we&#8217;re typing commands and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;What was this thing we&#8217;re typing stuff into?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> He says it&#8217;s BASIC. I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Okay, well, what does BASIC do?&#8221; He threw a bunch of family computing magazines in my lap and said, &#8220;There&#8217;s programs in the back of that, type them in and see what they do,&#8221; and that&#8217;s where it really started. But it was mostly this informal romance back and forth with computers and games and gaming and didn&#8217;t really do a whole lot of software development, although I did poke around a little bit. Then it came time to go to college and I had to pick a major and I said, &#8220;I kind of do stuff with computers. That seems fine. Let&#8217;s do computer science.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then I found out what computer science was, which was a really jarring experience but I honestly don&#8217;t think I learned a whole lot about software development in studying computer science. I learned algorithms. I learned all sorts of interesting things about data structures and of course, all those things are pieces and are related to what we do but we had this class called software engineering and every class, every year gets a theoretically real customer, usually somebody from the community around the university that needs some software built. We&#8217;re supposed to learn software engineering by building the software for this customer, which sounds great until you realize that nobody&#8217;s ever actually taught you how to do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We had the dubious distinction of being the first class ever that this professor had that actually did not deliver the software so my first software project was a failure. I learned to fail from Day 1 and got out into the real world and actually learned software development and really from a bunch of people who&#8217;d come from other places that came to this little nonprofit that did not have any kind of discipline or whatsoever and we kind of invented everything that we did as we went along, which was both really good for me because I got to explore a lot of interesting ideas and do different things. But really bad for me when I went to my first job that actually had legacy structure in place. I said, &#8220;We need to do this.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> &#8220;No, you don&#8217;t get to do that here.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> &#8220;What do you mean?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> &#8220;We don&#8217;t do it that way here. We do this,&#8221; and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Well, that stupid,&#8221; and we kind of grew in and learned from there. Now, like seven-ish years on the other side of that jarring transition from we&#8217;re making it all up as we&#8217;re going along to going to help really large companies that are figuring out that the big process of things that they&#8217;ve created is not helping them succeed and figuring out how to actually get them closer to. Really a lot of the early experiments or weird stuff that we&#8217;re making up as we went along back in the earlier part of my career says this weird kind of full circle feedback loop and I don&#8217;t even know how I got to this part of the story but we&#8217;re here now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Matt, I have a question. You talked about how when you picked computer science for your major that it was really jarring, kind of a slap in the face and not exactly what you were planning and that your first software engineering experience wasn&#8217;t that great so what motivated you to keep going?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was going to run out of scholarship money if I didn&#8217;t graduate so I wanted to keep going and people kept telling me that I was going to make a lot of money and I had no money so making a lot of money versus no money sounded pretty good. This was maybe a year before the dot-com boom exploded. The fact that you could theoretically walk out of school with a computer science degree and make serious cash and actually be able to not eat ramen noodles and stuff like that, that was real. I thought some of this sucks but I wasn&#8217;t really acquainted with the idea that work could actually be separated from toil because I watched my father toil for my whole life: work with something that he hated and I thought that that&#8217;s kind of what work was like the thing that you did to make money so that you could do the stuff that you really wanted to do. I&#8217;ve since obviously learned that there&#8217;s so much more to it than that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I just thought that things were hard and you needed to continue going so the fact that it was maybe not what I expected or maybe not the most fun, I thought well, maybe this is just how things are. It took me a while to break out of that mold of people would say, &#8220;This is the way this is. This is the way we do this,&#8221; and to say, &#8220;You know what? There’s a lot of structure and assumptions that you built up there, what if things weren&#8217;t that way?&#8221; And people kind of look at you, &#8220;What do you mean by what if things weren&#8217;t that way?&#8221; This is what I do all the time now is just kind of try to find the underlying structural assumption that people have about the way something should be and say, &#8220;Let&#8217;s set aside all the challenges that we think we have. Let&#8217;s challenge that and see what happens.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You must be a consultant because people who are usually like that from people who actually work with them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>People don&#8217;t like a lot of the things that I do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t like the fact that you dinged ramen. I love ramen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We don&#8217;t talk shit about ramen on this show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like ramen. I just don&#8217;t like the stuff that I buy for 25 cents in the pack at the grocery store.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>MSG-flavored packets are so good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If that&#8217;s your thing, that&#8217;s great. Now, we did used to make this stuff that we called, &#8216;Oh, shit ramen,&#8217; in high school with ramen noodles plus 18,000 spices and the whole goal was to see how fast you could make somebody sweat. That was entertaining and that was a great use of those packets. But I do like the fancy ramen that I can get down the street from the office. That stuff is really good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How long did it take you between your first job to becoming a consultant?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I worked my first job for 11 and a half years.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The one with non-profit or the &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, the nonprofit. The St Jude Children&#8217;s Research Hospital that&#8217;s in the bio on my website, for 11 and a half years. Then my next job, I worked nine months.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sounds more industry-appropriate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was partly because I have a decent amount of need on a daily basis to have really good medical insurance for various family things that we have. This company&#8217;s medical insurance was almost as bad as not having any at all. I was paying ridiculous amounts of money for just almost nothing and I needed to find something else. VMWare happened to call me and say, &#8220;We&#8217;re looking to hire people who know Spring to go do consulting stuff and in the meantime, we&#8217;re going to give you this much,&#8221; and I said, &#8220;Let me do the math. That&#8217;s 37% more than I make right now. Yes, please,&#8221; and I became a consultant.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Interesting to me because you seemed like one of those people that would generally have a hard time fitting inside of a box because you&#8217;re always challenging the status quo with everything. You fit well into that consultant thing where your job is to challenge everything. It seems like you would gravitate toward that, even outside of all these other kind of factors but maybe not. I don&#8217;t know. What do you think?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s weird. I saw a consultant when I was working that original job and you saw people show up in suits with briefcases and telling you all kinds of things and language that you didn&#8217;t really understand. If you go back to the idea that we were the shop that started with seven people and eventually grew to 30 and we invented everything as we went along, it usually wasn&#8217;t based in, &#8220;Somebody told us to do this best practice because this would work and this is why,&#8221; to, &#8220;This thing hurts. Let&#8217;s figure out a way to make it not hurt. Okay, we fixed that. Now, this other thing hurts. Let&#8217;s figure out a way to make it not hurt,&#8221; so we kind of experimentally discover in the process that we had. It didn&#8217;t look like anything that anybody else did.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then as we got bigger, people said, &#8220;Maybe we should figure out how other people do things because we&#8217;re getting big enough that we need to start acting like the big companies,&#8221; okay fine, so we brought in consultants. They said, &#8220;You&#8217;re doing everything wrong. You should do this,&#8221; and then we started trying to do that and everything got worse. My initial exposure to that was really negative and I kind of stiff arms, keep that away for a long period of time and it became the next obvious thing to do in my career that would help me, again make the money that I needed to support my family.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That nine-month job was the most important thing that I did to succeed as a consultant of anything I did leading up to that point because if I had only ever worked one place and I had never actually seen what went on outside of that artificial world that we had created for ourselves and saw, &#8220;This is how the big companies do it,&#8221; I would have been a really bad consultant because I would have been like oil and water as soon as I walked in to another customer and basically said, &#8220;You&#8217;re doing everything wrong,&#8221; and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;No, we&#8217;re not doing everything wrong,&#8221; and we would have never actually been able to communicate. I had some empathy for the people that I was now starting to work with as a consultant because I had experience the other side of that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I had to evolve into the ability to do this work. There&#8217;s one thing that just challenge everything. It&#8217;s another thing to challenge in a way that people are receptive to that and that&#8217;s the thing that I&#8217;ve had to learn through doing over the last&#8230; I don&#8217;t know, I guess how long have I been doing the consulting thing? Maybe five and a half years?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s really interesting to me that the market for consulting is so inefficient that those consultancy described having been pushed out of it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No doubt that implies that your objective in hiring a consultant is to do anything better. Seriously.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Rather than doing something to do, something better?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I have an answer. Those consultants were bringing answers, right and you are bringing questions?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, there&#8217;s model in this. My current view of what consulting feels like is very much driven by the way we approach things at Pivotal. So much of our practice is based in discovery and research and asking questions and trying to figure out what are the real problems that we&#8217;re trying to solve. Most of the consultants that I experienced before that were walking in with, &#8220;Here&#8217;s what you should do. I don&#8217;t even know who you are. I don&#8217;t know what your problems are. I don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s hurting you but you should do this.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s another type of consultant, which was the consultant I&#8217;m friends with, who I would very often hire when I was in management for a period of time to say, &#8220;This is what I&#8217;ve been telling people and they won&#8217;t listen to me but if you say it, they&#8217;ll do it because you&#8217;re a consultant.&#8221; This actually as I found out goes on all over our industry right now, which is you need to be able to appeal to some of outside authority sometimes to get some change that you want to actually take place so you basically coach the consultant &#8212; who already agrees with &#8212; &#8220;This is exactly what I&#8217;ve been trying to say. This is what I want to happen.&#8221; They show up for a short term engagement, present this and it&#8217;s the same thing I&#8217;ve been saying for the last three years that nobody will listen to and he doesn&#8217;t go off script at all and all of a sudden we&#8217;re doing it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s like being a woman in tech.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ll be honest with you, when I was a consultant one of the things I would do was survey the team, ask them what they think should be done and then pick a thing that they suggested and suggest it. The reason for that wasn&#8217;t so that I could take credit for their ideas, it&#8217;s so that I could take the blame if it failed and because they&#8217;d listen to me because they&#8217;re paying a lot of money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yep.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Matt, you mentioned empathy a little while back. How important is empathy in the work that you do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think empathy is almost these center, the foundation of everything that I do because again, learning the hard way that trying to push change on people that aren&#8217;t at the same place that you are &#8212; I was having a conversation this morning about how in 2003, I went to an extreme programming conference and became infatuated with XP and then walked back into my organization and basically called a meeting of everybody and gave this manifesto and said, &#8220;This is what we&#8217;re going to do,&#8221; and people are like, &#8220;Yeah, that&#8217;s funny.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The walk in with a big stick and swath everybody with that approach, doesn&#8217;t ever work, at least not in a positive way. You can make people do things if you coerce them enough but I wasn&#8217;t exactly in a position to do that. But the more of that I&#8217;m realizing that I have this place that I want to help people get to but they&#8217;re all starting from a different spot in their journey, either as an individual, as a team, as an organization and if I don&#8217;t tried to look at it from their perspective and stand in their shoes and understand the constraints that they feel like they have, the pressures that they feel like they have, it&#8217;s very difficult for me to communicate with that group, just trying to be them mentally, even emotionally because I walk into emotionally charged situations all the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One that happened a month or so ago at a large bank actually is still very vivid in my mind of two competing groups in the organization that have very different agendas that came to this meeting that had an agenda that was separate from either one of their agendas. Immediately, these two people &#8212; who obviously have some power &#8212; start co-opting the session and start trying to drive the agenda the direction they wanted to go, to the point where moments later, there&#8217;s 10 of us just standing there watching these two people arguing with one another about something that has nothing to do with what we were there to talk about and we&#8217;re like, should we stop them? What should we do here? We eventually just waited until the heat ran out in the room and said, &#8220;Let&#8217;s break for lunch.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then I walk back in and say, &#8220;We&#8217;re going to come up with a structure of this meeting that prevents what just happened, not to say that either of you are wrong but the rest of us didn&#8217;t really know what to do with ourselves and we&#8217;re not getting towards any of the goals that we said we were going to have on the agenda so let&#8217;s make a list of things that we&#8217;re not going to talk about and if they come up, you agree that if I say you can&#8217;t talk about that because that&#8217;s on the list of things that we&#8217;re not going to talk about, that you have to stop,&#8221; and people are really hesitant like, &#8220;Should I agree to this? I don&#8217;t really like this. Okay, we&#8217;ll do what Matt says.&#8221; The rest of the day was much better. In fact, most of the things that we said we were going to talk about actually never came up again and we got a lot of things done.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Sometimes you have to figure out, &#8220;There are some emotional political power play thing going on here that maybe has nothing to do with what we&#8217;re here but it&#8217;s infecting everything that we&#8217;re doing. Now, we have to figure out how to diffuse that,&#8221; but again if you walk in with a fixed agenda and you can&#8217;t be flexible and you can&#8217;t relate to where everybody in the room is coming from, it&#8217;s very hard to do that work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Actually, what&#8217;s funny is that part of the thing that got my mind so much on this metaphor communication track recently was actually a result of that same meeting with that customer that I was talking about having to defuse all the crazy political driven emotions in the room. It&#8217;s pretty easy to segue into that conversation because in some ways, a lot of what I&#8217;m finding in a power struggle is people want to own the language because they feel like if they can own the language that&#8217;s used across the organization, they can control the conversation and drive it in the direction that they wanted to go, if that makes any sense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It just occurred to me that we&#8217;re going to spend the next 30 minutes recapitulating Wittgenstein.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Really?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Talking about language games and things like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m not familiar with that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wittgenstein was a philosopher, probably the most influential philosopher of modern times and one of his big concepts was that we all are playing a game with language and we each have our own language that we use and sometimes they overlap with other peoples and sometimes they don&#8217;t. We each have our own goals that we&#8217;re seeking when we play this game, with the language that we use and things like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve not heard that or articulated that way but it fits perfectly in with everything else that I&#8217;m thinking about right now so there&#8217;s probably a reason for that. That&#8217;s cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s also the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that posits that the language that we use constrains our thinking. I think that what you&#8217;re describing could be considered weaponized language, where if you&#8217;re controlling the vocabulary of describing a problem, you are also constraining solutions to that problem to the space that you establish.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Matt, can you give a concrete example of controlling language.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Right now the one that is happening everywhere that I go is microservices. Every company that I&#8217;ve worked with is now writing their definition of what a microservice is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; as definitions overlap.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s some weird Venn diagram that we could draw that as differing amounts of overlap that eventually would become impossible to decipher. We&#8217;ll leave it at that but the interesting thing, going back to the weaponized language idea is that you find competing tribes within the organization that have their definition that they&#8217;ve come up with and they want their definition to win. Usually, it feels like it&#8217;s based in, &#8220;I want to establish constraints around people that I don&#8217;t necessarily have direct day-to-day control of so that I can control what they do because this is the organizational standard so therefore you have to do it this way.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I have walked in to, again that same organization. I can think of maybe three or four different individuals who are with various different architect type titles, leadership titles that say, &#8220;I want microservices to have this bullet point list of characteristics and you have to do what&#8217;s on this list.&#8221; Part of that shouting match that we talked about was about differing opinions about, &#8220;Microservice should have this. No, it shouldn&#8217;t have this. No, this is crazy. What are you doing?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This reminds me a lot of Agile because the point of microservices that was each one could have different characteristics.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s not how the Fortune 100 conversation around microservices is going right now. It&#8217;s everybody is building a PowerPoint deck with, &#8220;Here&#8217;s what a microservices and here&#8217;s the characteristics that it must have.&#8221; Now, what&#8217;s really bizarre and happening that kind of sucks is that deck is now being broadcast to a huge organization of people who don&#8217;t have any understanding of what they&#8217;re paying told to do and they&#8217;re just naively going through and checking off the bullet points and saying, &#8220;Our service does this, it does this, it does this. Okay, we&#8217;ve built a microservice,&#8221; and no freaking clue why they have built one, what they&#8217;re supposed to be getting out of it, what the value is but they were told they&#8217;re supposed to build microservices so therefore, they built them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Another organization, I&#8217;m giving a huge talk and there&#8217;s a question and answer session, somebody stands up and says, &#8220;We&#8217;ve got fifty microservices in our application and new ones are appearing every day and this really hurts. What should we do?&#8221; I said, &#8220;You should probably build less microservice,&#8221; and people laughed and it went back and forth a little bit. Somebody comes up to me afterwards, the sponsor of this particular event and says, &#8220;Let me tell you the back story to that question that you&#8217;ve got. His organization has been incentivized by their manager to build as many microservices as they can so that he can basically demonstrate to the rest of the org how awesome their little sub-org is at being on with the microservices initiative and all the stuff that they&#8217;re doing and here&#8217;s all these metrics that we have to demonstrate that fact,&#8221; but it&#8217;s leading the people who are actually living that life to experience ridiculous amounts of pain.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Janelle and I have been talking about lemmings a lot lately and we have all these lemmings and they&#8217;re marching off the cliff dutifully because they know that&#8217;s what they&#8217;re supposed to do but they fall to their death. They don&#8217;t know why because that&#8217;s what lemmings do. Maybe we&#8217;re doing it consciously and I just don&#8217;t know it but I feels like I want to believe that it&#8217;s unconsciously that we&#8217;re creating these legions of lemmings in software development in these large organizations that are going and doing all this work. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They don&#8217;t know why they&#8217;re doing it but they&#8217;re told that if they just do it, it&#8217;s going to solve all of their problems. It ends up creating new problems &#8212; big surprise to the group of people talking on this podcast &#8212; but very often the answer is, &#8220;You&#8217;re just not doing it right. You must not be microservicing correctly because microservices solve all your problems and so let&#8217;s try to microservice even more.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Now, I this person who&#8217;s been hesitate to say, thought leader in this particular area, people pass around my little 50-page O&#8217;Reilly book like it&#8217;s the Bible or something and say, &#8220;You should do everything that&#8217;s in here,&#8221; and now I&#8217;m going around so you do know all that stuff I said about doing in all these microservices, I don&#8217;t mean this. Don&#8217;t do what you&#8217;re doing right now. This isn&#8217;t what I said and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;But you&#8217;re the microservices guy.&#8221; I&#8217;m like, &#8220;No, I&#8217;m not. I&#8217;m the, let&#8217;s build software and solve problems guy and microservice is a tool in my belt but no. Stop. What you&#8217;re doing is going to hurt. It&#8217;s not going to end well.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Your book isn&#8217;t just one page that says, &#8220;Microservices. Yes, more of those please?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s what people have translated it to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s interesting to me. We could probably have a whole conversation on the choice of count of microservices as a proxy for successful implementation of the microservices or whatever.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s like the line of code metrics.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, Jessica.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s interesting to me too because there&#8217;s a whole control dynamic here going on with internal fiefdoms competing against one another and then trying to come up with some metrics that gave them control to influence another organization and then using language tactics and things like this to own vocabulary. There&#8217;s a whole entire empire building thing going on. One of the things I see happening on the engineering floor is it&#8217;s so difficult and takes so much energy to fight the momentum at that organizational empire level that people just decided not to care because it&#8217;s easier. At some point it is like, &#8220;Whatever, we&#8217;re all going to walk off the cliff. It&#8217;s fine by me,&#8221; and like genuinely choosing not to care anymore as a coping strategy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If we can, I&#8217;d like to go back to something you said a little bit earlier, Matt about how there&#8217;s these different competing definitions of microservices and architects are putting together PowerPoint slides and saying, &#8220;These are the characteristics that your microservice must have in order to be considered a microservice.&#8221; I&#8217;m as cynical about corporate power structures as the next person but I really want to give people the benefit of the doubt and I wonder how much of that comes from the architect&#8217;s previous painful experiences of like, &#8220;I tried this and it sucked and I&#8217;m trying to save you from that by just telling you the answer,&#8221; despite that strategy perhaps not being the most successful one for actually getting people to do what they should be doing. What do you think about that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that most of the time these efforts come out of a place of good intentions like what you just described like I&#8217;ve been down Road X, I have the scars to prove it and I want to help you not feel that same pain and that part is good. I&#8217;ll probably butcher the cliché but that&#8217;s fine of you can&#8217;t solve the problems that you have with the techniques that got you here. The various forms of the thing being said but it&#8217;s like, &#8220;This thing hurts. I don&#8217;t want people to repeat that so I&#8217;m going to tell people how not to hurt themselves by following the exact same process that I followed to hurt myself in the first place.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the biggest examples I had of this &#8212; I only deal with large organizations right now because that&#8217;s who we try to sell to &#8212; they sent me this 150-page Word document that describes their microservices strategy for the organization. As painful as it was to read it, I read it. It was a mishmash of cargo-culted paragraphs from blog posts from Martin Fowler and other people that have authority. Eric Evans was in there and all kinds of things, then it describes this reference architecture that as I talk to people in the organization, I found out what they basically did was they took the thing they already had and rename all of the things to match the terms that are floating around in the industry right now and change the technical stack to be basically with our Spring Cloud Foundry stuff with some other things thrown in there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I said, &#8220;Basically what you&#8217;ve done is you&#8217;ve created what you already had with new toys and you went to great lengths and pain to do it. The whole point in my mind of going down this road is to free you from the very constraints that you&#8217;re actually trying to reimpose upon yourselves,&#8221; and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Yeah, but we have to have these constraints.&#8221; I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Well, let&#8217;s look at that from two different directions. One, we can challenge whether you have to have those constraints or not but that&#8217;s a hard conversation. We don&#8217;t have to have that one right now. Let&#8217;s have an easier conversation. You have to have these constraints. Why do you need to change anything then? because you&#8217;re actually making it harder for you to enforce these constraints with this new set of disciplines and techniques and technologies than what you already had, because the things that you already have are actually designed to enforce those constraints and you&#8217;re now trying to take something that&#8217;s designed to free from those constraints and use it to enforce these constraints.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They&#8217;re like, &#8220;We&#8217;ve never really looked at it that way before.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And they&#8217;re using tools that don&#8217;t have those constraints.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right and so I was like, &#8220;How do I do control X with microservices technology?&#8221; And they&#8217;re like, &#8220;We don&#8217;t.&#8221; I&#8217;m like, &#8220;What do you mean? How do you not do control X? Have to do control X.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> &#8220;What is the goal of control X?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> &#8220;Well, to prevent those &#8211;&#8220;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Transactions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; other things. We&#8217;ll prevent that thing from this &#8211;&#8221; Oh, let&#8217;s not even talk about transactions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just don&#8217;t want to go there. That&#8217;s just such a bad, bad place but everybody&#8217;s going there so we should probably go there too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And that is one of the constraints that people are used to from a relational database like Oracle. But when you go to microservices, you don&#8217;t get that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s probably actually okay in a huge percentage of circumstances but because we made transactions so easy, we made everything transactional. Now, it&#8217;s hard for us to even conceive of a world that has things that aren&#8217;t transactional so when I say, &#8220;Think about the process as separated from the software. Is that process inherently transactional by meaning ACID transactions? Is it truly atomic, which is usually we don&#8217;t have to go beyond atomic. But is it truly atomic?&#8221; They&#8217;re like, &#8220;Actually, this thing happens one day and this other thing happens another day in the real world.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Then why are you trying to make software do anything but that and I&#8217;m not even trying to tell you to have it spend a day. I&#8217;m trying to tell you have it spend seconds and you&#8217;re resisting seconds but the actual thing that happens in the real world is taking multiple hours and we get tongue tied because we&#8217;re walking into a set of fundamental assumptions and were saying, poke that one and kick that one out and now reformulate the world.&#8221; All of a sudden, not only is it more freeing but it&#8217;s also more scary because we haven&#8217;t been there before and this constraint, while it&#8217;s limiting, is also feels like protection.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Like it&#8217;s comfortable?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Going back to the original, I want to define the language conversation, it&#8217;s because we&#8217;re trying to find a structure. One of the things that Janelle throw this book at me metaphorically and I&#8217;m digging through this bit about structural isomorphisms between different things. The one that they&#8217;ve been beating on now for a while is argument is war and it points out all the language that we use when we&#8217;re talking about arguments. That&#8217;s all based in talking about war.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They extrapolate on that a little bit so I started thinking about how does that play out in conversations that I&#8217;m having. The thing that I stick with is people come with the structure that they want and then they tried to create a mapping from the popular conversational metaphors to the structure that they want, like why do I care so much about owning microservices and bounded context and all of these things as terms. If I can own those terms, I can map the structure that I want and I can appeal to outside authority at the same time. I can get power from the words but then use the power and inherent in the words to actually get this other thing that I want.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What you&#8217;re saying, Matt sounds like something that I heard recently that was about interviewing. It was not about technology at all. One person was talking about like when you got and interview somebody, you have a way that you try to make them feel so that you can get what you want out of the interview. His version of it was trying to make people feel at home so he would try to be welcoming and eat whatever they gave him or drink whatever they gave him. He was saying there&#8217;s another interviewer, I think it was Jorge Ramos who&#8217;s interview style is war because he is used to being a person who learned journalism in Mexico where the press was marginalized and suppressed. He&#8217;s used to having to poke at the bear to get the answers that he wants so his interview style is much more aggressive.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Maybe it&#8217;s related to what you&#8217;re saying because if you&#8217;re in an organization, where in your position, you have to be aggressive, then when you&#8217;re talking with your own staff, you&#8217;re going to be like that, whether you realize it or not and be less open to their suggestions as opposed to somebody who might be much more like collaborative in trying to gather all of the information. You&#8217;re not going to notice that you&#8217;re not talking the same language.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, so the extensions of that &#8212; and I think that&#8217;s right on &#8212; is that I, as an observer without that context of why I&#8217;m behaving the way I&#8217;m behaving, sees that person being aggressive or sees that person being welcoming and saying, &#8220;That person behaves this way and that person is successful, therefore if I behave that way, then I will also be successful and I divorce the practice from the context.&#8221; That same aggressive behavior that works in that context taken into a context where aggressive behavior is viewed as pathological is going to blow up in your face. That&#8217;s an obvious example. But the less obvious example is if I do what Netflix did with their software, I will be successful in software but we&#8217;re forgetting the very important point that I am not Netflix.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My problem is not their problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly and I&#8217;m not to say that there are no other organizations that can use the exact same set of practices and techniques and be successful. It just means that not necessarily you. It could be you but may not be you so it&#8217;s probably better to figure out where we are and try to get to where we need to go.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As kind of a follow up to my previous question about people who have come up with their own language around defining the constraints that they want to impose on everybody else, I&#8217;m wondering how you can facilitate a conversation between people who have different words and different idioms that they&#8217;re using to try to impose these things and if you can get those people to come to some common agreement and how do you do that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I probably haven&#8217;t done that exactly the way you posed the question and that would actually be interesting. You&#8217;ve got a couple different scenarios. You&#8217;ve got two people showing up with different words for the same thing. I usually have, maybe the inverse of that which is people are using the same word to mean different things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That never happens in software.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, it&#8217;s everywhere. One of the things that I&#8217;m using, I think more as a trick than it is a technique right now is to double down on the fact that everybody seems to be newly obsessed with Eric Evans and Domain Driven Design. I start talking about ubiquitous language and I start saying that, &#8220;You&#8217;re using a word to mean this and you&#8217;re using the same word to mean something different and that&#8217;s leading you to frustration.&#8221; Eric Evans talked about this problem and I expound on the whole idea of ubiquitous language in a nutshell being that when we use the same words, we mean the same things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Sometimes, I&#8217;ll even go often to talking about, &#8220;And that&#8217;s what a bounded context is. It&#8217;s a domain model that has ubiquitous language,&#8221; but depends on how excited that particular group is about that term or not because most of the time it&#8217;s a language that they picked out of the industry conversation. We talked about microservice. I&#8217;ve mentioned bounded context as another term. There&#8217;s a lots of these there floating around right now so they&#8217;ll grab one of those terms that people are saying is, &#8220;This is a good thing. This is something that you should strive for and they&#8217;ll define it to mean what they want it to be.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;ll say, &#8220;You know what? That thing that you want, that&#8217;s valuable. That&#8217;s a good thing and this other thing that you want, that&#8217;s different is also valuable and a good thing. Let&#8217;s name those things.&#8221; You don&#8217;t get to use microservice as the word for that thing. You need to call it something else.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I kind of go back and forth with them a little bit about if you find things that are valuable, you should make up a language that makes sense to you so that other people in the organization &#8212; when they encounter these terms &#8212; they&#8217;re not confused because I read this book that said that word meant this or I read this blog post that said this word meant something else. You&#8217;ve defined within your organizational lexicon that this term means this thing that you value as an organization and that helps diffuse things a little bit because I was like, &#8220;Oh, cool. We get to invent new words. That sounds like fun.&#8221; That helps a little bit. It helps people to feel like the ideas that their brain to the conversation are in fact valuable ideas, instead of being told, &#8220;You&#8217;re wrong. That&#8217;s not what a microservice is,&#8221; because I&#8217;ve tried that strategy and that strategy doesn&#8217;t work very well. They feel like, &#8220;Oh, my thing is good. My thing just needs a name and the name that I&#8217;m using is confusing because it&#8217;s defined elsewhere,&#8221; and I understand that. That feels right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then we start to get into a useful language defining conversation that feels a little bit like modeling and who doesn&#8217;t like modeling a problem space and giving names to things? Then you&#8217;ll say, &#8220;You know what? We’re creating ubiquitous language right now, at least amongst the group in this room,&#8221; and then now we can use that to expand and educate other people in the organization, instead of confusing them by redefining all these words that they&#8217;re either already using or they&#8217;re encountering in a conference talk or a magazine article or something else.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a recent Douglas Hofstadter book that talks about metaphors and similes as the fuel and fire of thinking. One of the things that&#8217;s pointed out in the book is the supremeness of metaphors. I think we&#8217;re particularly susceptible to this in software development because we are not really involved in neologism so much as repurposing existing metaphors. We use smoke tests, we use server, we use client, we use composition, we use all these words that have barred from different disciplines and I think it&#8217;s only natural that, as human beings we conceive of these terms differently. We mapped the metaphors differently. I think neologisms is a really interesting way to frame a solution to that problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Neologism. Does that mean making up new words?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Did you make that word up?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No. Yes, I invented that word.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Matt, this idea that you&#8217;re talking about of universal language, I just want to mention is exactly the concept of language games by Wittgenstein. It is building a shared group of concepts that you use to describe your shared activity in the real world.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. The interesting thing, when you&#8217;re going back to that metaphors we live by a book, the premise of that book and I&#8217;m only about a third of the way through it at this point but I already feel like I&#8217;ve got probably a few months’ worth of things to think about just from reading that third of the book, is that we kind of have these metaphors that are so ingrained in the culture that we use them without realizing that they&#8217;re metaphors. The argument that it is war is one that&#8217;s easier to see but there was one that was really good. Janelle, you should be able to jog my memory on this, maybe.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There was the whole structure in there about talking about things that aren&#8217;t containers and calling them containers because he would say that a person, for example, is in love. If you&#8217;re in something, you&#8217;re inside of a container so the metaphor is actually that love is a container. He talked about that a little bit and I can&#8217;t remember half the stuff he said. It was really good stuff but we walk around communicating in these metaphors all the time and he makes this statement that really there is no such thing as non-metaphorical conversation. At least what I take away from it is that you can actually walk everything back to a metaphor and it feels like there&#8217;s this concept that eventually you should get to things that are atomic and there&#8217;s a whole chapter in there that challenges the idea that there&#8217;s actually anything that&#8217;s atomic from an idea perspective, that you can always take something and break it down even further.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hofstadter talks about that as well. In a talk that I gave recently which is called, &#8216;Metaphors Are Similes. Similes Are Like Metaphors,&#8217; I talked about how the standard scientific method is about seeking the atomic components, about solving small problems and composing solutions to small problems into a larger solution. Then we have something like category theory, which says the small pieces don&#8217;t matter. Let&#8217;s look at things from an even higher perspective and find the similarities that way and compose a problem-solution pair that is about shared characteristics, rather than differences.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re talking about how to bridge two different people sort of universes of language so they can share an understanding of something and we&#8217;re talking about metaphors and their relationship to some truth. Metaphors don&#8217;t actually describe the thing. If they perfectly describe the thing, they wouldn&#8217;t be metaphor. Metaphors are leaky analogies or are very leaky abstractions. Wittgenstein has another concept called Wittgenstein&#8217;s Ladder which might be more familiar to some people as lies to children, which is where we attempt to bridge a differential in understanding between two people by saying something that is not true but is more true than their current understanding. If you do that enough, you eventually bridge that gap with the caveat that you then have to throw away the bridge that you&#8217;ve built because it&#8217;s no longer hopeful, because it&#8217;s a lie.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s simultaneously fascinating and terrifying.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Don&#8217;t take off in the middle of that process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Strong agree.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If you give people a whole list of check boxes for what it&#8217;s a microservice for instance, some of those are like with those equality, the [inaudible] resilience or [inaudible] breaking. Some of those are going to be within reach and useful now but some of them are not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The one that I think is both the most misunderstood and also the most dangerous is this database per service concept. There&#8217;s this idea that I think&#8217;s a very valid one that if you have a bounded context and you&#8217;ve got this domain model that has a boundary put around it that controls what comes in and what goes out so that you can protect the integrity of the language you use within that circle. One of the things that we say is you can&#8217;t have a shared database across multiple-bounded contexts because then I can actually not go through your front door to engage with you. I can go through the back door and talk directly to your data and make it do the things that I want to do or get the information that you say I can&#8217;t have. That&#8217;s important and valuable and it&#8217;s a principle that I think is interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> What we&#8217;ve done is we&#8217;ve taken that and we have turned it into a bullet point on a slide that says microservice should have their own database. Or even worse, every microservice should have its own database. Notice the difference there?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Now the implication is microservice should have a database.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Whether they need one or not?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. Exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And so, I walked into an architecture&#8217;s conversation. They&#8217;re showing me they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Every single microservice had a database,&#8221; and I said, &#8220;Why does this one have a database?&#8221; They&#8217;re like, &#8220;Because it&#8217;s a microservice.&#8221; Like, &#8220;Yeah but why does that microservice have a database?&#8221; They&#8217;re like, &#8220;Because every microservice has to have a database. That&#8217;s what makes it a microservice,&#8221; and these were genuinely confused people. They had been taught this and they were doing what they were told. It&#8217;s worse than cargo culting. I don&#8217;t know what it is, like cargo culting, &#8220;We adopt something, we don&#8217;t know why we adopt it. In this world, we&#8217;re doing something we were told to do and we don&#8217;t know why we were told to do it but it&#8217;s the rules because it was in the slide deck that said this is how you microservice and we were told we have to microservice.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There are these things that we put on the list that are based in some truth and because we want to simplify it, we want to get people closer to this thing that we want people to adopt in a way of building software, the simplification becomes actually adopted as the truth, which is the thing that I thought was so scary about as you said is we built this bridge and then it&#8217;s appropriate to throw it away at some point but not only do we not throw it away, we actually double down on it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, you sort of engrave it into the structure of your organization and say, &#8220;You have to understand this bridge. This bridge is now part of our organization,&#8221; when in fact the bridge was only there to get everyone to a shared place of understanding and past that point is counterproductive.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But the bridge was given to us by an authority and that short circuits a lot of stuff in our brains.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I mean, we can get really mad in here. We can talk about how do you create knowledge in another person&#8217;s brain. We&#8217;ve talked about through rote just by telling them the thing and how that often isn&#8217;t very effective because they don&#8217;t really internalize it. We can do it by building a bridge through metaphor and through analogy. I think, Jess you were talking about earlier, sometimes it&#8217;s important to let people fail because sometimes the best way to gain your knowledge is through experience.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like the other major theme here is that everything is this solution-centric conversation and everyone gets caught up in this argument of what the solution is supposed to be and everybody&#8217;s forgetting about what problem it is we&#8217;re trying to solve to begin with that at the end of the day, getting back to the pain, getting back to the problem that we&#8217;re trying to solve is the thing that I think anchors everybody back to that same goal and purpose of why we&#8217;re here to begin with. It&#8217;s just so easy to get lost in all the solutioning that we end up just forgetting that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that as technical people, we also have an obvious bias towards solutions and shiny new toys, which does not help us in any way in this conversation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know, let&#8217;s replace our government with software. Let&#8217;s all be technocrats. Every constraint on a system is a scar from a previous experience.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There was an interesting conversation that we had on Twitter, I guess two days ago and it was a broken conversation for me because I started it as a flight was getting ready to take off and then I&#8217;ve continued on in-flight Wi-Fi poorly and then I started again while I was trying to get out of the airport &#8212; this is how committed I was to this conversation &#8212; and I forget exactly what the trigger was but we were talking about this transition from this thing that Simon Brown calls a modular monolith, all the way over to the microservices as an evolutionary thing and why that&#8217;s a good way to go.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Adrian Cockcroft pipes in and says, &#8220;In Netflix, we spent like X number of months &#8211;&#8221; or years, I can&#8217;t remember it was, &#8220;&#8211; struggling and trying to build a modular monolith and we have initially eject it and went to microservices.&#8221; And I asked the question to follow up and say, &#8220;I bet you learned a lot through that struggle. Do you think &#8211;?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Are you assuming it was a struggle?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, he said it was a struggle. I said, &#8220;So you had a struggle there. I bet you learned a lot, do you think that you would have been as successful had you not had the struggle? Had you just gone straight to microservices on Day 1?&#8221; He responded. &#8220;No, we developed and anti-architecture of painful things to stop doing,&#8221; was I think his exact quote. That really resonated with me because the thing that I felt going through my mind in the earlier part of the conversation, maybe a couple minutes ago, was solutions versus what problem we&#8217;re trying to solve. It feels like an economic problem. If we could just get the right solution on Day 1 and just implement it, that should be cheaper than struggling through the figuring out of the problems stuff because that takes time and effort and that time is not free.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But if you pick the solution on Day 1, assuming that it&#8217;s going to be correct, it looks like, &#8220;We didn&#8217;t go through all that stuff, all that discovery process, all that figuring out the problem. We just have the solution so we saved all that money,&#8221; and then it blows up in our face later on the project and we end up paying for that and probably paying beyond what we would have originally paid, had we just struggled through the original discovery process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It will just blow up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s why I like to say that monolith is sort of an important part of the evolution on any software system because creating a monolith &#8212; the system &#8212; lets you define the domain and you have no idea what services you need until you thought the pain of having everything be tangled.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. Exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And having the monolith gives you the ability to move things around without crossing a service boundaries that are significantly more expensive than module boundaries.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, you don&#8217;t even know what those service boundaries are when you&#8217;re just setting out to solve the problem because you don&#8217;t have that perspective yet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Matt, you mentioned that you tried to put in the solution to all the problems that you&#8217;re going to have at the beginning and then it blows up. How does it blow up?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>By blowing up meaning that we adapt a solution without going through this process of discovering and finding where the pain points actually are, where the boundaries ought to be so we get a completely different set of &#8212; going back to the idea of accidental versus essential complexity &#8212; accidental pain versus essential pain. There&#8217;s pain that&#8217;s inherent in the problem that we&#8217;re trying to solve and we adopt a solution that doesn&#8217;t address that pain so we now get different pain, which is the pain inflicted by the solution on the things that the problem didn&#8217;t actually inflict upon us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This is manifested in a lot of clients that I&#8217;ve worked with where they set out and they figured out, &#8220;We&#8217;re going to draw all these microservices on the whiteboard and these are good so we&#8217;re going to build that,&#8221; and then six months into that project or a year into that project, they come back and I say, &#8220;Show me the architecture,&#8221; and it&#8217;s not the same architecture. Usually, they have less services than they had before and say, &#8220;What happened to this?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> &#8220;Those services made life worse so we backed them back into monoliths,&#8221; which one of the very first things that I did before microservices [inaudible] in the term that [inaudible] around, I was working in the world of OSGi and we have built this whole architecture based on different OSGi modules. We did a very bad job of defining our modules and OSGi made our life a living hell. One weekend I said, &#8220;Screw it. I&#8217;m backing OSGi out and I&#8217;m recreating a single codebase.&#8221; The pain of the modularization that we needed was still there but all the pain of the stuff that we had created artificially went away.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I am well-acquainted with a bunch of microservices and then back it back into a monolith. It&#8217;s a painful expensive process to go through so myself and a couple other folks have theorized from different directions, maybe we should defer the creation of the distributed system. I don&#8217;t want to say things like to the last responsible moment because people have used that in weird and crazy ways but defer it until something obviously hurts and then figure out is separating along a boundary of where this pain point is, is that going to potentially make the problem better? Do that one thing. Do that one thing and limit the expense to attacking that one pain point, which should be a smaller experiment than we&#8217;ve got 25 microservices and we need to go back to 12 or we&#8217;ve got 12 and we&#8217;ve got to 25. Then experiment.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Is this better? If it is better, great. We&#8217;ve got a microservice and we&#8217;re going to run with it. If it&#8217;s not, it shouldn&#8217;t be nearly as disastrous to bring it back in. In fact, we should just be able to, in theory, revert to that particular commit in the codebase and move forward. But that seems to be a better approach. Now, what I haven&#8217;t done is taken this approach out and run with it on multiple projects to see if the theory is correct or if it&#8217;s just as busted as the other idea. But it feels like it would be better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Matt, I think you talked earlier about this as evolutionary process and Coraline, I know you said that too. I think that&#8217;s such a useful metaphor for this that we should unpack it a bit. For one thing and this allows me to get on one of my favorite horses, evolution is a process whereby progress is made by making choices that are in aggregate better than random chance. It turns out that&#8217;s actually all you need to make progress on some time scale.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The other thing is that a lot of people look at this problem, I think as a path-finding problem or you say, &#8220;There is the goal. Let&#8217;s find a path to that goal,&#8221; and the problem with that is that implies we know what the goal is, where really it&#8217;s a different kind of search problem where we don&#8217;t know where the goal is and we won&#8217;t know until we get there. There is no way that you could just pick a random point in the space and say, &#8220;Let&#8217;s go there because we think it&#8217;s where we&#8217;re supposed to be.&#8221; I think, in thinking about this in terms of evolutionary search of this problem space is a really good metaphor.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. When I actually did my undergraduate thesis on and then published another paper on in grad school was using genetic algorithms for optimizing search spaces. I&#8217;m pretty familiar with the idea of, &#8220;I&#8217;ve got a haystack and there&#8217;s a needle in there somewhere but I don&#8217;t even know what the needle looks like or if it&#8217;s even really a needle but I&#8217;m going to go look for it anyway.&#8221; I just start throwing solutions up the problem space and tweaking them in various ways, using again metaphors to biological processes to see if we can come up with better solutions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Now, Neal Ford and Rebecca Parsons are working on a book on the same level from an architectural standpoint called Evolutionary Architecture and they&#8217;re not implementing genetic algorithms so much as they&#8217;re borrowing the concept of a fitness function and saying, &#8220;We&#8217;re going to define a fitness function for the things that we find valuable in an architecture and then use that fitness function to evaluate our architecture at various stages of evolution and either the architecture is getting better or the architecture is getting worse and that will allow us to drive the decisions that we make in different directions.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s always interesting to me how this is well-explored in the software engineering domain than at the process in organization level, lags behind by decades.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>True.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It seems to me that the costs of doing some genetic algorithm are relatively well understood in software and you can do thousands of generations in a reasonable amount of time, whereas if you tried to do a truly evolutionary process in an organization, you would run out of money long before you got anywhere.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, it&#8217;s interesting there are cases where you can take this aggregate approach to problem solving. If you need to solve a problem, you can buy 10 tools that you think might solve the problem, then maybe one of them does and maybe it&#8217;s cheaper than having developed a tool in-house. There are times where you can do it but there are also other ways to do better than that aggregate method.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things that I see a lot is at the organizational level is our obsession with reuse of we want to make sure that we only develop one service of this type and that service is going to be the one that does that type of work for all time, which again flies in the face of the whole microservices that should actually be now easy to replace and you should be able to create new ones cheaply and throw things away. I kind of challenge that with notion of like why are you trying to control that? Why not let multiple services that do the same type show up in the organization and then whichever one actually ends up being used the most and delivers the most value, that one survives?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Once a service is like no traffic has been routed to the service for three months, maybe we can turn that one off. Depending upon who I&#8217;m talking to, people are either fascinated or terrified by that idea because so much of governance is about controlling and preventing those types of things from happening but it seems like an approach that, again I haven&#8217;t seen done it scale but would be very interesting to see an organization and say, &#8220;You know what? We’re going to stop that particular type of control and allow the service typology to actually evolve and use some function to evaluate which services survive and which ones do not and see where that goes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It seems like in order to accept that, you would first have to accept the idea that your first idea of what that first microservice in that category was, you actually have to give up the idea that that was the right choice. You really invested in that, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. You know, I think that&#8217;s one of the things that the earlier incarnations of kind of when we were figuring out this Agile thing of we rewrite a test and then we make the test pass and then we&#8217;re supposed to refactor. The refactory thing tends to get set aside because I wrote that code and I labored over that code and I&#8217;m really proud of that code and I want to keep that code around. We promote that idea to larger and larger and larger structures. I saw some cost-fallacy flyby in the chat a little bit earlier, we haven&#8217;t learned that thing because we invest in an architecture that we know to be poor but we&#8217;ve invested in it so therefore, we need to keep it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The best crazy example of that that I remember is a project from four years ago where we were working with an organization that shall remain nameless as always and they were doing scrum &#8212; I&#8217;m doing air quotes right now for folks that can&#8217;t see me &#8212; and they had done their sprint planning and we had something that we were supposed to bring to the project and we were late but we showed up four days into this sprint. The sprint was going to be a month and they said, &#8220;We&#8217;ve got the thing now. Can we start working on it?&#8221; I said, &#8220;No, we&#8217;ve already done the sprint planning. You have to come back next month.&#8221; They said, &#8220;But we have new information that invalidates this.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> &#8220;It doesn&#8217;t matter. We’ve done the sprint planning so therefore, you have to show up next month.&#8221; It&#8217;s comical and tragic at the same time but there are so many examples of us doing exactly that, of we have created something whether it&#8217;s a plan or a piece of software or an architecture and we know. We now have new data that tells us this is wrong. But the process says or something else says that we have to go on. It’s irrational but at the same time, it&#8217;s so prevalent. I don&#8217;t really know how to cut through that other than to say, &#8220;It&#8217;s irrational and we need to cut through it,&#8221; but yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The best summation of that pattern that I&#8217;ve heard so far is defining the waterfall process as &#8216;a shared agreement not to learn anything for the duration of the project.&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a mental model of it that I use that comes from Karl Popper, a philosopher of science who&#8217;s probably best known for this notion of falsifiability that was pretty popular while ago. His political philosophy, which you can take or leave, incorporates the idea that we focus a lot on making the right decision. We put a lot of time and effort into making the right decision but it turns out, that&#8217;s not the only way to achieve progress. You can also achieve progress by recovering from bad decisions. If you do that enough, you&#8217;ll eventually have the right ones will stick. If you have a culture that focuses on recovery from failure, rather than preemptive and trying to make sure you never do anything wrong, that culture can be a lot less fragile.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Going back to the whole metaphor thing, I think one of the foundational metaphors that drive a lot of this type of behavior is the manufacturing metaphor. When we think about our software as we&#8217;re building these little parts and they were putting these little parts in a box and shipping them to customers, that metaphor is so foundational to our thinking that this idea that we&#8217;re going to perfect things up front versus that evolutionary process, you&#8217;re talking about of being able to adapt after the fact that we need to move to a mindset of software is inherently a discovery process and that we&#8217;re always going to get it wrong and we&#8217;re always going to make mistakes. The best way that we can make progress, as you&#8217;re saying and evolve toward whatever that goal is that we don&#8217;t even know yet is to learn how to respond to the pain and observe the pain and figure out how to adapt from those things as early as quickly as possible.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We probably need to stop talking about iteration and start talking about evolution because iteration is not a metaphor and metaphor is more powerful than descriptive terms.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We would love to continue this conversation but we are running short on time. We, unfortunately need to wrap up the show and get into reflections. This is the part of the show where we talk about something that is maybe going to stick with us, that we learned or that we maybe want other people to spend some time thinking about. Matt, would you launch into that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MATT:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Was it Wittgenstein that we mentioned earlier? I was not familiar with that particular philosopher and the whole language games thing but I have definitely added something additional to my reading list from the conversation because, again going back to the idea of metaphors and trying to create isomorphisms, once I see something that shows up in more than one place, I want to go collect as many other examples of things like that as I can to figure out, &#8220;Am I actually seeing a pattern or am I not?&#8221; Now, I&#8217;m fascinated by a new potential candidate for that list. I have homework to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m going to be doing some thinking about the shortcomings of pattern matching. We didn&#8217;t specifically talk about pattern matching during the show but I think it was a subtext where we see what we think a problem is and pattern matching tells us what the solution is, regardless of whether it&#8217;s actually appropriate or not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I actually really enjoyed the talk about using evolution as a model. One of the things I really like about that is that evolution occurs because of mistakes and I think it&#8217;s a good idea to remind ourselves that allowing for mistakes to happen gives us the opportunity to see a new way that we can adapt what we&#8217;re doing and actually utilize that to make ourselves better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Astrid, that actually reminds me of a thing I wanted to say before but forgot, which is sometimes the best thing for an organization to do is to make it cheap and easy to fail, rather than to succeed. My reflection would be I want to mention a book called, &#8216;The Beginning of Infinity,&#8217; that sort of expands on this Popperian idea of how to make progress just by correcting mistakes. It&#8217;s a little bit woo, a little bit philosophy, a little bit science. It’s pretty interesting book and that definitely gave me a lot to think about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot about this idea as language as a mechanism of control and constraining the vocabulary and space of meaning as a means of controlling the thought patterns and stuff of others. I&#8217;ve never really thought about it that way but it&#8217;s amazing to think about how a tribal argument is war, can take place via language control.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For me, the thing that really caught my attention &#8212; I mean, there was so much &#8212; the idea of building a bridge of understanding with progressively less incorrect metaphors is when I heard that I thought immediately of the process of raising my daughter who is now eight almost nine. That’s something that I&#8217;ve definitely been going through. I haven&#8217;t really thought about it but when she asked questions that I get frustrated and trying to think about how to answer them, I&#8217;m realizing that it&#8217;s because there are several segments of that bridge and I&#8217;m not sure I have time to build them all right now so that I can answer the question to her satisfaction, so thank you for that model. That&#8217;s really useful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Matt for this great conversation today. I think you gave us a lot of stuff to think about. Especially, now my head is very twisted with metaphors and trying to understand how and talking and listening to other people. Hopefully we can have more conversations like this where we get to go on for a little bit longer than usual but to all of our listeners out there, thanks for listening and will see you in another couple of weeks.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
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<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span> <a href="http://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Matt Stine: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/mstine"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@mstine</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.mattstine.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">mattstine.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Chinchilla Chat: Where It’s All Chinchillas&#8230;All The Time&#8230;” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show,<br />
buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><b>03:10</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Matt’s Origin Story in Software Development</span></p>
<p><b>09:04 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Business of Consulting</span></p>
<p><b>16:24 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Empathy in Consulting</span></p>
<p><b>20:07 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Rigorous Communication and Shared Language; Microservices</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ludwig Wittgenstein</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.dictionary.com/browse/sapir-whorf-hypothesis"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226468011/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0226468011&amp;linkId=eb1e64309e20b18e5700df50e48890ae"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Metaphors We Live By</span></a></p>
<p><b>39:05 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://martinfowler.com/bliki/UbiquitousLanguage.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ubiquitous Language</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465018475/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0465018475&amp;linkId=acbb83bfae39114efe5369b300142f68"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking by Douglas Hofstadter </span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czvgHSYKkNU"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke: Metaphors Are Similes. Similes Are Like Metaphors.</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein%27s_ladder"><span sty]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span> <a href="http://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Matt Stine: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/mstine"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@mstine</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.mattstine.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">mattstine.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Chinchilla Chat: Where It’s All Chinchillas&#8230;All The Time&#8230;” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to help make us a weekly show,<br />
buy and ship you swag,<br />
</b><b style="font-size: 1.8rem;">and bring us to conferences near you?<br />
</b><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p><b>Or tell your organization to send sponsorship inquiries to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><b>03:10</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Matt’s Origin Story in Software Development</span></p>
<p><b>09:04 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Business of Consulting</span></p>
<p><b>16:24 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Empathy in Consulting</span></p>
<p><b>20:07 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Rigorous Communication and Shared Language; Microservices</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ludwig Wittgenstein</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.dictionary.com/browse/sapir-whorf-hypothesis"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226468011/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0226468011&amp;linkId=eb1e64309e20b18e5700df50e48890ae"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Metaphors We Live By</span></a></p>
<p><b>39:05 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://martinfowler.com/bliki/UbiquitousLanguage.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ubiquitous Language</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0465018475/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0465018475&amp;linkId=acbb83bfae39114efe5369b300142f68"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking by Douglas Hofstadter </span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czvgHSYKkNU"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke: Metaphors Are Similes. Similes Are Like Metaphors.</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein%27s_ladder"><span sty]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/matt.jpeg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/matt.jpeg"></googleplay:image>
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					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>01:14:06</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>Episode 035: Behind the Scenes at npm with Laurie Voss</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-035-behind-the-scenes-at-npm-with-laurie-voss/</link>
					<pubDate>Thu, 01 Jun 2017 02:03:51 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=628</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Laurie Voss joins us to talk about what goes on behind the scenes at npm, including setting workplace culture, technical hiring, and organizing engineers.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Laurie Voss joins us to talk about what goes on behind the scenes at npm, including setting workplace culture, technical hiring, and organizing engineers.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="http://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Laurie Voss: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/seldo"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@seldo</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://seldo.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">seldo.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Yes, SJWs Do Actually Code” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:22</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Superpower Origin Story</span></p>
<p><b>06:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Real Programming”</span></p>
<p><b>08:45 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Gay in the Tech Industry; </span><a href="http://www.microactivist.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Micro Activism</span></a></p>
<p><b>16:17 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Setting Workplace Culture</span></p>
<p><b>21:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Working in Open Source While Working in a Company like </span><a href="https://www.npmjs.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">npm</span></a></p>
<p><b>25:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Monetizing npm</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.npmjs.com/enterprise"><span style="font-weight: 400;">npm Enterprise</span></a></p>
<p><b>32:55 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– npm@5</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!</b><b><br />
</b><b>Thank you to Linnea Kylén Rönnqvist!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Thank you to Jacob Stoebel for submitting our first guest blog post, </b><a href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/2017/05/30/guest-post-honesty-kindness-and-inspiration-pick-three/"><b>“Honesty, Kindness and Inspiration: Pick Three”</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Submit your own guest blog post to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p><b>42:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The 10x Engineer</span></p>
<p><b>44:19 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Technical Hiring</span></p>
<p><b>49:53 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Why Whiteboarding and Code Exercises Don’t Work</span></p>
<p><b>51:51 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Organizing Engineers</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591846404/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=1591846404&amp;linkId=c494a8d5b6315f65af8e4f4a31c3f450"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Not being concerned with how other people view you as a programmer.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Remembering good hiring practices to influence others. </span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Making your interview process focus on having people talk to each other about software. </span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004SCRVIK/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B004SCRVIK&amp;linkId=841afede1e410cba5f9277716d97f581"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Becoming a Change Artist by Gerald Weinberg</span></a></p>
<p><b>Laurie:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Organizing large groups of people to get stuff done.</span></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="http://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Laurie Voss: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/seldo"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@seldo</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://seldo.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">seldo.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Yes, SJWs Do Actually Code” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:22</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Superpower Origin Story</span></p>
<p><b>06:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Real Programming”</span></p>
<p><b>08:45 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Gay in the Tech Industry; </span><a href="http://www.microactivist.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Micro Activism</span></a></p>
<p><b>16:17 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Setting Workplace Culture</span></p>
<p><b>21:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Working in Open Source While Working in a Company like </span><a href="https://www.npmjs.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">npm</span></a></p>
<p><b>25:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Monetizing npm</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.npmjs.com/enterprise"><span style="font-weight: 400;">npm Enterprise</span></a></p>
<p><b>32:55 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– npm@5</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!</b><b><br />
</b><b>Thank you to Linnea Kylén Rönnqvist!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Thank you to Jacob Stoebel for submitting our first guest blog post, </b><a href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/2017/05/30/guest-post-honesty-kindness-and-inspiration-pick-three/"><b>“Honesty, Kindness and Inspiration: Pick Three”</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Submit your own guest blog post to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p><b>42:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The 10x Engineer</span></p>
<p><b>44:19 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Technical Hiring</span></p>
<p><b>49:53 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Why Whiteboarding and Code Exercises Don’t Work</span></p>
<p><b>51:51 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Organizing Engineers</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591846404/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=1591846404&amp;linkId=c494a8d5b6315f65af8e4f4a31c3f450"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Not being concerned with how other people view you as a programmer.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Remembering good hiring practices to influence others. </span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Making your interview process focus on having people talk to each other about software. </span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004SCRVIK/ref=as_l]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="http://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Laurie Voss: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/seldo"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@seldo</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://seldo.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">seldo.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Yes, SJWs Do Actually Code” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:22</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Superpower Origin Story</span></p>
<p><b>06:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Real Programming”</span></p>
<p><b>08:45 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Being Gay in the Tech Industry; </span><a href="http://www.microactivist.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Micro Activism</span></a></p>
<p><b>16:17 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Setting Workplace Culture</span></p>
<p><b>21:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Working in Open Source While Working in a Company like </span><a href="https://www.npmjs.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">npm</span></a></p>
<p><b>25:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Monetizing npm</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.npmjs.com/enterprise"><span style="font-weight: 400;">npm Enterprise</span></a></p>
<p><b>32:55 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– npm@5</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!</b><b><br />
</b><b>Thank you to Linnea Kylén Rönnqvist!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Thank you to Jacob Stoebel for submitting our first guest blog post, </b><a href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/2017/05/30/guest-post-honesty-kindness-and-inspiration-pick-three/"><b>“Honesty, Kindness and Inspiration: Pick Three”</b></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Submit your own guest blog post to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p><b>42:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The 10x Engineer</span></p>
<p><b>44:19 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Technical Hiring</span></p>
<p><b>49:53 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Why Whiteboarding and Code Exercises Don’t Work</span></p>
<p><b>51:51 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Organizing Engineers</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591846404/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=1591846404&amp;linkId=c494a8d5b6315f65af8e4f4a31c3f450"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Not being concerned with how other people view you as a programmer.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Remembering good hiring practices to influence others. </span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Making your interview process focus on having people talk to each other about software. </span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B004SCRVIK/ref=as_l]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Laurie.jpg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Laurie.jpg"></googleplay:image>
										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/628/episode-035-behind-the-scenes-at-npm-with-laurie-voss.mp3" length="60762487" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>yes</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>Yes</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>63:17</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>Episode 034: Systems Thinking in the Real World</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-034-systems-thinking-in-the-real-world/</link>
					<pubDate>Thu, 25 May 2017 00:35:05 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=598</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[In this episode, we talk about new ways to organize society around a culture of plenty rather than a culture of scarcity. Along the way we discuss the intersection of corporations and open source and the gatekeeping that prevents  marginalized people from participating in open culture.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[In this episode, we talk about new ways to organize society around a culture of plenty rather than a culture of scarcity. Along the way we discuss the intersection of corporations and open source and the gatekeeping that prevents  marginalized people fro]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="http://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Missives from the Future of Tech: Ladies’ Night Edition” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:20</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Where the Lines Cross; Social Responsibility of Engineers</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tragedy of the Commons</span></a></p>
<p><b>06:53 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Why We Do What We Do</span></p>
<p><b>09:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Surviving and Functioning For All Humans: Basic Social Support</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>For sponsorship inquiries: please contact </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p><b>16:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Preventing Infrastructure Decay and Advancing the Whole</span></p>
<p><b>19:54 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “The Cycle of Safety”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553380966/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0553380966&amp;linkId=057eda599b58fdadf1e06c52a9256018"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady&#8217;s Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson</span></a></p>
<p><b>25:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Scarcity</span></p>
<p><b>30:15 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Where are we focusing?</span></p>
<p><b>33:25 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Reframing The Tragedy of the Commons; Gatekeeping</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKpbejoneFs"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Broken Promise of Open Source by Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p><b>37:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Organizations as Business AND Schools</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385517254/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0385517254&amp;linkId=7e9c7008b6f4237ac17119214b877a51"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Fifth Discipline: The Art &amp; Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge</span></a></p>
<p><b>40:25 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Abundance and Barter Systems</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Coraline: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Access to technology as a human right.</span></p>
<p><b>Janelle: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Where is all the knowledge in the world? Where does the knowledge flows? What are the gates that get in the way of knowledge flows?</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> What would you do if money wasn’t a factor? </span></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Software has to hold the keys. It’s the closest thing to magic that we’ve ever had.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.openmastery.org/join-us/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Open Mastery Community</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!</b><b><br />
</b><b>Thank you to Ilan Shredni!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Welcome everybody back to our podcast &#8216;Missives from the Future of Tech: Ladies’ Night Edition&#8217;. I&#8217;m here today with my great friend, Coraline Ada Ehmke.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hey, everybody. Really happy to be here and to my left on Skype is the lovely and talented, Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning. I am super excited about the show today because we have Janelle Klein, as the guest again and this is because a few weeks ago, we had Janelle on the show and we were supposed to talk about when the lines cross between tech and life but we totally didn&#8217;t pay attention to that because we got so excited about her ideas around Idea Flow and measuring development that we peppered her the questions about that for an hour so we have to have Janelle back because it&#8217;s time to talk about what really matters.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Janelle is a software developer, system builder, speaker, and entrepreneur. She&#8217;s known for her willingness to question all the secret kinds of contemporary development methodology and indeed, the very underpinnings of modern society. Janelle, welcome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi. Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What are some of these topics that we don&#8217;t talk about?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Since we&#8217;ve been working on this AI project or emotional intelligence, I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot about this question of just where the lines cross and that our industry is about to go through a major scientific revolution and there&#8217;s all these questions about what&#8217;s going to happen to our social support infrastructure. The more I think about it, the more it looks like we&#8217;re heading for, essentially system collapse and given that our industry is introducing all these disruptions, does that make us socially responsible for stepping up and doing something about it? I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot about those type of questions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It seems to me that we&#8217;re seeing an increasing number of stories in the media over the past several years about how tech companies are not taking those responsibilities for &#8216;disruptions&#8217; of the systems that we have in place today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It kind of feels like a major tragedy of the commons type of effect, where everyone feels entitled to do their own thing, make money their own way, run typical business and then as everybody in the system does that same thing, we end up with this destructive commons effect which eventually builds up but it&#8217;s like the code module that nobody owns. It&#8217;s everybody&#8217;s problem but it&#8217;s nobody&#8217;s problem and it affects all of us and now the system is spinning out of control.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What&#8217;s spinning out of control?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess I see, what I would describe as a number of negative feedback loops that are reinforcing in vicious cycle. When I think about how the dynamics of the system are shifting right now, those are the patterns that have me, I guess the most concerned that when I just predict where those patterns lead, it takes me to relatively scary predictions right now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can you give some concrete examples?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I looked at all of this from a lot of the perspective of software development and what&#8217;s happening in our industry because in software and connectivity and now, AI&#8217;s being put in everything. As we go and build more and more of our infrastructure off of our shared parts, we&#8217;ve got this buildup of software in the industry that we all use. It&#8217;s like 90% of our software is built from existing parts now. If there&#8217;s bugs in that software, if there&#8217;s security vulnerabilities and things that in that software, then those things make us vulnerable since we&#8217;re putting the stuff in our bodies, in our cars, in all of our infrastructure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When I think about this from a risk perspective of public safety and human life and software being in everything, we used to have an open source culture that was very central around optimizing the whole and chipping in and helping each other for the good of the industry. It&#8217;s not that that is gone. It&#8217;s just there&#8217;s been this generational shift in what that means. The people that have built all this software are largely aging and can&#8217;t necessarily keep maintaining it anymore and then this new wave of engineers tends to see themselves more as users, as opposed to owners so the open source has largely depended on companies going in taking responsibility for those assets, for things to get funding and move forward.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then companies start shifting their perspective of looking at open source as a means to get people in their funnel. Basically, as opposed to it being about the good of the whole, it becomes about how do we exploit this open source investment for our own gain. It&#8217;s perfectly reasonable to have that belief because these are sort of the social norms of business. But as soon as everyone starts doing that and nobody takes responsibility for the growing shared infrastructure, it all seems to fall apart and nobody thinks it&#8217;s their job to fix it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think about these problems kind of happening in our software industry as this negative feedback loop that&#8217;s enforced by this recoil and optimize for yourself effect that everybody simultaneously does and the collective owned things, sort of falling by the wayside and then becoming everybody&#8217;s problems. I look at that and it looks to me similarly like some of the problems that are happening with the structure of our socio-economic system and arguing over what we ought to do in those same kind of differences in belief systems that are largely around entitlement and dominance and control type of sentiments, like a difference of practices versus principles kind of tearing apart the world and the commons infrastructure that we all need, kind of going by the wayside in a similar way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Janelle, it kind of sounds to me like you&#8217;re talking about why we do the things that we&#8217;re doing, like there was a generation of people who were building open source projects for the good of everybody and then that started to shift when you had people who were thinking more so about their own particular uses and then how that could be maximized for their benefit. Is that right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve definitely seen that in terms of open source projects where companies are either hiring developers, who are gone open source to insert features that only that company needs or looking to contract with people in the same way or pressure the maintainers and adding features that really benefit only one consumer and that&#8217;s that company.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like this is a problem that we keep having, especially in science where you start out with the intention of maybe just curiosity or inquiry or trying to grow the knowledge base and you want to bring together the best minds and do something that&#8217;s going to be great for everybody. Then once it matures a bit, there&#8217;s always this financial incentive that comes in and then it starts to break off until smaller, little entities that are still working with others but they&#8217;re doing it more so from a different place. Then that can become really destructive and it seems like we don&#8217;t have a good answer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is where I start looking at we&#8217;ve got all of the software engineers that have all these skills with respect to building and designing and maintaining complex systems and designing things for agility and figure out how to do all of this abstract complex systems level modeling and stuff. We&#8217;ve got the set of problems that we need to solve in the world that are very engineering-focused right now. It&#8217;s not a game anymore where it&#8217;s about who&#8217;s winning and losing in election. What we&#8217;re talking about is infrastructure collapse of the socio-economic system of our world, which in all likelihood will lead to war.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the problems we need to fix.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think probably a big one is things like health care or just basic social support education kinds of things, like the basic needs of just being able to operate and have a fair shake at life. Like you grow up, can I go to school? Can I get educated such that I can participate in economy? I mean, what are the basic functions that we need to survive and thrive as a species and then how can we make that the baseline that we start on top of and provide that for all humans, essentially.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I guess, where I see another spinning out of control effect, I&#8217;d say is the wealth of the world concentrated in a very small population. We got four billion plus people in deep poverty and at least from my own experience, when I&#8217;m seeing humans suffering and in a lot of pain, they tend to do crazy stuff and come up with ways to survive. It&#8217;s like we&#8217;re creating all these problems with massive amounts of suffering in the world and then blaming the people that attack us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m just thinking if I was growing up with that kind of suffering, how I might turn out and I can hardly blame someone for raging as a way to survive. Despite the effects that&#8217;s like our world is just filled with so much pain and it&#8217;s easy to shrug it off because it&#8217;s always way over there and we look at what&#8217;s happening in our own world bubble and our problem seems significant. I don&#8217;t know&#8230; It&#8217;s easy to see yourself as the victim and stay in a pattern of self-optimizing, whether it&#8217;s at the individual level or at the entity level or at a family level. But somehow, we have to shift as a global world, I think to that opposite reflex of generosity and abundance and create a social support infrastructure system that is capable supporting the people and at least to that base level of being able to participate in the world. I think that fundamental problem of basic social support needs to be solved and is largely an engineering problem, I think.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And that social structure is being undermined in America by the current administration. The budget includes really deep cuts for social services and what I referred to as entitlements, a word that I take exception to. I think it has gone from this place of anti-science and anti-research and is being framed as a question between supporting the poor versus incurring more death, which really comes down to supporting the poor versus supporting the rich.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As if we could make everyone&#8217;s lives better by smooshing down on half of us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, you know Janelle, I would argue with you that it may not be the engineering that is the problem because what I notice happens is that when you start with a problem that seems really clearly set that it doesn&#8217;t take long before you get to people, being part of the issue. I think for what you just described, one of the big problems is the belief structure that you have, like what you were saying about having it be possible to go to school and learn to participate in society, unfortunately is a believe and there are others who don&#8217;t believe that you are entitled to that because you&#8217;re human. They believe that you don&#8217;t deserve things only by being born that you have to have other things happen, that you somehow must create, no matter your circumstance, or else you aren&#8217;t entitled to it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think those types of clashes is part of the reason why we can&#8217;t even get to solving the engineering problem because you have to start with the foundation that&#8217;s universal about what you should be doing and there&#8217;s a lot of conflict about what you should be doing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s a circle because like Coraline said, you don&#8217;t have what you need to participate in the economy if you don&#8217;t have health care and education and it&#8217;s participating in the economy that people defined as the virtue, which &#8216;entitles&#8217; you to health care and education.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it is a circle. I&#8217;m not arguing that but it&#8217;s still coming from that you have to believe that health care is a human right and there are people who don&#8217;t believe that. If they don&#8217;t believe that, they&#8217;re not going to participate in the solution from the same place as I am.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As looking as though, I don&#8217;t think they necessarily have to participate. As long as they&#8217;re not like, &#8220;Because the people don&#8217;t deserve it, I will make sure and prevent the people that want to provide these services to them don&#8217;t.&#8221; As long as we don&#8217;t force that, the people that believe or see that as a human right have the power to go and build a system to potentially solve that problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I agree. It&#8217;s just unfortunate that for some, when you say something like health care is a human right, for them that is an attack on their beliefs and they feel like they have to fight it and that&#8217;s what they do. Then it creates this war, which is we&#8217;re still not solving the problem. We&#8217;re still arguing about who&#8217;s right and in the meantime, there are people who are starving and dying who don&#8217;t have to. But I think it&#8217;s really hard to move forward when we don&#8217;t have the tools, it seems to even be able to deal with that type of ideological back and forth.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think we do have the tools. It&#8217;s just a matter of using the tools. One of the core principles that came out of lean is this idea of blame the system rather than the people and that the system is usually responsible for 94% of the systemic causes of the dynamics in effect we see. With this whole metaphorical lens that we can examine the system and revisit and view the dynamics of what&#8217;s going on without assigning leaning to the dynamics, we can just observe them and then maybe come up with our own meetings and we can leave all of our metaphorical baggage to the side and come up with a new vocabulary to describe the effects we see. This is the discipline of science which I know is political in itself but these are the tools that we can use to get out of the current situation that we&#8217;re in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As in, if our goal is to provide more wealth in the economy as a whole, maybe we can observe that provide more health care to people result in more wealth in the economy as a whole?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the challenges is trying to run experiments in the context of the existing system as there are so many effects at play &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. The scientific method does not work when you&#8217;re in the middle of a complex system.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and especially if you have a biased interest in a certain perspective, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Janelle, is the parallel you&#8217;re making that our social infrastructure is decaying because of individual incentives? And also, our open source infrastructure is decaying that in order to exist and participate as software, you depend on run times and libraries and all of this open source stuff and if we don&#8217;t take care of that, then we&#8217;re hurting all of us?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I think these things are coupled in a variety of interesting ways and that metaphorically, they both are these sort of tragedy of the commons type effects that have to do with the same shift in mentality from this optimize the whole mindset of abundance, &#8220;Let&#8217;s all chip in and help each other out,&#8221; kind of mindset shifting to, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to focus on myself and optimize for myself and I don&#8217;t need to care for the good of the whole. Whatever, those people can fend for themselves.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That same shift of mindset, I see it happening in our industry. It seems metaphorically parallel to some of the shifts, I think we&#8217;re seeing which I think is response of fear and pain, in response to a feeling of scarcity, like if we&#8217;re going to run out of resources and this feeling, we&#8217;re clearly in a lot of debt. There&#8217;s no disputing that and so it seems reasonable to the people that are recoiling in that way to do so because of the circumstances.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Likewise, shifting out of that mindset has these sort of out of control effects with it because that cycle feedback loop effect you were talking about, where the poor keep getting poorer kind of thing. It&#8217;s easy to go, it&#8217;s not really the problem and look at this as values thing but at the same time, there&#8217;s this overarching challenge with, in order to solve the scarcity problem, we have to figure out how to solve energy. There&#8217;s all these problems that we need to be able to solve, to actually stop being afraid.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If we can get rid of the reasons to be afraid with respect to scarcity and use our skills to create a world of abundance, then we can mitigate that fear, I think and counter those effects. Then I start thinking, if we could figure how to solve our software problems, we can probably figure out how to solve all these other problems too. At the end of the day, the only thing really holding us back is working together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yup. When you&#8217;re in a place of scarcity, like if you&#8217;re hungry and you don&#8217;t know what you&#8217;re going to feed your kids, you cannot think about advancing the whole. That is not a thing. You have to think about right now and today. Fear and pain and all of those things can have an influence on you because you just have to look out for yourself when you personally are in a place of scarcity.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> With software, if you&#8217;re a developer of open source and you need to feed your family, you&#8217;re going to take that corporate money to develop that particular feature that only helps that corporation and you&#8217;re not going to be spending all your time on vulnerabilities that would maximally help the community because you have to take care of yourself at that point. But if we ever move that scarcity and Lord knows we produced enough food for that, then we let people contribute to the whole.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So basically, shift things into a virtuous cycle?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. What do you call it in your book, the Cycle of Safety?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The Cycle of Safety, yeah. I think that&#8217;s how I&#8217;ve been looking at the world as looking at negative feedback loops, which is the cycle of chaos and positive feedback loops or the virtuous cycle or the cycle of safety. After I started looking at Idea Flow this way of looking at these patterns in communication and problem solving and developing this theory of mind, essentially based on all ideas in research, I started seeing these patterns of feedback loops everywhere.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then mentally, I&#8217;ve been using biological metaphors to study organizations as an organism and imagining how I build a hive mind brain, imagining like an organization in software or looking at the socio-economic system as a biological organism and look at how it shifts in emotional energy from just emotional training of tribal effects and humanity and how those things affect the system and how I can think of like Idea Flow as an abstract construct for understanding information flow and energy flow and people trying to solve the problems of survival.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I mean, it gets down to that fundamental level of how are people surviving both physically and emotionally and coping with their suffering and what are the dynamics that result from that and what is the response that people are having as they&#8217;re shifting to a mindset of fear and scarcity even when they&#8217;re in a position of relative wealth by comparison. How that causes these major shifts in the overall system? I know it&#8217;s like everything is a metaphor but you start looking at the feedback loops and flows and I look around at the people who has the skills to be able to go and build abundance producing systems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> What I&#8217;m looking at doing is basically building such a support infrastructure into the economy. If we manage to conquer the generalized AI problem, which with our team now and where we are with our research so far, I have a reasonable level of confidence that we&#8217;ll be able to figure that out. Then you start thinking about, &#8220;If we have infinite power, essentially what are we going to do with it?&#8221; Now, we can do with emotional intelligence, we could build like mentorship AI to solve and automate education related problems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s so much capability in potential that you start thinking, &#8220;If we could build a support system for an abundant world to make people not have a need to be afraid and not have a need to recoil in safety or in fear, then maybe we could shift the world from a cycle of chaos to a cycle of safety.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m curious, Janelle if you have ever read Neal Stephenson&#8217;s The Diamond Age?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My husband was like, &#8220;You need to read this.&#8221; I am working through his Snow Crash right now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What is the Diamond Age?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The Diamond Age is based on a premise that we are able to manufacture anything from raw carbon. Basically, the means of production that we know today is totally gone because we now have machines that can produce any goods or anything of value. It&#8217;s called a Diamond Age because diamonds are actually able to be manufactured and thus, they lose their value. It&#8217;s about the social fallout of no longer needing a centralized control of the means of production. It&#8217;s also a very empowering story with the strong feminist message. Janelle, I think it would be right up your alley so you should definitely read that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I will definitely add this to my list. My husband is like, &#8220;You need to read this.&#8221; It is on my list. I will bump it up a little further up on my list. A lot of people are like, &#8220;You have to read this book,&#8221; especially we&#8217;re in this realm where we&#8217;re talking about all this futurist sci-fi stuff that just turns into this fun conversations. One of the things we&#8217;ve been talking about is projected virtual reality. The tier of consciousness that relates to dreaming and simulations in our minds and what it will take code-wise to be able to reproduce that capability. As we&#8217;ve been talking about, essentially of VR projection system, we started thinking about we could do like software battle mages where you put helmet on and you&#8217;re in the office and you can throw fireballs at your coworkers. It&#8217;d be so much fun. We&#8217;ve been having a lot of fun dreaming about all these really fun stuff what we&#8217;ll be able to build too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to come back for a second to the topic of scarcity and point out that a lot of the resources that we, as a society treat as scarce, are actually artificially scarce. Someone mentioned food. We throw out enough food to feed everyone in America. I was recently in rural Virginia for a family funeral, unfortunately and in the area where my parents lived, the cable companies never ran cable. They have to rely on satellite for their television and also for their internet and their internet is capped at six gigabytes per month.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I try to go about my daily life with my Twitter and Slack and checking Facebook and checking email and I made us hit the cap. At the point where the cap is hit, they reduce your bandwidth to about 28k per second. The entire infrastructure of what&#8217;s on my laptop crumble and failed. Bandwidth is free. There&#8217;s no reason for me metering bandwidth and yet, we&#8217;re cutting people off in these rural areas where they&#8217;re already isolated. We&#8217;re cutting them off from everything that allows us and we take for granted digitally. Software is not designed for scarce bandwidth and yet, the majority of our country geographically has scarce bandwidth.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Interesting and more things that it&#8217;s really easy to take for granted on a day-to-day basis like even being able to do what we&#8217;re doing right now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, there&#8217;s no way in hell that my parents could ever get on Skype. During the day, they don&#8217;t have a nearby cell tower so if I needed to make a call, I needed to drive about 15 minutes away to get closer to the cell tower and there&#8217;s no reason for that, except it&#8217;s not in the best interests of corporations to run the lines.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s frustrating because at the same time, I&#8217;m sitting here and thinking about all this stuff and I realize what a bubble of privilege I live in at the same time. There&#8217;s always things that I could be out there doing that I&#8217;m not. I spend a lot of time thinking about this stuff and what we can do but at the same time, I live in a nice house, in a nice neighborhood and I have beautiful trees in my backyard and I&#8217;ve got internet. It&#8217;s so easy to take for granted all of these luxuries that in our lives that become transparent to us, like they&#8217;re all invisible.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Despite all these beautiful things around us in our lives that we can focus on the awesomest restaurants in town and live in the awesome experience and all that, that becomes our obsession of life and feeling entitled to that of how dare anybody take away my life of entitlement kind of thing, which at the same time, if we can figure out how to create enough social infrastructure support for just any human in the world, not necessarily as thinking that it is a right to be human, that you are entitled to these things but I think it should be a goal that we ought to work for because our species would thrive as a whole if we had these capabilities. I think it makes sense to have as a goal or a target vision for a better world.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve noticed I suffer from cognitive dissonance of there&#8217;s things about the world that are not okay like not everyone has enough food or that people are persecuted or afraid and yet, I&#8217;m not doing anything about them. I think that on one hand, when I read the news now, I try to just look at this as this is reality. In the Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge says that if you can&#8217;t see reality, then you can&#8217;t change it and that the creative tension of making something new in the world involves both having a vision and being able to see reality as it is and not get caught up emotionally in some sort of blame circle of how terrible it is. Because it&#8217;s been worse before, right? Surely, it&#8217;s been worse before and people somehow emotionally dealt with that so being able to see reality as valuable.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also I think, it&#8217;s like with open source. As developers, we could work on any of these projects. We could do all the things except we can&#8217;t do all the things. We could do any one of the things and we just have to hope that randomly enough of us converged on the things that really need done and get super passionate about that. Even though, it&#8217;s not objectively that much more important than a thousand other things. There&#8217;s some value in the randomness of where we put our focus.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So where are we putting our focus so that we would say in the future, this is probably going to happen versus something that we&#8217;re not focusing on that may not happen?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve been putting my focus pretty much on cracking the open master problem for years I&#8217;ve been working on, essentially on how do we make mastery level education free to the world? I&#8217;ve been working on building out a system infrastructure for how do we support this as a business model that is like an operating business within the economy, as opposed to tied into government in any kind of way, where essentially once we have the financial support for the thing, then it becomes the community run, open government type of organization to build that support so we&#8217;ve got business that brings in money and then we can traffic all that out to social support infrastructure type stuff, specifically around education. I&#8217;m focusing on education because I think it&#8217;s the linchpin for solving all the other problems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Really, how so?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think one of the main things that keeps people in a position of poverty is access to knowledge and we&#8217;ve talked about, even to something as simple as internet bandwidth has an effect on what you have access to as well. But in terms of software skills, say we&#8217;ve got software skills are interesting because we don&#8217;t have any raw materials that we use. We turn our ideas into tools. It&#8217;s not crafting things that are wood or bronze or whatever. We&#8217;ve got this full creative potential to dream up all these crazy things and an infinite supply of dreaming that we can potentially do. I don&#8217;t think we&#8217;re ever going to run out of software systems that we could potentially write.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I looked at brain power, essentially as the one unlimited resource that we have on our planet and if we could figure out how to support all these brains in terms of being able to contribute and create, that any problems that we have in terms of food or energy or these other kinds of things that we could potentially solve with lots of collaborative brainpower. Part of that is also being able to raise people skills. I realized there&#8217;s a number of constraints to break.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That said, if we can give people skills that are of value, that allow them to generate wealth within their environment, which I think software development skills definitely qualify as one of the best ways to make money right now, that if we could figure out how to get the skills that are in the brains of the software engineers, transferred to the masses like automating that problem, that sort of the knowledge flow challenge that shifts everything else.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And to teach a computer to teach people computers?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Essentially, yeah. It&#8217;s where I&#8217;m focusing on, on mentorship AI.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve noticed you talk about the tragedy of the commons a few times and in my talk, The Broken Promise of Open Source, I talked about reframing the tragedy of the commons because like the modern tragedy of the commons in my opinion is in about a scarcity of resources as you pointed out, knowledge is infinite and software is infinite. What the scarcity is access and I think that we have a real gatekeeping problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We have software bootcamps that require a $12,000, three-month investment and not working. We&#8217;re cutting people out of access to contribute to the internet economy, to contribute to improving their lives and their communities, simply by erecting these barriers to entry and acting as gatekeepers to what is essentially a vast population of people who know the problems that they and their communities face and maybe inspire to affect change in their community but they&#8217;re being hampered. They don&#8217;t have the access they need to start solving these problems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The people that we&#8217;re letting into the system are the privileged people and the privileged people, whether due to lack of exposure or lack of empathy, are not going to be the one solving the social economic corporate problems that we&#8217;re facing as a society.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And then [inaudible] an Idea Flow problem. It&#8217;s in the flow of ideas from one group of people to another. The other thing that I think is fundamentally interesting about this distinction is it&#8217;s not about money. If you think about this from a policy perspective and training perspective that you&#8217;re going to somehow, pay some people to train all these other people and put the ideas in their heads. But if you just look at every human perspective, forget about who is being paid and currency and money flow and all of that stuff because you&#8217;re never going to be able to hire enough of those that would actually do that because they&#8217;re in more valuable software jobs that are higher in demand.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We&#8217;ve got an Idea Flow problem, with respect to software skills specifically, between software engineers and the people that need to teach. Then the access points as you mentioned with these huge barriers of $12,000 per coding bootcamp just be able to cross that barrier, creates I guess a bottleneck in flow that reinforces those feedback loops. It&#8217;s really interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When you&#8217;re talking, Coraline it reminded me of that movie 2012 where they have those arks that have been created to withstand this apocalyptic stuff and there&#8217;s all these people who are trying to get on the arks but the arks have already been reserved. You have wealthy people who have a whole sections of the arks that have living rooms and all this other high tech stuff. Then you have people who are just trying to survive who can&#8217;t get on because they didn&#8217;t reserve a room. I feel like that&#8217;s a metaphor for what tends to happen a lot. There is a big problem and you get a lot of people together and they try to solve it and they do come up with a solution and that&#8217;s awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then when it&#8217;s time to implement it, there&#8217;s a few people who get access to it and then everybody else is still fighting. It seems like this cycle that keeps happening, like the same problem is still there even though you solve that and part of it is there is that idea of who deserves to have it and who doesn&#8217;t.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Which I think is a broken question. I mean, if your question is coming down to who deserves it and who doesn&#8217;t, it&#8217;s incurred in the belief that that is a choice that has to be made.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. You know, watching that movie is absurd because obviously these people want to live. That&#8217;s why the arks were created so the people could live. Why would you make it something that you can pay to have a suite? It shouldn&#8217;t even have been an option. But visualizing that reminded me of all the stuff that we&#8217;ve been talking that these things keep happening partly because there is this idea that you have to prove you&#8217;re worthy or have the ability to get to a particular gate in order to have access to something that you think would be much more universal.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And that is the whole problem with meritocracy in a nutshell.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Very true.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had a thought I wanted to run by you all. I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot about one of the ideas in the Fifth Discipline and I think I might have gotten us out of the Fifth Discipline field book. But one of the ideas that Peter Senge brings up is to think of a learning organization as this hybrid between a business and a school. If you imagine that you&#8217;re learning so much in the context of your job that it feels like you&#8217;re going to school and mastery is just baked into part of your job, the union of those two systems is what a learning organization is or characteristically would look like.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you think about that system model, one of the interesting effects is there&#8217;s a fundamental shift in the direction of money flow. In the context of a business, a business pays employees and in the context of a school, the students pay tuition to get an education. If you put these systems in equilibrium so that currency flow is off the table and all of the transactions between people occur at a point of equilibrium or barter, such that this idea of open mastery came from is finding that point in equilibrium and you design a system around it, this is what originally gave me the idea of what if we built a software education support infrastructure into the industry.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, because every healthy software team is a learning organization in the sense you just described. If you don&#8217;t feel like you&#8217;re constantly learning stuff every day, you&#8217;re not going to be as happy and also, you&#8217;re not building and expanding the system the way it could be.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This whole discussion about gates, specifically has been fascinating and looking at that as a different type of constraint, like a flow constraint, like a faucet turned off. It reminds me of a faucet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, totally and the obvious one is like medical schools, only they let in so many people per year. The supply of doctors is deliberately constrained so that they can continue to make a crap ton of money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. This is one of the reasons I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot about going back, like what would it mean to go back to barter systems. Money has developed this meaning of its own.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Why do we even need barter? If we&#8217;re in a place of abundance, then we can give to people for the joy of giving because our needs are met. We don&#8217;t need anything from them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>At least my belief is that abundance will occur at a collective level but transactional sharing will still need to occur because the stuff has to move. Goods will have to move and to be exchanged.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, like physical objects?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Let&#8217;s say we had a theory based on a brand new currency system that we had some kind of means of exchange that wasn&#8217;t money or wasn&#8217;t tied to any of the existing currencies. It give you a way to sort of redefine the meaning of money in a way. One way to zero out the meaning of money is to go back to a barter system. Perhaps, a barter system that operates on an internet scale, though so that we can still trade at a global level.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That sounds like a pain.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the challenges with social support infrastructure is to just keep all the people busy and preoccupied in doing something. The system right now, you basically have working associated with getting paid a wage, such that you will get enough to afford these basic things that you need. If we get to a place as a species that, let&#8217;s say we have enough overall abundance that we can support all of the people doing, at least basic level stuff for that would be supportive as our collective. But that would mean that not everybody has to work. Then you&#8217;ve got this other problem of how do we keep everybody busy and out of trouble and generally having fun so they&#8217;re not causing lots of problems for each other. It kind of feel like one of the things we&#8217;re going to do is like buy everyone a PS3, or PS4 I guess now or whatever. You&#8217;re getting what I was saying like get everybody playing video games together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, there were Native American cultures who were like that prior to the Europeans coming, where everybody didn&#8217;t work. There were certain people who did and they would go out, which was normally like hunting or something. They were just bring it back and everybody would share. Then once you got older and you didn&#8217;t have to do anymore, then you knew that there was going to be something for you because that was the nature of the way that they operate it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It kind of helps to have a system, I think which is I know is part of what you&#8217;ve been talking about, that supports a certain value system. In their case, they valued community. Therefore, those who were able and capable, they went out and they did that hunting for everybody and then people who had a good cook into that, the other things so that everybody was taken care of. It would be nice if we could go back to something like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things that I think is interesting about video games which is one of the reason I bring it up is we&#8217;ve got a lot of fairly well-established helping out the guild type behavior in the context of video games. When we&#8217;re in the real life world, we operate under one set of social norms and contracts. Then we go into a game world and we can immediately adjust those behavioral characteristics that we interact with others with. Then suddenly these communal behaviors are part of the social norm in this alternative dream world culture.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It makes me think that one of the most powerful ways we can potentially adapt culture at scale is through augmented reality type video games, where you&#8217;re in a world that you can virtually decorate with&#8230; I don&#8217;t know, whatever your happy dreams are but that we can build sort of guild communal system on top of the real world by turning it into a video game.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that definitely has potential. It kind of makes me think of how people can argue on all kind of things but if you both rooted for the same sports team, then you can do that and you&#8217;re all good when you&#8217;re talking sports.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Humans are capable of making complete context shifts like that and developing a new context, a new set of social norms in the context of this virtual world and then if we can spend some time thinking about how to engineer a global cooperative through a video game. The software industry already has a strong foundation of collaborative roots and it&#8217;s largely based on open source community but also just our jobs are really hard. We rely a lot on learning from each other to figure out how to do our ridiculously complex jobs. Because of that, it has created a lot of, I think the strength of community in the software industry that doesn&#8217;t necessarily exist to that same degree of other places. A lot of software folks play video games too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I look at the software world and see all this potential in terms of both engineering capability, as well as people that care a lot. Our jobs are these creative scratch or essentially love on code all day. We&#8217;ve all been through this experience of being feeling stomped on by the business machine so we have that deep bond as well. I think metaphorically too, it becomes easier to see when other people are being stomped on because we know what it feels like ourselves. Even though, we are generally a privileged bunch, we know what it&#8217;s like to be controlled and dominated by others, I guess you could say.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, that comes from the empathy and I think empathy is a scarce resource for some reason, especially in the tech industry.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It takes brain power.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It takes work. It&#8217;s a skill to develop. It&#8217;s not an innate ability.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I don&#8217;t mean it takes IQ. I mean it takes conscious rational thought, which we have limited amounts of thinking as individuals. I know my brain gets full.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What&#8217;s exciting about software is it&#8217;s an opportunity to build a new world. But then in the same way, people can take advantage of it so that&#8217;s the fight that you have going on where you have those who just want their little corner and they want to build up their very expensive apartments and avenues so you when you land on it, you get to pay all these money. Then there are other people who are just trying to build a world for everybody who doesn&#8217;t have a place.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that can still happen. It just seems like, especially in the last maybe five or 10 years, it&#8217;s become inundated with all these money-grabbing, greedy intentions instead of what it was when it first started which was a place for people to communicate and a place for people to be able to put something new out there and see how people like it because that&#8217;s the beginning. It is, I think incumbent on those who want to continue that to make sure that they stand their ground and keep it that way, as much as possible and not allow too many of the negative influences to become the norm.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So now, we are right back around to where we started with?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yay!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s the deterioration of open source as it becomes the responsibility of companies, instead of the pure joy of creation and sharing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One thing I heard that was very encouraging to me was a lot of the modes that we have where we see or hear things like television and radio, those things were created in part to advertise to people and to put out a message. The internet is the first thing that is this pervasive that was not created for that reason. If we don&#8217;t give it up, then there&#8217;s a lot of potential for that to continue and to flourish into something good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. The internet I think is one of the main reasons I have hope right now. With respect to our ability to collaborate and work together and make things happen that we wouldn&#8217;t be able to do if we couldn&#8217;t organize it in the way that we are capable of now. We spend so much of our time blaming other people for the fails and things that are wrong. We worked so hard and feel like we deserve anything coming to us because we&#8217;ve been working really hard.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When I listen to the way people talk on what, from my perspective is like the other side of this wall, where it looks like greed. When I go to the other side of the wall, it&#8217;s like these people see themselves as victims and see this as an entitlement of ownership and property. I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Huh?&#8221; It&#8217;s almost like stepping into an alternative universe, almost. When I think back at a system level of what kind of things lead to change, part of it is learning how to take a step back and blame the system as opposed to blaming each other and rather than waiting for somebody else to somehow solve the problem and blame them for not solving the problems, what can we do to actually start collaborating and figure this stuff out. We&#8217;re smart people. We got mad skills.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And specifically, we have system building skills.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I keep coming back to something that one of my partners has talked about. She&#8217;s from Sweden which has a really great social support network and a really great health care and a really great social services. She moved to San Francisco to work in a company and she talks about how sad it makes her that on her way to work, she literally has to step over homeless people in the street of San Francisco to get to her high-paying job. That is just so fucking tragic. We have no financial incentive to help these people out so she gives charitably. She takes advantage of that Silicon Valley salary to give to organization that are trying to make a difference but I think she&#8217;s in a minority of people who do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s easier to just push it out of your brain, you know? Because there&#8217;s so much stuff. There so much suffering. There&#8217;s so much tragedy that happened every single day and we all deserve to be happy and enjoy our lives. It&#8217;s like, &#8220;Why should I just sit here and be miserable when I could be doing something fun and enjoying my life.&#8221; You can&#8217;t really blame people at the same time for doing what they&#8217;re doing but at the same time, it&#8217;s so tragic. That&#8217;s the thing that just bugs me as I can see where people are coming from and yet, it feels so wrong to me at the same time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Everybody is happy when we are around other happy people so we totally benefit from other people&#8217;s happiness but yet, we can&#8217;t individually make everyone happy so we give up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s easier to feel helpless, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Which is where the systems thinking comes in and I think we, as software developers have a unique opportunity to understand systems thinking because we build complex systems and we build complex systems that we can change and study on a short time scale. We have opportunities to learn about systems and if we zoom out, we can appreciate that we live in a system and realized that we do affect it, in small ways sometimes or in big ways if you spend a lot of time on it like activism. We&#8217;re not helpless. We also can&#8217;t do everything. Do something, not nothing but also don&#8217;t feel like it&#8217;s your job to save the whole world. Like contributing to open source.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think there&#8217;s definitely some of that but I guess the other thing of why I brought up the tragedy of the commons thing is I think the nature of the type of problems that face us as a country and as a world right now are the type of problems that we can only solve through collaboration. As all independently chipping in a little bit, it just not going to cut it right now and then if we want to fundamentally shift the trajectory of our world to a better place, it means shifting our mindset toward collaboration in a way that we&#8217;ve never really done before.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a really good point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;ve talked about a lot and Janelle, you have an amazing perspective on issues that we&#8217;ve talked about and it&#8217;s has been a real conversation. One of the things that I keep coming back to is access and gatekeeping. I don&#8217;t know what good it would do honestly because we have this document that lots and lots and lots of countries signed called the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. On this human rights is access to health care and the uncharitable among us point to the fact that a person with no insurance can go to the emergency room and not be charged. But going to the emergency room is not a solution to being healthy. It&#8217;s crisis management.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Even though the United States is a signatory of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we don&#8217;t treat health care as a fundamental human right. But I do wonder if it would be worth having universal declaration of digital rights, which we talk about things like cell phone access and internet access and access to education, such that if you wanted to contribute to software solutions, to social problems, that you wouldn&#8217;t have the barrier to entry that we have today. I don&#8217;t know if that would be more of a gesture or something actionable but I think we should start thinking about access to technology as a human right, given the fact that so much of the information and resources and opportunities that are available in the modern world rely on access to technology.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Interesting. I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot about the gates idea too. That was actually what I was going to say but one of the things I learned with systems thinking is to imagine flows as faucets that you can turn on and off and flows can fill in dream like a bath tub. When you brought up the creation of gates and how it shuts down the flow of ideas or the access to knowledge, you can sort of imagine the world as where is all the knowledge in the world? Where does the knowledge flow? What are the gates that get in the way of the various knowledge flows? And how can we solve that problem? If you erase the entire system and just focus on those handful of key constraints, I think the other stuff will get so much easier.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I missed part of the conversation but I was thinking about the topic of money and how much it affects everything. What I got out of it was to start thinking a little bit differently about the things that make us scared. I know, oftentimes we talk about how to be inspired and how to try to find what you really want and how and where you want to contribute in the world by asking yourself questions like, &#8220;What would you do if you are afraid?&#8221; Or &#8220;If you had a billion dollars, what would you do?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But in another context, I think we should also be asking, &#8220;What is it that money is not aiding or helping?&#8221; Like what would you do if money was not a factor in the sense of you don&#8217;t need it to do it, it&#8217;s not going to make money? What can actually be solved if it wasn&#8217;t about money?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s really an interesting point. I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot about the meaning of money and how it developed a meaning in itself, in our minds and how that ends up having such a huge effect on how we reason about our experiences in the world? If you erase money, how everything would change?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The framework of that thinking would be different.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. It&#8217;s been something that has been in the back of my mind since the financial crisis because our money is not real. It&#8217;s not based on anything real but it can take the whole world down, which is very scary and it has so much power and everything we do seems to be so controlled by it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But if we look at the system of knowledge flow and we look at where the knowledge is in the world, the knowledge that has the most power. The software industry, the engineers of our industry have all the power in the world because we hold the knowledge that is capable of producing massive wealth for all the people that have the money. If you create a system that replaces money with a knowledge-based systems, as opposed to accumulating wealth in dollars and we&#8217;re accumulating value in humans, in our minds, in our capabilities, in our skills, in our knowledge and that becomes the currency if you will or capability of being able to do stuff and produce true value, then it gives us ultimately an opportunity to redefine the meaning of currency.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We have to tear down capitalism for it to actual work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re getting there. We&#8217;re getting there. This conversation has been really abstract and I still don&#8217;t understand a lot of it. I don&#8217;t understand all the parallels that Janelle sees nor the hope that she sees. But I also feel that software has to hold the keys. It&#8217;s the closest thing to magic we&#8217;ve ever had. Like Janelle said, it&#8217;s an infinite supply of dreaming that we can make real.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Personally, I live in a place of great abundance and my needs are met. I get to dream and turn some of those dreams into reality but I&#8217;m surrounded by a place of scarcity &#8212; a culture of scarcity &#8212; and I want this abundance for everyone. I&#8217;ve joined Janelle&#8217;s community at OpenMastery.org. I&#8217;m totally going to learn more about this and see how I can contribute. You can join too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you Janelle for an amazing conversation. I want to do quick shout out to one of our Patreons, Ilan Shredni who pledged at the $10 level and I remind people that we are 100% listeners supported. If you enjoy the podcast and enjoy the conversations that we have and the guest that we have on, pledge on Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. Pledge at any level to gain access to our Slack community which includes access to the panelists and guest to continue the conversations that we have on the podcast. We are also open the corporate sponsorship so you can get in touch with us through the website about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Astrid, Jessica, Janelle, thank you so much for the wonderful conversation today. I&#8217;m looking forward to hearing what people think about the conversation we had and what kinds of calls to action they&#8217;re going to take away from it and we&#8217;re going to conclude that conversation in our Slack. Thank you everyone for listening. It&#8217;s been Episode 34 and we will talk to you again next week.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="http://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Missives from the Future of Tech: Ladies’ Night Edition” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:20</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Where the Lines Cross; Social Responsibility of Engineers</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tragedy of the Commons</span></a></p>
<p><b>06:53 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Why We Do What We Do</span></p>
<p><b>09:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Surviving and Functioning For All Humans: Basic Social Support</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>For sponsorship inquiries: please contact </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p><b>16:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Preventing Infrastructure Decay and Advancing the Whole</span></p>
<p><b>19:54 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “The Cycle of Safety”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553380966/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0553380966&amp;linkId=057eda599b58fdadf1e06c52a9256018"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady&#8217;s Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson</span></a></p>
<p><b>25:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Scarcity</span></p>
<p><b>30:15 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Where are we focusing?</span></p>
<p><b>33:25 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Reframing The Tragedy of the Commons; Gatekeeping</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKpbejoneFs"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Broken Promise of Open Source by Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p><b>37:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Organizations as Business AND Schools</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385517254/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0385517254&amp;linkId=7e9c7008b6f4237ac17119214b877a51"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Fifth Discipline: The Art &amp; Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge</span></a></p>
<p><b>40:25 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Abundance and Barter Systems</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Coraline: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Access to technology as a human right.</span></p>
<p><b>Janelle: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Where is all the knowledge in the world? Where does the knowledge flows? What are the gates that get in the way of knowledge flows?</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> What would you do if money wasn’t a factor? </span></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Software has to hold the keys. It’s the closest thing to magic that we’ve ever had.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.openmastery.org/join-us/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Open Mastery Community</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="http://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Missives from the Future of Tech: Ladies’ Night Edition” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:20</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Where the Lines Cross; Social Responsibility of Engineers</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tragedy of the Commons</span></a></p>
<p><b>06:53 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Why We Do What We Do</span></p>
<p><b>09:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Surviving and Functioning For All Humans: Basic Social Support</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>For sponsorship inquiries: please contact </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p><b>16:20 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Preventing Infrastructure Decay and Advancing the Whole</span></p>
<p><b>19:54 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “The Cycle of Safety”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0553380966/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0553380966&amp;linkId=057eda599b58fdadf1e06c52a9256018"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Diamond Age: Or, a Young Lady&#8217;s Illustrated Primer by Neal Stephenson</span></a></p>
<p><b>25:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Scarcity</span></p>
<p><b>30:15 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Where are we focusing?</span></p>
<p><b>33:25 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Reframing The Tragedy of the Commons; Gatekeeping</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKpbejoneFs"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Broken Promise of Open Source by Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p><b>37:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Organizations as Business AND Schools</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385517254/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=0385517254&amp;linkId=7e9c7008b6f4237ac17119214b877a51"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Fifth Discipline: The Art &amp; Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge</span></a></p>
<p><b>40:25 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Abundance and Barter Systems</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Coraline: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Access to technology as a human right.</span></p>
<p><b>Janelle: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Where is all the knowledge in the world? Where does the knowledge flows? What are the gates that get in the way of knowledge flows?</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> What would you do if money wasn’t a factor? </span></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Software has to hold the keys. It’s the closest thing to magic that we’ve ever had.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.openmastery.org/join-us/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Open Mastery Community</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><]]></googleplay:description>
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					<itunes:explicit>yes</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>Yes</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>01:01:13</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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					<title>Episode 033: Mental Illness with Greg Baugues</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-033-mental-illness-with-greg-baugues/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 17 May 2017 22:57:59 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=588</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Greg Baugues talks about how mental illness affected his life and early career as a software developer. Collectively, we discuss stigma, shame, fear, our personal experiences, and individual coping mechanisms.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Greg Baugues talks about how mental illness affected his life and early career as a software developer. Collectively, we discuss stigma, shame, fear, our personal experiences, and individual coping mechanisms.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mandy Moore</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greg Baugues: </span><a href="mailto:gb@twilio.com"><span style="font-weight: 400;">gb@twilio.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/greggyb/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@greggyb</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twilio.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Twilio</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “What is your favorite color?” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mashable.com/2016/07/26/teach-dog-text-selfie/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">How to teach your dog to take selfies&#8230; and text them to you</span></a></p>
<p><b>01:34</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Superpower Origin Story; Mental Illness in College</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005GFII62/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B005GFII62&amp;linkId=79bcb3acaec3579dbe20b56995fc6577"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder</span></a></p>
<p><b>10:13 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><b>*Disclaimer*</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> We Are Not Doctors and a Message on Self-Diagnosis</span></p>
<p><b>13:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Panel Experiences with Mental Illness: Rock Bottom, Shame, Stigma, and Fear</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://behavioraltech.org/resources/whatisdbt.cfm"><span style="font-weight: 400;">DBT Therapy</span></a></p>
<p><b>25:54 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– How Mental Illness Seems to Uniquely Affect the Tech Community</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>For sponsorship inquiries: please contact </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p><b>31:06 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Coping Mechanisms</span></p>
<p><b>34:17 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Creating an Environment That is Beneficial to People with Mental Health Issues; Work-Life Balance</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://osmihelp.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Open Sourcing Mental Illness</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.mentalhealthfirstaid.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mental Health First Aid</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!</b><b><br />
</b><b>Thank you to </b><a href="https://twitter.com/davetapley"><b>Dave Tapley</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.attn.com/stories/17143/why-fidget-spinners-might-be-helpful-brain?utm_source=22words&amp;utm_medium=fbpost&amp;utm_campaign=syndication"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Why Fidget Spinners Might Be Helpful for the Brain</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Rein: </b><a href="http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in-depression.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Allie Brosh: Adventures in Depression</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Depression can feel like nothing.</span></p>
<p><b>Mandy:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Reach out: </span><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><span style="font-weight: 400;">mandy@greaterthancode.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">; or </span><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></a></p>
<p><b>Greg: </b><a href="mailto:gb@twilio.com"><span style="font-weight: 400;">gb@twilio.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">; or </span><a href="https://twitter.com/greggyb/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@greggyb</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Sharing your story is powerful.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello everybody and welcome to &#8216;What is your favorite color?&#8217; My name is Mandy Moore and I&#8217;m joining as I guest panelists today. Along with me, I am pleased to be here with my friend, Rein Henrichs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hey Mandy and I think you&#8217;ve been doing the show for long enough that you would know that the actual title is &#8216;What is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?&#8217; and I&#8217;m here with my friend, Sam.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, what do you mean, an African or European swallow?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There it is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, all right. Hey everybody, it&#8217;s Greater Than Code and we&#8217;re here today with Greg Baugues. Greg may perhaps be best known for teaching his dog to text selfies and if that&#8217;s not what he&#8217;s best known for, then something is very, very wrong with the world. If you&#8217;re curious about that, we&#8217;ll put a link in the show notes. Among his list of achievements, Greg worked on a developer evangelism team at Twilio for three years. He now leads their developer community team whose mission is to, &#8216;encourage and amplify developers,&#8217; and I am informed by a reliable source that this is in fact somehow different from developer evangelism.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Anyway, after 11 years in Chicago, Greg and his family moved to Brooklyn last year. That family includes a two and a half year old daughter, Emma and while Greg is very, very much eager to teach her to code, it sounds like they have to work on some typing first. Anyway Greg, hi and welcome to the show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello, y&#8217;all. Thanks so much for having me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I asked you to come on the show because I was at the CodeNewbie conference in New York City and you gave the most awesome talk on Developers and Depression. But before that, we should probably get to the normal question of what is your story, where did you obtain your superpowers?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think, in this day and age it&#8217;s probably safe to say that being able to write code is a superpower. That might not be hyperbole in this day and age. I was just super fortunate. For some reason, my parents bought a TRS-80 when I was a kid. My dad&#8217;s a pastor, my mom&#8217;s a nurse so there was not necessarily a professional reason for them to. But back then, the computer would boot into BASIC so to use the TRS-80 was to program. There was magazines, 3-2-1 Contact and this was &#8217;86 or &#8217;87 and you could literally copy BASIC programs from the back of the magazine into the editor there. You could just start coding there and it was like the most instant gratification you could get with a computer before there was an internet. I think the first one we had didn&#8217;t even have floppy drives. I had a cassette drive.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I start programming as a kid. I think some kids pick up pen and paper, some kids pick up crayons and start drawing and programming would always has been my creative outlet where you can start with a blank page and type something and then make it do something and type a little more make it do something else. I just kind of stuck with it ever since.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Just out of curiosity, did you pursue a formal education in computer science or did you do the informal &#8216;I&#8217;ve just been on computers my whole life&#8217; thing that so many people tend to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, I pursued a formal education. I went to University of Illinois for computer science but I failed out. This probably kind of plays into the main topic of today but I did five years there. I did the wrong way. I started in &#8217;98 and I left in &#8217;03 so that was right around the time when it started being cool to drop out to start something. I didn&#8217;t do that. I had no plan. I did that exact wrong way. I spent five years and still didn&#8217;t get a degree and I didn&#8217;t do it because there was some awesome opportunity.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In retrospect, I just got really depressed and had ADD and didn&#8217;t know it. I had bipolar as it turns out and that tends to come on right around the time in your early 20s for a lot of folks. I was crippled with depression. I didn&#8217;t have those words to describe it. I think that my college experience would have been quite a bit different if I just been more aware of what was going on at the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I did pursue a CS degree. I was not particularly good at it. I would skip classes in the morning and then just come home and basically just code all night on. I was probably doing PHP mostly at that time. I pursued but did not achieve a formal education, I would say.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Interesting. That sounds, at least somewhat similar to my first couple of tries at college. I discovered as an adult that I have ADD as well but at that time, I didn&#8217;t realize it. When I got to college, I realized that it&#8217;s not high school and there aren&#8217;t hall monitors here and nobody&#8217;s making sure I go to class. Then, I also like you have depression issues as well. All of those made it very difficult to stay focused and I was until to my third time in college that I actually managed to make it stick.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You did finish, though?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I did.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Fortunately, my depression is more or less manageable by medication. My ADD is not so severe that I can&#8217;t function at all and it turns out that the way that the colleges that I went to is structured. Everything is on a quarterly system so everything is new every 12 weeks which is just a short enough time span that I could be like, &#8220;Okay, I can do this.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s so brilliant. I have wondered looking back if my experience would have been different. I went to University of Illinois which is a Big 10 university semester system, middle of nowhere. Effectively, the town exist because the college exists in central Illinois, which I wonder if you choose a different university that has quarters where everything is happening faster or if you choose a university or in the middle of a city where there&#8217;s a lot more stimulus and you&#8217;re not just bound by the collegiate lifestyle, I really think that we probably underestimate the degree to which the educational environment impacts the student success. It does not feel like there&#8217;s a lot of opportunity to iterate and pursuing a college education, like you have opportunities to iterate when trying to figure out what you want to do for your career, which jobs are right for your or how is the best way for you to get your work done. That&#8217;s really cool that you took several shots at it and kept at it and mixed it up and got it done.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I got really lucky too that I started a community college so when I graduated, I only had $19,000 in debt, which sounds like a lot. In modern college standards, it&#8217;s pretty damn low.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s awesome. Well played.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I tried a semester of college and decided that that was not at all for me so I have never really gone to college. I found out when I was younger that I have a history of bipolar disorder in my family and I have never been diagnosed but I&#8217;m pretty sure I have ADD. The reason I&#8217;m pretty sure is that when I read the DSM, when it has a checklist, I just checked off nine out of ten boxes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then also, there&#8217;s a great book called &#8216;Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder, From Childhood Through Adulthood, which if anyone listening is wondering, &#8220;Do I have ADD? What&#8217;s it like to have ADD?&#8221; Read that book, it was completely mind blowing for me from the very first paragraph through the very last paragraph.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had a similar experience with that book. I fell out of school, moved back home with my parents, thought that maybe the problem was school. Maybe if I was doing full time development that my brain would just operate better and things would be better but it wasn&#8217;t. All the same problems kept popping up where I couldn&#8217;t start on a project until the night before it was due and I started dodging calls with clients and whatnot. When I get started on it, I could just work for 12 hours at a time without stopping.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Finally, one night in desperation, I Googled chronic procrastination and adult ADD popped up. I went to Barnes and Noble the next day and I discovered that book. I just sat down and I think I read the whole thing there that day. Simultaneously, I wanted to jump for joy but also just break down crying because it felt like it was describing my life and having that outside look on the way I was struggling. Feeling sorry for myself wasn&#8217;t the right thing but I think it just brought the entirety of what I&#8217;ve been going through but also seeing that there were so many other well-intentioned, moral and not lazy people out in the world who are suffering through the same thing, kind of alleviated a lot of the guilt. It gave me a reason for the difficulties that I&#8217;ve been having that was something other than just being a lazy bastard who was squandering the opportunities that were given to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My college career basically consisted of me commuting to and from a school because I, in my early 20s was not at the point where I felt like it would be a good thing for me to go away to school. That was mainly because I was a not so great kid. I was very experimental back in those days and decided that going away would probably make me completely spiral out of control so I spent my time commuting. But I often wonder if I would have stayed on campus if I could have gotten it together enough to have lived the college lifestyle that sometimes I feel like I missed out on. Instead of hanging out with people on campus, I hang out with people around my home community that didn&#8217;t go to school or just worked for a living, as the case maybe. I feel like often, if I would have been around, some of the more academic people, my college experience would have been different.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Before you get too far along, I do want to add a caveat for our listeners about self-diagnosis, especially with regards to ADD. A lot of people when you read the list of symptoms of ADD, pretty much everybody who reads that list is going to go, &#8220;Oh, wait. This might be me,&#8221; and to some extent, I think that modern and Western culture is so interrupt driven that it will make you feel like you have an ADHD, even if you don&#8217;t.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That said, there are diagnostic criteria that it&#8217;s not super well-understood. I have a feeling that there are several sub-diagnoses that may come out of it at some point but right now, there&#8217;s a big list of a whole bunch of various symptoms and you can have a widely varying combinations of those symptoms. The criteria is something like, &#8220;You have X or more number of those things that affect you in two or more different contexts,&#8221; like your personal and professional life and they seriously impair your ability to function in those contexts. It&#8217;s not like you read the article, you do the Cosmo quiz and you&#8217;re like, &#8220;Hey Doc, I have ADD, give me meds.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But it does affect, I think more people than realize they have it. My own experience was that my dad and my brother are classic ADHD cases. They&#8217;re hyperactive, they had various issues of substance abuse and really impulsive behavior and I didn&#8217;t have the hyperactivity and I wasn&#8217;t as impulsive so I thought, &#8220;They have it, I don&#8217;t. Gosh, I got lucky there.&#8221; It turns out later, not so much. I just have a different variation than they do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You should probably add that none of us here are doctors and your experiences with mental illness and depression, anxiety and everything that we&#8217;re talking about here is probably unique. We&#8217;re just talking about our own experiences and hopefully bring it to the light in the community so that if you are struggling yourself, maybe you should think about going and getting professionally diagnosed because we&#8217;re not here to do that for you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m going to give plus one to that. I mean, the folks who actually are qualified to make the diagnosis of do you have this or this or this, go to school and actually completed school for years. In the case of psychiatrists, they first get an MD and go through all of med school and residency and then they go do more school so they can diagnose stuff of the brain. I think the only thing that any of us here can probably speak with authority on as our own experience and the best case scenario of listening to this, if some of what you hear strikes close to home would be to go set up an appointment with a professional who is qualified to help you through this.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and I think that&#8217;s what we can do here. We can talk about our own experiences and we can help reduce the stigma that our culture has around talking about mental illness and seeking treatment because, at least in my case, treatment is very effective and it allows me to be functional when I otherwise might not be.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. I was just diagnosed myself with depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder and that stems from probably the last 10 years of my life but on the main thing that it triggered everything was this past January when my mother passed away. She&#8217;s my rock. We are very, very close and adjusting the living life without her has not been easy. We spoke every day. She was my best friend and I miss her so deeply that it hurts.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The first couple of weeks, I could barely get out of bed and sometimes, I&#8217;m still at that point where it&#8217;s hard getting out of bed in the morning and going about your day and now that spring is upon us, I don&#8217;t want to go out and play and just store the energy so I started seeking help and I&#8217;ve been in and out of therapy since my teenage years. I haven&#8217;t really ever gotten a lot out of just talking.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> My doctor recommended that I do something called DBT therapy. It&#8217;s a classroom kind of setting as a small group for 10 people and we go over concepts in the mindfulness, distress tolerance and a personal effectiveness and emotion regulation. It has been super effective. If you don&#8217;t know what that is, I highly recommend you check that out because I had never heard of it before and it&#8217;s really done wonders for me so far.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mandy could you talk a little bit about what was going on that finally made you realize that you needed to seek extra help for this stuff? What was the moment when you do something different here?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am a single mom of a little girl. She will be eight in July and she lost her Mimi too and we both were grieving and it was hard because she was upset and I was upset and she would get home after school and we would just be sitting there. I will be watching TV and she will get her iPad and finally I was like, &#8220;This is not okay. We should not be sitting here crying and basically doing nothing.&#8221; But yet, I didn&#8217;t have the energy and then it all came ahead when I forgot her half-birthday and that&#8217;s very important in the life of a child, especially at elementary school age child whose birthday is in the summer so half-birthdays are very important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> She came home from school and she was like, &#8220;Mommy, you forgot my half-birthday and we didn&#8217;t bake the cupcakes,&#8221; and I was like, &#8220;Oh, shit,&#8221; and I felt like the worst mom ever. It seems a lot of people would be laughing and saying, &#8220;Oh, it&#8217;s no big deal,&#8221; but to me, I felt like I let down her school, her teacher and I was just like, &#8220;Oh, my God. I can&#8217;t believe I did that,&#8221; and it was like the worst thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I basically was like, &#8220;I got to get it together and I can&#8217;t sit here.&#8221; I didn&#8217;t take a shower for 6 days. I had a friend come over to my house and basically say, &#8220;Amanda, you need to go and get a shower. I&#8217;m sorry but you smell horrible,&#8221; because I just wasn&#8217;t taking care of myself and I was doing the basics to take care of my daughter like get her on the school bus, get her dressed in the morning and doing her hair, making sure she had lunch money and then when she would go off to school, I would just lay back down on the couch and normally go back to sleep.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When she would get home from school, I would again do the bare minimum: prepare her dinner or actually order dinner. I&#8217;ll be honest, I probably did not cook or do anything in the kitchen for eight weeks after my mom&#8217;s death. I&#8217;m pretty sure, I single-handedly funded the local pizza shops income by ordering out every night for eight weeks or if I was not hungry, I would heat up a can of soup for her because she just loves soup, or a grilled-cheese sandwich but it was a very, very, very basic stuff. I realized that time, I needed to get it together so I reached out to my doctor and she referred me to my psychiatrist now and like I said this DBT therapy has really changed everything. I go once a week for an hour and it has been very, very helpful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks for sharing all of that. That&#8217;s not &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, no problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s not an easy story to tell.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, it&#8217;s not and that&#8217;s why I invited you on, Greg because your talk at CodeNewbie was just like that, sharing your own experience and if that story just helped one person go seek out and get help, then I&#8217;m so happy that I just popped on a podcast today. With that being said, would you mind Greg, kind of recapping your talk from Codeland because it&#8217;s not up [inaudible]?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. Like I said, I think sometimes I really came out hard during my fifth year in college and it was really tough because going into my fifth year, I had just broken up with my girlfriend. Most of my friends have graduated in four years and I moved in an apartment by myself. I don&#8217;t think I want to admit it but it was pretty obvious I wasn&#8217;t going to graduate. It&#8217;s pretty obvious. I was just biding my time in signing up for classes but there was no real degree in sight. I did not know how to tell my parents that because they pay for most of it. Then I just felt like a piece of shit because I knew I was smart enough to get the work done but I just end up sleeping all day.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When I get depressed, the most obvious symptoms sounds similar to what you went through is that I sleep a lot. I was asleep in 16 hours. Back then, there&#8217;s one day I slept 24 hours and really, the best part of my day was when I was unconscious. That&#8217;s when I didn&#8217;t have to deal with the debt of my life situation that was piling up around me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Same.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I think the hardest part is that when you go through this, you just tend to go through it alone. In a way, you wouldn&#8217;t have physical illness. If I was having chest pains, I wouldn&#8217;t be ashamed necessarily to tell people about that or if I was having migraines, I wouldn&#8217;t feel ashamed but when you&#8217;re suffering with this stuff, the inclination is to hide. I even went so far. I had basically like one or two friends on campus and with one of the guys I worked with, I had stopped going to work and he noticed that I was gone and he had hit me up a couple times over e-mail, to checking in and I had ignored those.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then one day, it was the afternoon at two o&#8217;clock, a weekday, I was still in bed and he calls my phone and I ignored it. He calls again and I ignored it again. Then I hear this knock on my door. I still don&#8217;t know how Bill got my address but I&#8217;m pretty forgetful about things and there&#8217;s a lot of like life maintenance tasks that I think I just accepted are not going to happen and back then, locking my doors was one of them. It was far more likely that I was going to lose my keys than someone was going to try to break in my house.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I hear the door knob start to turn and here I am like I&#8217;ve been dodging this guy for weeks now. At the time, I was sleeping on this bed, it was one of those cheap metal frames as a casters on it on hardwood floors and it roll just a little bit away from the wall. I just slid into that gap between the bed and the wall and I pulled the covers over my head. I just laid there and I just held my breath and Bill walks into my apartment and he just looks into my bedroom and he looks in my office and then he walks out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That’s the best single example I can get of what the shame really felt like. I think that process just continued on. I fell out, I lie to my parents, I tell them I graduated. I won&#8217;t tell any of my friends what&#8217;s going on and basically for a year and a half, I was living at home trying to do freelance work and just failing all over the place there. Finally, like I said I kind of Google in desperation and I found that book. Still even, a year after finding that book, it took me a year to set up an appointment with a therapist because I think really of the stigma. I don&#8217;t think anyone really wants to admit that they have ADD because that&#8217;s what lazy people have like who don&#8217;t want to work hard. That&#8217;s what I thought about it at the time. It just seemed like an excuse or a cop out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Finally though, I was basically about to get fired, I set up an appointment and go through all the tests and she&#8217;s like, &#8220;Greg, you definitely have ADD but I think you might also have Type II Bipolar,&#8221; and my response was basically like, &#8220;I will take the ADD and you can keep the bipolar.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If you are having problems with the stigma of ADDs, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It goes bipolar, dun-dun-dun.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, seriously. In my head at the time, that&#8217;s like people running through the streets naked. That&#8217;s, I think the media portrayal of bipolar or manic depression. Definitely, I don&#8217;t want that one. Type II bipolar is milder so the highs aren&#8217;t quite as high. It&#8217;s called hypomania instead of mania and the range of these things, every case looks different but my cycles are more elongated so I&#8217;ll have four or five days, where I am hypomanic and just have like a lot of ideas and just moving really fast and talking really fast.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I feel like I need to have all these ideas for projects and I&#8217;ll start on them and complete them all tonight because in part, I don&#8217;t know if I going to have enough energy by the end of the week to do them. The net result is a whole bunch of a folder on my hard drive full of whole bunch of projects that are somewhere between 20% and 60% complete. I don&#8217;t want to say that that is a symptom of bipolar but something that&#8217;s happening in my life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That seems something I deal with ADD as well is over commitment.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I totally agree. Just generally speaking, easier to start things and to finish things. I started taking meds for ADD. They helped me focus a lot but they also, when I was depressed, which was the majority of the time. I feel like I have two or three days of hypomania and then four to six weeks of depression where life just felt like trying to walk through a swimming pool and &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That does not seem fair.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, when I finally go see the psychiatrist about two years later and he&#8217;s describing bipolar and he describes hypomania and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Yes, that. How do I get that all the time?&#8221; There&#8217;s a lot of folks that are bipolar who will not go get treatment because they don&#8217;t want to give up the mania because it if feels awesome but the tradeoff is not a fair exchange at all.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think, I finally just reach the point where like you, Mandy I knew something was wrong for several years and I just convinced myself that I don&#8217;t know how to fix it. I&#8217;ll just contain the damage to myself. After losing or quitting right before I got fired for several jobs after and then being in a job at this web consultancy called Table XI in Chicago, that was just amazing to me and they kept me around far past when they should have, they show so much compassion and I ended up being there for seven years and just realizing I was letting all of them down. I had to come to grips with the fact that you don&#8217;t suffer through these things alone.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you have depression or anxiety or bipolar, the people in your life go through that with you, rather they know the cause of that or not. Finally, for no other reason, just for the sake of the people around me, I got an appointment. I saw a psychiatrist and I got on these meds called Lamictal. I got super fortunate there. In the vast minority, I think I got on the right meds the first time. The stuff called Lamictal has worked well for me and I&#8217;ve taken it for about eight years now and life just kind of gradually got better. It&#8217;s a mood stabilizer and I&#8217;ve been stable for eight years or so now and life has been really great. Basically, everything after having bipolar is kind of best case scenario for me there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I need to get help because my family didn&#8217;t know what to do for me. Rather than deal with me, they kind of started to pull away which made things worse. When I was completely isolated, I was like, &#8220;I want my family back. I really want to be with these people,&#8221; but they don&#8217;t want to be around me right now so I need to do something to get myself better because I don&#8217;t like being here right now and the people around you don&#8217;t like being around me right now so I need to do something to fix this.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;ve been in the tech community for about 10 years now and it seems to me that these kind of issues are significantly prevalent in the tech community. Do you have any thoughts on that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. In the general population, depending on what you read, I think all these things are kind of hard to measure but you&#8217;ll see numbers anywhere between one in four, struggle with a mental illness to like one in six will deal with depression. I think general population, if far more prevalent than most folks who would think, given the stigma and given the fact that we don&#8217;t talk about it in the same way that we talk about other diseases.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But in tech, I don&#8217;t know of any studies so what about to say isn&#8217;t based on science so don&#8217;t take this any more than one man&#8217;s opinion. I know that for, at least me &#8212; I&#8217;m going to spout off some of these cherry pick symptoms of some of the stuff that I deal with &#8212; hyperfocusing, which mostly are probably familiar with like you get locked in on something and you just work on it for a long time. There&#8217;s irregular sleep patterns, especially onset insomnia where it&#8217;s hard to fall asleep at night and it&#8217;s impossible wake up in the morning. There&#8217;s racing thoughts, which is what it sounds like. There&#8217;s pressure speech, which is when the racing thoughts try to escape through the small hole in your mouth. There&#8217;s a thought of grandiosity, thinking that you can change the world or thinking that you can solve problems that have alluded everyone else.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you&#8217;re a young adult or an adolescent and you are experiencing these symptoms and say you&#8217;re bouncing around sampling different professions, if you happen to land in the software development world, my guess is that you will feel a little bit like coming home, like we will except the socially isolated here. Our workplaces generally accommodate irregular sleep patterns and consistent bursts of productivity in a way that say, my guess is an accountancy does not or a law firm does not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you actually want to change the world &#8212; back on the superpowers comment &#8212; I don&#8217;t think that there is a skill that you could have that would more enable you to do that today than knowing how to code. There&#8217;s the Apple commercial from a while back that says, &#8220;Here&#8217;s to the crazy ones because while the rest the world sees crazy, we see genius. Because those were crazy enough to believe they can change the world are the ones who do.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We really kind of sent out this beacon to the general population for the last 30 years or so saying like, &#8220;Come join us if you feel this way,&#8221; so my guess is that the rate of occurrence to some of these things are probably higher amongst the tech community for no other reason than our industry is more accommodating to them. We also know that issues like bipolar correlate with increased intelligence and I believe depression does as well. Then I also think on the other side of it, it might possibly be more difficult for folks in our industry to admit and get past the denial, if they&#8217;re struggling some of these stuff in part because a lot of folks in this industry have spent a good chunk of their life being the smartest person in the room and being praised for how well their brain works and their livelihood is dependent upon their brain functioning at a high level. Their livelihood is dependent upon their creativity and their identity is often wrapped up in that. I know mine certainly is so starting to admit that maybe your brain is malfunctioning can chip away at that identity and potentially your livelihood. At least for me, I think a great reluctance to seek treatment that could possibly screw with the way that my brain is working.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. That jibes with my own personal biases which I&#8217;ve long thought that learning to program in particular is an activity that&#8217;s selects strongly for ADHD because if you have the ability to hyperfocus, you will plow through a lot of stuff that puts a lot of neurotypical people off of learning to program. The error messages are too hard. It&#8217;s too frustrating and the compiler is too picky.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I agree with that and there&#8217;s so much instant gratification in programming.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, totally. I actually recently went to a group class on ADHD and one of the things that they kept talking about over and over again is that they don&#8217;t know a lot officially about ADHD but the really fundamental basic part of it is that people who with ADHD their brains are biased towards two things. They&#8217;re biased towards immediate gratification and novelty and both of those things computers provide in spades.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s so great.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s almost like programming is my crack. If I am in a manic phase, that&#8217;s the way that I get out. That&#8217;s what I do when I want to get stuff done. But when I&#8217;m depressed, it is in some ways comforting for me to work on programming even though I&#8217;m not as productive because I still feel that sort of Pavlovian thing of, &#8221; I made that test pass,&#8221; or whatever and it makes me feel like I&#8217;m making steady progress.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One thing I want to mention about self-diagnosing is that it&#8217;s not so much for me about saying that I have ADD or whatever because I don&#8217;t so much care about that. It&#8217;s understanding that the possibility is for me to improve the way my brain works, improve my quality of life. They don&#8217;t actually require drugs. I have collected an extensive set of what are essentially coping mechanisms that include everything from what I do in bed at night or more importantly, what I don&#8217;t do in bed at night, how I wake up, how I organize my day as far as tracking my time, what I do when I&#8217;m feeling depressed. I have a lot of things that I do. They are almost rituals for me that help me even though I&#8217;m not on prescribed medication. For me, it&#8217;s a lot of it is just being aware that there are things you can do to improve the way your brain works.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Rein, could you share a couple of those?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I don&#8217;t use a computer in bed because I have trouble getting to sleep and if I open up a laptop, it&#8217;ll be 3 AM instead of 1 AM. In the morning when I wake up, I immediately put my feet on the ground whether I&#8217;m awake or not and then the rest of my body seems to follow. I don&#8217;t have coffee past three in the afternoon. I have a journaling system on my computer. I specifically use Emacs and any time I&#8217;m feeling frustrated or confused while I&#8217;m working, I write something there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Does the computer in bed thing includes the phone because I struggle with that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. [inaudible] and what I do is I&#8217;ll use an iPad but I only read. But I think the light is still a problem so I&#8217;m going to experiment with getting a book light and reading an actual book or maybe the Kindle would be good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, there&#8217;s also a feature on iPads now called Night Shift which shifts the spectrum towards the orange and away from blue. There&#8217;s still some blue light coming into it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For me, the point isn&#8217;t so much what specific things I do. It&#8217;s you can find things that help you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a lot of literature on sleep hygiene. One of the psychiatrists that I saw for a while, he was very clear on sleep hygiene and the way he put it was your bed is for two things: sleeping and you know what the other one is. I think if we get in the habit of reading or puttering around on the computer or watching television while we are in bed, our brains are powerful association machines and it can make it a lot easier for your brain to associate bed with not sleep, which doesn&#8217;t help your insomnia in anyway.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Another big one for me is that time that you want to wake up in the morning and wake up at that time every day seven days a week, no matter what happened the previous night.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I&#8217;ll mention also real briefly that I was diagnosed last year with sleep apnea so I have a sleep apnea machine now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, me too. That completely changed my life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that actually helps a lot with my energy and focus during the day.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My doctor said, &#8220;Your sleep apnea is so severe that you could have died,&#8221; so I&#8217;m glad I&#8217;m not dead and I actually wake up in the morning and I don&#8217;t feel like there&#8217;s been a weight on my chest pressing me down for eight hours.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s incredible.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Are there other things in tech that are particularly helpful or challenging for folks with mental illness?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think one thing that comes up a lot is how do you talk to your boss about these things, if at all. I think the other is on the flip side is a question that you&#8217;ll hear from managers is how do I addressed these things with my employees or how can I serve my employees well who might be struggling with this stuff. There&#8217;s a guy named Ed Finkler who&#8217;s done a lot of speaking on this. He has an organization called &#8212; actually it&#8217;s a 501c3 &#8212; Open Sourcing Mental Illness and he&#8217;s been speaking about this stuff for four or five years now and he&#8217;s just fantastic. He is really great at addressing a lot of these issues. They publish a number of hand books on how to serve your employees well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> He also is a big advocate of something called Mental Health First Aid. It&#8217;s a course you can take that would certify you in much the same way be certified in traditional first aid that will just help you identify people who might be at risk or symptoms that might indicate someone&#8217;s at risk and then how do you go about being &#8216;first responder&#8217; to that. I think it&#8217;s also worth mentioning that for as difficult as it is to recruit and retain developers in today&#8217;s economy, addressing one of your employees in mental health is probably the biggest switch you could pull into increase the general productivity of your developer team.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We talked about like the Ten-X Developer as being this mythical thing but if you have someone who&#8217;s working on your team, who is suffering through crippling depression and you get them help that helps treat that, their productivity will increase by 10x.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It helps with retention too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, 100%. I mean, I quit several jobs because I felt depressed and when you aren&#8217;t willing to consider that your depression might be due to internal circumstances, you just look to the most prevalent factors in your life which is typically where you work and where you live. Obviously, I&#8217;m depressed because this job sucks so I go and try different job and there&#8217;s novel for a little so I&#8217;m a little bit happier within the same stuff happens so I&#8217;m like, &#8220;This place sucks too.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Finally, it was the job where after a year and [inaudible], I was like, &#8220;This place by all measures should be awesome and I am still depressed. Something else must be going on,&#8221; and I got treated there and I was incredibly grateful and loyal because of the compassion that they showed me and the patience that they showed me. I stayed there for seven years.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think a couple things that employers can do just to really help out is to have on hand the name of, say two psychiatrist and two therapist, like pick a man and a woman on both sides and who takes your insurance, who is within 10 or 15 minutes of your office. Finding and setting up that first appointment with a therapist or psychiatrist is like the hardest part because the current system sucks. It&#8217;s all based on phone. Zocdoc makes it a little bit easier but figuring out who takes your insurance and whatnot is just such a great thing for an employer to be able to say, &#8220;If you are struggling with this, you don&#8217;t have to go to individuals. You can but just make it broadly known every month just broadcast, if you are struggling with this stuff. Drop an email to this person, they take our insurance, you can take off any time of day you want to go see them. No one&#8217;s going to ask any questions, just block off your calendar and say you have a meeting or whatever, like go and take care of this. This is priority number one.&#8221; It could just have a huge impact on your workplace and truly save lives.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;ve lost coworkers to the stuff before and there&#8217;s few things that employers can do that could truly change the trajectory of one of their employees lives like pointing them in the right direction and getting them hooked up with the appropriate help for, if they&#8217;re struggling with one of these things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m really, really excited that you&#8217;re talking about this stuff because it really doesn&#8217;t get talked about enough and anything we can do to just let people know that it&#8217;s okay to struggle with these things. Sometimes, it&#8217;s normal. It&#8217;s a thing that happens to humans. It&#8217;s not neurotypical but it doesn&#8217;t mean that you&#8217;re bad or broken.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. I do want to mention that we do have a Slack channel in our Greater Than Code Slack community for wellness. If people want to join us, to donate a dollar per month to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode and discuss it in there. It&#8217;s a safe place. It&#8217;s a really encouraging atmosphere and it&#8217;s there. Speaking of which, we should probably call out our $10 level Patreon of the week. That would be Dave Tapley. Thank you Dave for being a part of our community. Again, you can get into our Slack community for pledging as little as a dollar per month to support the show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just want to throw in here that if you, for some reason can&#8217;t afford a dollar a month, don&#8217;t worry about it. If you know one of us on Twitter, reach out to us. We&#8217;ll get you in because this stuff is important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve feel like with the folks I chatted with, for the folks who are gone through these things, the turning point in their lives is the moment they can point to where they say that they talked to someone about it, whether that was a friend. I think often it starts there or whether it was in an online community like the Slack channel here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For me, that&#8217;s what it was because I did not have supportive people in my life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s awesome. I think that&#8217;s just so cool that you have that Slack channel setup and just a place where folks can come in and chat about it. The end game should be seeing a professional. Again, they go to school and they&#8217;re professionally trained at diagnosing these things. They do it all they long but if that seems too far, just find someone you can share your struggles with. I think what I found, at least in my life is that verbalizing what you&#8217;re going through seems to loosen a little bit of its grip on you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and there&#8217;s a lot of incremental progress that you can make. You can talk with a trusted friend, you can go and read a book and that can give you a framework. With a lot of these issues, there&#8217;s not a one thing that will fix it. Maybe you get lucky and you hit on a medication that works exactly right for your body and that&#8217;s great. But a lot of these things, they reinforce each other so if you can pick apart one thing you can improve, it will give you that much more energy to work on the next thing, then you can snowball and eventually a couple years down the line, you can find yourself reasonably functional.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Honestly, one of the biggest things for me has just been awareness, has just been being able to say, &#8220;I&#8217;m feeling depressed right now. That&#8217;s normal. It&#8217;ll pass.&#8221; Just metacognizant, that awareness of the state that my body has in, has been a huge help for me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I mentioned that meditation is also a really useful tool for a lot of people and meditation can mean as something as simple as five minutes a day.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you have any tips for how to get started on meditation because I&#8217;ve heard that so many times from different folks and haven&#8217;t been able to pick it up myself? But how did &#8211;?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I suck at it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As the guy with ADD who mentioned meditation, I have started meditating probably 20 or 25 times and I have never been able to stick with it long term. But the nice thing is you can always start again and part of it is realizing that meditation is not probably what you think of it as. It&#8217;s not the idea of sitting down and clearing your mind because as it turns out, that&#8217;s biologically impossible to do. What meditation is the practice of sitting down and noticing when your mind goes astray and just naming it and sitting with it and being okay with it and bringing your attention back to just being present. There&#8217;s lots of ways that you can get to that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I have a 15-minute playlist on my phone that when I do try to practice meditation, that&#8217;s very helpful. People like to sit and use a physical focus like rosary beads. Those are a great thing. There&#8217;s all kinds of ways you can do this.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What&#8217;s with the fidgets spinner craze?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It turns out you can make them for about a dollar in China. But yes, some sort of physical focus can be very helpful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I laughed there only because I go to the playground here and all the kids are using it but if it works, if it buys you three weeks of increased concentration before the novelty wears off, go for it. It&#8217;s clearly a fad that&#8217;s not going to be at the same height of popularity in two years right but if that works, do that. I think that one of the things, you just keep iterating through different techniques to help get a little bit better today with the realization that, at least for me, the craving of novelty means that what works today quite possibly isn&#8217;t going to work in two months and I&#8217;ll have to try something new and I&#8217;ll give myself grace to say like, &#8220;Okay fine. We&#8217;ll do something new.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I brought that up not in any way to make fun of it. Right before this podcast, I saw a wonderful article about how they are having an unexpected effect on people&#8217;s mental health in a positive way. I will actually link that in the show notes because it was a very good read.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a couple of folks in the office who have them and they have them in the meetings and said they help a ton.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, would you said that I looked down on the one on my desk and I thought of the one that I print it and sent to Jessica last week.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A friend of mine called them shiny placebos and I said, &#8220;I don&#8217;t care if it&#8217;s a placebo as long as it works.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Seriously.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s the thing about placebos. They do work 100% of the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Fantastic.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Now, do we have anything else that we wanted to head on before we wrap up?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, but I don&#8217;t think we have time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Super-fast reflections and go. Mine is, we&#8217;ve been talking about depression a lot and I think if you don&#8217;t have depression, you may not get what it means for the people in your life that do. It&#8217;s not just feeling sad all the time. There&#8217;s a blog post &#8212; actually a couple of them &#8212; by Allie Brosh who is best known for the clean all the things meme and it&#8217;s called Adventures in Depression where she talks about what it actually felt like to go through her life with depression. It&#8217;s not being sad. It&#8217;s just not wanting to do anything or be around anyone. If you&#8217;ve read that and you know people with depression or you yourself suffer from depression, that may help you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I will second that. My own experience with depression is that a lot of the times, it just feels like nothing. Nothing is interesting, there&#8217;s not really any point in getting up to do anything and I might as well just sit here play solitaire for three hours. In lieu of reflection, I&#8217;m going to leave you with that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, same here. Sometimes, I just feel nothing. When I feel nothing, I just see myself sitting in my office, looking around at all the stuff that reminds me of things and reminds me of my mom. She was the person that I would go to and I guess now, I just don&#8217;t have that. I really don&#8217;t have any kind of support system in place outside my therapist or anything so I will invite the listeners that if you feel the same way or if you would want to talk to me, I would love it and you can feel free to reach out to me via email: Mandy@GreaterThanCode.com or on Twitter on @TheRubyRep and I would love to talk to anybody who would just want to sit and listen or sit and talk.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ll plus one on that too. I&#8217;m GB@Twilio.com or @GreggyB on Twitter. I&#8217;m always happy to chat about this stuff. What I think about this conversation, the thing that I will probably remember, given how my memory seems to be fading as I get older here. But I think I&#8217;m going to remember six months from now, Mandy is your story and you&#8217;re sharing and just being brave enough to share your story with our listeners. To think back over the pivotal moments of my life, it&#8217;s typically been someone going first and sharing their story to normalize these things that so many people go through.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I would just encourage anyone who&#8217;s listening, who&#8217;s suffering through this to find someone to share your story with. I think that not only will it most likely help you but I think that it&#8217;s easy to underestimate how helpful that could be to someone else to just to know that there is someone who is suffering in a similar way that you are and that you are not going through this alone and that you&#8217;re not weird or abnormal because of these things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or morally deficient.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We have a strong cultural bias against feeling lazy or appearing lazy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The reason I felt brave enough to share my story was because you were brave enough to do it at Codeland, Greg so same goes for you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I think the first time that I gave a talk about this at tech conference, that was pretty hard and I was pretty scared about it. On the second time, I was a little bit less scared. What I found is that I grossly underestimated the developer community&#8217;s capacity for compassion and empathy. I have just been blown away by how kind people have been after I give that talk. I still say that it&#8217;s very common that there to have a little voice in the back of my head that says, &#8220;Don&#8217;t do it. Don&#8217;t share this. They will shun you. Why would you possibly talk about something so shameful with these people?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> What I&#8217;ve just come to realize is that the voice in my head is lying to me. I&#8217;m fortunate in having evidence now, or at least a lot of anecdotal evidence to back up the claim that that voice in my head is lying to me. But just know that if you are suffering from mental illness by definition, your brain is malfunctioning a little bit. By definition, it&#8217;s taking inputs and running them through a faulty analysis process and spitting out incorrect conclusions. If you do hear that voice and it&#8217;s telling you like, &#8220;No, you need to go through this alone. You need to keep this locked in.&#8221; Just be willing to consider the fact that that voice might be wrong.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you for coming on, Greg. We appreciate it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>GREG:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s been awesome. I really appreciate y&#8217;all having me on. Thank you so much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And thank you, listeners. We&#8217;ll be back with you again next week.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amazon links may be affiliate links, which means you’re supporting the show when you purchase our recommendations. Thanks!</span></i></p>
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]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mandy Moore</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greg Baugues: </span><a href="mailto:gb@twilio.com"><span style="font-weight: 400;">gb@twilio.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/greggyb/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@greggyb</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twilio.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Twilio</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “What is your favorite color?” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mashable.com/2016/07/26/teach-dog-text-selfie/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">How to teach your dog to take selfies&#8230; and text them to you</span></a></p>
<p><b>01:34</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Superpower Origin Story; Mental Illness in College</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005GFII62/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B005GFII62&amp;linkId=79bcb3acaec3579dbe20b56995fc6577"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder</span></a></p>
<p><b>10:13 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><b>*Disclaimer*</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> We Are Not Doctors and a Message on Self-Diagnosis</span></p>
<p><b>13:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Panel Experiences with Mental Illness: Rock Bottom, Shame, Stigma, and Fear</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://behavioraltech.org/resources/whatisdbt.cfm"><span style="font-weight: 400;">DBT Therapy</span></a></p>
<p><b>25:54 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– How Mental Illness Seems to Uniquely Affect the Tech Community</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>For sponsorship inquiries: please contact </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p><b>31:06 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Coping Mechanisms</span></p>
<p><b>34:17 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Creating an Environment That is Beneficial to People with Mental Health Issues; Work-Life Balance</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://osmihelp.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Open Sourcing Mental Illness</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.mentalhealthfirstaid.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mental Health First Aid</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!</b><b><br />
</b><b>Thank you to </b><a href="https://twitter.com/davetapley"><b>Dave Tapley</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.attn.com/stories/17143/why-fidget-spinners-might-be-helpful-brain?utm_source=22words&amp;utm_medium=fbpost&amp;utm_campaign=syndication"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Why Fidget Spinners Might Be Helpful for the Brain</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Rein: </b><a href="http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in-depression.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Allie Brosh: Adventures in Depression</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><sp]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mandy Moore</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greg Baugues: </span><a href="mailto:gb@twilio.com"><span style="font-weight: 400;">gb@twilio.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/greggyb/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@greggyb</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twilio.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Twilio</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “What is your favorite color?” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://mashable.com/2016/07/26/teach-dog-text-selfie/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">How to teach your dog to take selfies&#8230; and text them to you</span></a></p>
<p><b>01:34</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Superpower Origin Story; Mental Illness in College</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B005GFII62/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;creativeASIN=B005GFII62&amp;linkId=79bcb3acaec3579dbe20b56995fc6577"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Driven to Distraction: Recognizing and Coping with Attention Deficit Disorder</span></a></p>
<p><b>10:13 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><b>*Disclaimer*</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> We Are Not Doctors and a Message on Self-Diagnosis</span></p>
<p><b>13:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Panel Experiences with Mental Illness: Rock Bottom, Shame, Stigma, and Fear</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://behavioraltech.org/resources/whatisdbt.cfm"><span style="font-weight: 400;">DBT Therapy</span></a></p>
<p><b>25:54 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– How Mental Illness Seems to Uniquely Affect the Tech Community</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>For sponsorship inquiries: please contact </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p><b>31:06 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Coping Mechanisms</span></p>
<p><b>34:17 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Creating an Environment That is Beneficial to People with Mental Health Issues; Work-Life Balance</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://osmihelp.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Open Sourcing Mental Illness</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.mentalhealthfirstaid.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mental Health First Aid</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!</b><b><br />
</b><b>Thank you to </b><a href="https://twitter.com/davetapley"><b>Dave Tapley</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.attn.com/stories/17143/why-fidget-spinners-might-be-helpful-brain?utm_source=22words&amp;utm_medium=fbpost&amp;utm_campaign=syndication"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Why Fidget Spinners Might Be Helpful for the Brain</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Rein: </b><a href="http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/2011/10/adventures-in-depression.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Allie Brosh: Adventures in Depression</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;"> </span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><sp]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/greg.jpg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/greg.jpg"></googleplay:image>
										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/588/episode-033-mental-illness-with-greg-baugues.mp3" length="47804687" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>yes</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>Yes</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>49:48</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>Episode 032: Curation vs Algorithms: Who Is Writing Our History? with Amy Unger</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-032-curation-vs-algorithms-who-is-writing-our-history-with-amy-unger/</link>
					<pubDate>Thu, 11 May 2017 00:53:50 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=578</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Amy Unger joins us to talk about accessing and preserving history, categorizing information, and digital vs human curation.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Amy Unger joins us to talk about accessing and preserving history, categorizing information, and digital vs human curation.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amy Unger: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/cdwort"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@cdwort</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.heroku.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Heroku</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “JIRA Card Catalogs and The People Who Love Them” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:05</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Superpower Origin Story, Growing Up with a Computer in the Family, and Being a Teenager</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Women-Computing-Press/dp/0262632691/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1494455362&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Unlocking+The+Clubhouse+Women+in+Computer+Science"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher</span></a></p>
<p><b>08:30 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Humanities and History</span></p>
<p><b>10:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Access to and Preservation of Literacy (Who is writing our history?)</span></p>
<p><b>15:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Categorizing Information and Making it Accessible&#8230;But, Also Privacy?</span></p>
<p><b>17:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Reliance on Google as the “Defacto Archive”?</span></p>
<p><b>19:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Digital Records (Algorithms) vs Human Curation</span></p>
<p><b>24:10 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What can librarians and library science offer a company?: Information Architecture</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>For sponsorship inquiries: please contact </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p><b>27:32 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Algorithm Manipulation, Social Engineering, and Information Security</span></p>
<p><b>32:24 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Whose stories are we collecting, archiving, and making available to the public?</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tragedy of the Commons</span></a></p>
<p><b>41:09 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Meme Hacking”, Getting Involved, and Owning Your Own Story</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Rein: </b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_Noam_Chomsky_and_the_Media"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">How economics and politics rear their ugly heads unexpectedly.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Who is responsible for our history? </span></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The vast amounts of data we have and what we choose to preserve.</span></p>
<p><b>Amy: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Consider the possibility of working in the public sector.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to Episode 32 of &#8216;JIRA Card Catalogs and The People Who Love Them.&#8217; I&#8217;m here today with the lovely, Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning. Thank you, Coraline. That may be our show name today but don&#8217;t forget that the podcast is called Greater Than Code. I&#8217;m super happy to be here with Rein Henrichs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Jessica and it is my great pleasure to introduce Sam Livingston-Gray.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello everybody and I&#8217;m here to welcome Amy Unger to the show. The granddaughter of a former MIT Computer and yes, that was a job title, Amy was clearly supposed to be a programmer but just did not get the message. Her wanderings have taken her through the land of libraries and archives and into software consulting, like you do. Now a software engineer at Heroku, she&#8217;s deeply grateful for every [inaudible], she does not use vim commands and Google Docs. Welcome to the show, Amy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi everyone. I&#8217;m excited to be here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Amy, we would like to start the show by getting to know our guest a little bit better and our favorite question to ask is what is your superpower and how did you acquire it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think my superpower has got to be walking cats. I did not think I would be a cat person. I&#8217;m very much of a dog person. I love dogs but my partner has cats so I have taken the time to learn to walk cats, which is basically understanding that you have no role. Absolutely, none in the mission of actually getting from one place to another and you just sit along for the ride as the cat sits down in the middle of a grassy field and takes a nap.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So you are well-prepared to work in a team of software developers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Pretty much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I do have some literal experience with herding cats.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nice. What was it like growing up with a computer in your family?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When I was going through library school, I had a wonderful advisor who suggested I read the Unlocking the Clubhouse book, about women in the computer science program at, I believe this is Carnegie Mellon. It basically goes into all of the ways in which women are suggested by society that maybe tech stuff isn&#8217;t relevant. At the back of the book, there&#8217;s this wonderful chapter that is about the few women who did absolutely survive and thrive to certain degree. I realized that I was so lucky because my family &#8212; not me &#8212; hit every single one of those.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> My grandmother was a computer. What that title meant at the time was that you would do the computation so for her, she was a computer in the MIT wind tunnel and they would get a whole bunch of measurements coming in from this big, massive system and they would be the ones doing the computations to determine if a certain design of wing would have enough lift to allow a plane to fly. She went through the math program at Wellesley. I have two other grandfathers who went through MIT, both my parents went through MIT so there was always this expectation that science and technology were things that we&#8217;re part of their legacy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I live with the fact that I am a granddaughter of a computer because to me, I feel like mostly because of luck that I happened to be in a family that really encouraged and supported me in doing a lot of techie things, even when I didn&#8217;t think that I was going to be capable of it myself. For so many other people, that is very much not the case.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You said you didn&#8217;t think you were capable of it yourself. Do you know why that was?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, honestly I don&#8217;t and it took a long time for me to build that confidence. I think I lost that confidence right around high school and I don&#8217;t really know why.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It seems pretty common.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes and I think looking back at my high school self, it&#8217;s hard to see any rhyme or reason to a lot of things so who knows? I think there was absolutely some aspect at that time in your life, you start to get to realize that maybe your interest in equations is not going to affect some of the things that matter to you, such as popularity, such as having a decent social life. I definitely know I made a conscious choice to focus on the humanities at that point in my life because spending time learning about people and how organizations interact and have profound influences on people&#8217;s lives, really spoke to me as a 13 or 14-year old, going through all the changes that happened at that age and feeling a little bit, perhaps out of the loop and not necessarily at ease with some of the dynamics that were swirling around me. But I think by about age 15, I had pretty much given up on math and science and had decided I wanted to go into history.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In some sense, you discovered very early something that of, I know I&#8217;m only coming into in recent years of how interesting those human pieces are. But in another sense, as kids we have this idea that we can do anything and be anything and then sometimes we lose that. But you&#8217;ve totally got, particularly your superpower back now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think it was a really painful thing to be forced into learning. Obviously, there are incredibly more painful things to experience other than a little bit of teenage angst. But I am, to a certain degree grateful that I had enough challenges, feeling at ease with people that I took a direction that was very focused on the humanities because I do think that if I had just been able to continue on my happy way, I would have completely ignored the humanities and I might be one of those people who does not see the value in a strong humanities background in the tech field.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Kind of those people who just wants to be a computer?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s fair.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How did your family react to your shift in course because it sounds like there was this family legacy of devotion to math and science? Were they supportive of you or to they&#8217;ve tried to steer you back?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, I think I was having enough problems and there&#8217;s a legacy of enough problems in my family that they were happy that I was most likely not taking drugs and was relatively sane so the steer towards the humanities was not quite at the top on the list of concerns.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s not like you were voting Republican or anything.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>She&#8217;s a teenager. She can&#8217;t vote. Being a teenager is hard.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think it&#8217;s really fascinating to see how much the pressures that you experienced at that age can really affect how you choose to see the world as an adult and what choices you make about what is important as you make your way to, hopefully being a really good influence on society in making a difference.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m in a position to have experienced two puberties. One coerced and one voluntary. I can tell you that going through puberty at 40 is just as awkward as going through puberty at 13. But it has the same ability or potential to change your world view for the better. Exactly has been my experience.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, definitely. I think the effect of having so many changes around you feels incredibly destabilizing but it&#8217;s also was, I think a really big and important change for how I valued what I wanted to learn and what I wanted to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Did you end up going to college?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I did. I started at a college in Los Angeles called Occidental. That was a great first year but did not end up having some of the academic rigor I was looking for so I transferred to University of Chicago, which has a very strong core curriculum. It’s one of those programs where if you get out not having read Hegel, you are in the minority and it really aligned with what I was looking for.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It had a very strong set of humanities departments and I felt really at home in the history department. It was really an amazing experience to work with people who were through their research, helping to form the stories that we tell ourselves that amount to our shared history, our shared culture. To a certain degree, how we see ourselves as community, as towns, as country is through stories that we tell ourselves that we tell our youths, that we tell our adults. To see the process of those stories being created was a fascinating thing. It was my first exposure to seeing how important it is to choose the records that we, as a society want to preserve our primary sources so that would be whether newspapers showing George Washington&#8217;s first election or they know that a maid writes to her mistress saying that she&#8217;s running off.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The choice of what to preserve and what to spend our society&#8217;s resources, in order to keep around for generations really informs what kinds of stories we can tell ourselves about who we are, 50 years later or 100 years later. At the history department, they really brought me to a passionate love of archives and how we record and preserve information about ourselves.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting. It seems like some of what goes into that is our societal choices about who has, just plain old access to literacy, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely and it ties into, not only who has access to literacy and who can write those records but also who can write which records, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s easier to make the argument that you should preserve newspapers and that puts an increased value on the people who not only can write but choose that as a career, who have the knowledge to write into &#8212; the editor &#8212; and the power within that community to have the editor think, &#8220;Oh, gosh, Mr Sam Westinghouse. Yes, I will publish his editorial,&#8221; or letter to the editor but it&#8217;s far less likely that we are going to preserve the letters of Maid Joan. No one&#8217;s going to think to do that, at least certainly nobody thought to do that in the 1800s so you end up in this really interesting situation that the letter of the maid who was writing to her mistress saying that she was running away is one of the few examples that you have to study the lives of the working class and why was it preserved? Well, because this mistress was married to a famous senator. Therefore, it ended up in the official papers. It’s not just who can write but it&#8217;s who writes what and who has which connections.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I was listening to a lecture on medieval history and the author made the point pretty early on that almost all of the people of that time were peasants and almost none of their histories were recorded and preserved in any way so the view that we have of that is almost entirely of the merchant class and above.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly and the view you get is purely of counts of the number of serfs on X person&#8217;s field. Occasionally, someone might have to resolve a dispute of two peasants but it&#8217;s really limited. It’s really recording the lives of these people with a narrowness of focus to their economic value and then when they cause problems for the elite.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How is that different now where everyone has public platforms for sharing intimate details of their lives but probably there&#8217;s so much of it that it may as well be ephemeral?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a really interesting question. Many people doesn&#8217;t know actually has a corollary to people archives. University archives and other formal archives that have a mission to preserve things, have decades worth of a backlog of inventorying things so the papers of a famous poet who may have died 20 years ago are still sitting in boxes, not important enough to catalog so are essentially unusable by researchers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think what we&#8217;re seeing is that problem compounded because as we move into an age in which anyone can publish on the internet, first of all archives are struggling to adapt some of their collection policies to collect that kind of material because it&#8217;s incredibly hard to understand how to preserve Facebook. Do you do screen capture? Do you download the HTML and CSS and then make sure that you have preserved a version of IE5 and you have a computer to run it? Do you, instead create a collection policy for it that says, &#8220;Some archivist is going to copy and paste,&#8221; or far better, you&#8217;re going to write a crawler that is going to transform that into a text file but lose some of the detail there. I don&#8217;t think anyone is advocating for copying it into a text file but that would be the option that would be most stable to preserve. We’re almost always going to have a way to read a .txt file.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then in addition to the question of what do we begin to collect is how do we categorize it and preserve it in a way that is accessible? I think there are a lot of corollaries to the problems with paper archives. There’s just a backlog. There are constantly higher priority things coming in so there&#8217;s a real challenge there. I would add on top of that, there is a question of privacy. There are some interesting case of libraries that may not have as much of a connection to some of the archival training or archival scholarship that have made some interesting discussions about how to preserve records for their community.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One example I&#8217;ve heard recently is a library that really wanted to build on their mission to being engaged with the community and preserve that community history and started to preserve the posts on the neighborhood Facebook page. No, the content there isn&#8217;t particularly valuable. A lot of people with lost pets, with free plants but there are the occasional rant. Does that person who is really pissed off at their neighbor expect that to be available for eternity? I don&#8217;t know. It’s hard to say.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One argument is it&#8217;s a public post on Facebook but it&#8217;s not exactly the same as the professor on his retirement day, walking 10 boxes of papers down to the university archives so you end up with a lot of really difficult, challenging questions that because society does not yet quite have the answers to that, archives are really struggling to figure out what to do there. Of course, there&#8217;s not enough money even to handle the paper archives. There is a real reticence to really dump in there. There are a lot of organizations doing really great work and I should, of course tell our listeners that I am very far removed from the field so I may be less able to celebrate the successes that I know are out there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Isn&#8217;t Google the de facto archive of online life now?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, there&#8217;s some really interesting explanations about even the Internet Archive and how that might fit into thoughts in scholarship and archives themselves. They do not necessarily have the same level of collection policy. Instead of having a formal collection policy, they outsource it to you, the maintainer of the website and your [inaudible] .txt file. There are some really interesting parts about how that affects, whether we&#8217;re collecting the right stuff and preserving it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But yeah, I think reliance on Google as the means of preservation is taking a question of who we are as community, as a country, out of our hands and putting it into the hands of a company that exists to make a profit and exist within a system where they may delete results because that&#8217;s what&#8217;s going to make the money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So we&#8217;re back to people stories being reduced to their economic value?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I think if you treat Google as your way of figuring out what&#8217;s important, then absolutely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Amy, like you were saying before, it&#8217;s not just about what is stored. It’s also about how it&#8217;s retrieved and how it&#8217;s presented. We’ve seen, for instance Google presenting holocaust nihilism above legitimate results for World War II queries and things like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly. There&#8217;s a really interesting question, I think for our communities and for our country is about what that line is, because in the past we&#8217;ve made some of those decisions by essentially saying that libraries and archives will be our path into these resources. They will be our path to access and we will train our librarians and archivists rigorously and with a relatively consistent ethos of what it means to serve society. I think what we&#8217;re seeing is that is changing and yet, we don&#8217;t have an answer for how, as a society we want to manage that kind of access? You would never see a librarian if asked about World War II, putting you to a holocaust denial book. But that&#8217;s what Google&#8217;s doing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it really captures an interesting point that I was thinking about with regard to the difference between paper records and digital records, which is that you can feasibly do full texts search on digital records, where you don&#8217;t necessarily have to have an index or a categorization or anything. But in order for that to work, of course you have to know what you&#8217;re searching for. You have to know the right terms. You have to know how something may have been creatively misspelled and so on. I wonder if that is a good jumping off point to talk about the difference between digital records and human curation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I think that&#8217;s a really interesting point and it&#8217;s one that I think is converging a little bit more than we may think. ETSI posted a job for a librarian and there are a lot of companies out there that &#8212; very digital companies that are relying on learning algorithms to recommend things for you and to certain degree to sort things for you &#8212; actually hire librarians to do that first set of categorization to handle some of those questions of, &#8220;Did you really mean that? Maybe that&#8217;s a misspelling. Come on.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think there&#8217;s this interesting question for a lot of companies that have vast amounts of raw data text that they&#8217;re trying to make accessible, how do you get that first pass that a recommendation engine can then build upon? I do see there a decent amount of possibility for coalescing where we use some of the skills that librarians have built up to categorize things in order to help train and have our algorithms build upon that knowledge.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Without having the ethos of the librarian being part of the algorithm, how do we prevent those sorting algorithms from drifting into the realm of politicized content or popular content that is inaccurate or even propaganda?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that is an incredibly difficult problem for a lot of AI-based tools that we&#8217;re seeing. Some popular examples are obviously the Twitterbot that was trained to interact with people and within a few hours, became compromised essentially.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The Microsoft&#8217;s Tay, was it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m ideologically compromised.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. That&#8217;s an interesting point to frame it as ideologically compromised. I was thinking more along the security lines. It&#8217;s essentially a hack but it is a lot more about how do we make sure that these bots have a certain degree of integrity, whether that is Microsoft&#8217;s Tay or whether that&#8217;s Google&#8217;s image recognition algorithm that can&#8217;t tell the difference between apes and black people, whatever we use learning algorithms on, I think we need to understand how much we have invested in the education of humans over time and how hard that is and how much commitment we&#8217;ve had to make to that now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> You know, obviously I think we could probably be investing a little bit more than that. We have 12 years of education available for our children in this country without explicitly saying, &#8220;Thou shalt not ever do this,&#8221; helps to explain why it&#8217;s important for a shared community values to act in a certain way. I think it&#8217;s an interesting point to try to, in this environment when there is a lot of doubt about who we are as a country and there&#8217;s not necessarily the same muscles but existed many, many decades back for us to speak positively about what it means to be a part of a community, part of a country to say that this is what we believe in and this is what we want our access to information to reflect.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What do you think a librarian or library science can offer a company like ETSI? Is it just constructing an anthology for them, for their listings or does it go beyond that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I think I&#8217;m probably the wrong person to answer that. You could get a very interesting panel here of people who work as librarians in the private sector. My knowledge there is relatively limited but yes, the primary job of&#8230; I&#8217;m not sure if they use the word anthologist but it&#8217;s pretty much exactly that. You are developing what categories, items should be sorting in and then helping to sort items into that, develop rules for what goes in to what category.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There are also some interesting jobs in the private sector such as a corporate archivist that also walk this interesting line of profit versus preservation versus [inaudible]. But I went to programming path pretty early on in my library career so I would hate to step on the toes of the librarians doing really good work there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe we can relate this to something that some of our listeners might have more familiar within web development, which is information architecture. How do you classify and organize and present and navigate through the information that your website has?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, definitely. Information architecture is on the curriculum of almost every library science degree. It’s interesting to see the approach there. I think to a certain degree, the structured presentation of categories doesn&#8217;t always map to where websites currently are. If you think about those splash page, the hero page or hero image at the top and then this single page intro for most startups that are&#8230; I don&#8217;t know. What is the word? Hidden? Pre-alpha&#8230; stealth, there you go.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Those sites don&#8217;t exactly map, as well to structured information so I think, when it comes to information architecture, there is maybe some room for balancing of approaches where we recognize that highly structured information is not the best for access to information for a lot of things. The way a library school course for information architecture would like you to design a website is actually, probably pretty darn terrible.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We would like to take a quick time out to do a commercial for our own podcast. That is so meta. We&#8217;re advertising our podcast on our podcast. Actually, Greater Than Code is looking for sponsors. We’re looking for the right corporate sponsor because right now, we&#8217;re totally Patreon-supported which is fantastic. We have awesome Patreons and if you become a Patreon at any level, you get to participate in our Slack communication which is actually really nice. Remember, as anyone who has been in any of our recordings knows that this is not a well-oiled machine. This is a well-edited machine and that editing doesn&#8217;t come cheap so thank you everyone who supports that great Greater Than Code Podcast.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Now in other news, Amy I&#8217;d really like to get back to this question about Tay. You mentioned that she was hacked and I find that really interesting because she wasn&#8217;t hacked like a break-in to your servers and mess with your data sense. She was hacked like right through her front door interface of, &#8220;Oh, you want to learn something? I&#8217;ll tell you something,&#8221; of a bunch of people just started spewing garbage at her and this gets back to the part where, if we don&#8217;t have librarians curating the information that we have access to, what we have is algorithms.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When Google and Facebook are the stewards of our cultural story, then we&#8217;re subject to whoever can manipulate those algorithms and whoever is economically or ideologically motivated to put in the effort to manipulate those algorithms. That’s dangerous.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I definitely think it is. It’s a big time of change and you don&#8217;t know where it&#8217;s going. I think that is why I use the term &#8216;security hack&#8217; when I talk about Tay because I do think that we need to start thinking about altering AI output to give answers that it shouldn&#8217;t be giving the information that it shouldn&#8217;t be giving, as a security issue. I think someone correctly mentioned that this is kind of more a social engineering issue than Tay was not being DDoS. It’s not the code side of hacking but it is still something that endangers the security of the performance of AI-based applications.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A social engineering is a security vector and it&#8217;s actually the hardest security vector to deal with and I think, as our algorithms become more sophisticated, it become social creatures, they become susceptible to social engineering and that&#8217;s something the engineers behind Tay obviously never even consider.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And that has been [inaudible] social engineering on us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think there are at least two ways in which it is definitely a hack. The first is in a very literal way, which is that it was a compromise of its integrity as a system design, presumably not to be racist. To the extent that the designers didn&#8217;t want to design a racist Twitterbot. Its integrity was compromised and it was changed into something it wasn&#8217;t intended to be. The second is that a very simplistic form of meme hacking, where the system clearly is designed to retain some phrases and things over others and they were able to get it to retain those phrases &#8212; the racist ones &#8212; rather than other less racist phrases.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and I think there&#8217;s an information security side of this, whereas algorithms become a bigger part of how things are suggested to us and how information is categorized and access is determined that you could end up altering these algorithms to provide information that they really shouldn&#8217;t be giving out. If you are calling in to a help system that is going to help get you information about how to cancel your order, it should not allow you to cancel someone else&#8217;s order.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In the same way that something if you ask it like, &#8220;I&#8217;d really like to research the Facebook posts of this kind of group of people,&#8221; it shouldn&#8217;t be trained to share things that are really not related to what you&#8217;re asking about and drown out the other information so that it can never be found.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like we should mention the Facebook algorithm for determining what trending news is and the role of that &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; news.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and the role that that most definitely played on our most recent election.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, I was thinking of another example as well of perhaps an expert system that&#8217;s used for medical diagnoses. The equivalent attack on that from what happened to Tay would be that maybe you have something that&#8217;s designed to provide reproductive advice and you call into this thing expecting fair and unbiased results and it tells you to sterilize yourself or something like that, right? Particularly, sinister.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The integrity of a system is one of the three pillars of information security. We’ve got light bulbs that are de-dozing people. It’s not dissimilar from that. It’s a system that was designed to do one thing that was modified against to what the intention of its creators to do something else.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to go back to something you said earlier, Amy about whose stories get recorded. I think it was you who mentioned that in medieval times with the records of the merchant class and above, whose stories are we collecting and whose stories are we archiving now, based on these algorithmic selections? I think if Google and Google&#8217;s relevance algorithms depend on essentially social networks, how many people are linking to your content is a huge part of determining how relevant your content is and what content gets surfaced through a search result. Whose stories are we making available to the public?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s a really good thing to be thinking about. I think there are two aspects to that. The first is what is accessible today and I think that might be closer to the corollary of the public library. I think with that, we&#8217;re seeing things like the Kardashians being promoted. There are clear studies that your implied socio-economic power does impact how popular you are on social media platforms and how much your content gets surfaced.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think there is another interesting way to look at this from what we preserved. On the archives side, I think we may be overly optimistic that we&#8217;re preserving what we need to. I don&#8217;t think algorithms really even come into it and the anecdote from the last year is that a lot of minority students post their experiences with racism at the university using a particular Twitter hashtag. These were stories that got a lot of publicity within the community because the community wasn&#8217;t that familiar with micro-aggressions and some of the more overt and explicit racist actions were just ones that people thought, &#8220;Oh, that can&#8217;t happen here. We’re a liberal community,&#8221; and it was a really revealing moment to have these minority students to use Twitter to publicize what their experiences were at the university, which is not this beautiful, rosy post-racial experience.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> You would think that that would be incredibly important to preserve. Yet, the way that those Twitter posts were preserved was an archival student. This is a person who&#8217;s still getting their MOS degree, decided to pull those down. She taught herself how to program to pull those down and store them. The university didn&#8217;t know what to do with them so they didn&#8217;t accept the data. I know that story continues on to what I think is a slightly happier end but that might be just me hoping for that and not actually confirming that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that gets back to the fact that it&#8217;s really hard to preserve some of this content and there&#8217;s no existing societal statement of value at them. I think we know that they&#8217;re important but have we put that in words? Yes, we can talk about what the future of library is and archives are and how that is changing to use a certain degree of AI and learning algorithms. But when you talk about asking those institutions to figure it out themselves, it comes down to a question of what do we value. We, right now don&#8217;t really value preserving this stuff and we value it only so much as Google is willing to expose it to us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a couple of interesting bits in that story. One was that someone asked for people to tell their stories. One way or another, someone said, &#8220;Do this with this hashtag,&#8221; and we can consciously ask for the stories of people whose stories aren&#8217;t traditionally preserved and publicized. But then with the new data medium, we also have to find completely different ways of preserving them and we don&#8217;t know what those are yet and more significantly, I think providing access to information and this being done by algorithms. It like the story crafting has been taken from the historians and now belongs to the meme hackers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and I think that&#8217;s a really great way to speak about it. It’s a great place to find optimism because I think there are more and more efforts to try to find a happy medium, where individuals can, to a certain degree reclaim things. A good example of this is some of the personal archiving efforts that are being done at libraries across the country to help people preserve their own things. At a larger level, StoryCorps is really interesting as something that doesn&#8217;t necessarily give guarantees that admission of an item to a university archives would but does allow for stories to be promoted, to have a signal boost and to have archival efforts put to preserving them for a longer period than a converse salvation, a podcast might.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I personally have a great degree of optimism that we can find a balance between allowing access and preservation to be determined by companies whose motivation is profit. Even though they provide incredible resources in the present moment, they&#8217;re still making choices that may not be the same ones we would make as a society. I see a lot of optimism in individuals taking the time to get more involved and to create those stories of their own and to be part of movements and communities that will start to repeat those stories, to make them more important and to value them as a community. Therefore, give more power to them because ultimately, it&#8217;s the powerful stories that are the ones that influence us right now and are the ones that we preserve.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think a lot about the tragedy of the commons. For those who don&#8217;t know, the basic idea is there&#8217;s a Village Green and all of the local farmers are allowed to graze their animals on the Village Green. Any individual acting solely in their own best interest is incentivized to grow their herd as large as possible to take advantage of the public space for feeding their herds, which of course works against the community at large.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I feel like in our current society, it&#8217;s a digital commons and access to the commons is not what is subjective to gatekeeping but its attention that is a scarce resource. People whose stories are powerful and are transformative may not have the social standing to have their voices amplified and preserved and recorded and transmitted and that&#8217;s a real tragedy that refacing now. It is celebrity worship. It’s people with a higher socio-economic status, it&#8217;s people who have connections who are given greater voice and that&#8217;s to the detriment of people who maybe have different perspectives or different stories to tell.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s really interesting to be looking at our media currently for communication, in comparison to different ways that we have communicated at a society over time and to see us go through these cycles of how much information we publish, in what mediums and how much we expect people to be able to consume. I think there&#8217;s a really interesting challenge today because the volume is so much greater than it has been at any one point for people to consume and no one can come close.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But that doesn&#8217;t mean that there haven&#8217;t been similar times when the rate of increase of information available has exploded. I think it&#8217;s an incredible challenge to find a balance where the voices of the minority are heard. At the same time that there is a cohesive center and that the stories that we tell ourselves about who we are, have some degree of cohesion.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to make a point that sort of ties together what we were talking about at the beginning of the podcast in terms of who has history written about with. What we&#8217;ve been talking about recently, which is meme hacking and this idea that some ideas get to live while others don&#8217;t. Mostly, what I want to do is use this as a pretext to make a joke so I will do that now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Winston Churchill famously said that history is written by the victors and that&#8217;s not exactly correct, is it? It&#8217;s not the victors, necessarily. I mean, today it&#8217;s apparently still a part of the political discourse, whether or not the civil war was motivated by slavery so they didn&#8217;t win but they still get to drive the discourse. I think it&#8217;s more accurate to say that history is written by the people with the power to control the survival of memes that they prefer. If we want more working class representation and the ideas that are available to people in schools and in history books, then what we really need to do is rise up and see as the &#8216;memes&#8217; of production.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I see what you did there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Did you just say the &#8216;memes of production?&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I absolutely did.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that really gets back to some of the optimism about people getting involved. There’s no better time than now for people to be able to produce their own stories. On the other hand, obviously there is the horror of how do you sort through what should get attention, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think we could have a whole other podcast about how social media has impacted information availability and dispersal.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know. Definitely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Amy, the value in your background in history is the appreciation of how important those stories are because sometimes you want to say, &#8220;Oh, it&#8217;s all about the code. Oh, no. We’re only evaluating the code.&#8221; It&#8217;s never just about the code because the stories, the narratives and human life are greater than code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to mention to how little control we have in the world that we live in now over our own narratives even. You give an example of people sharing their experiences of racism and racially motivated micro-aggressions but I think I need to name search myself from time to time to find out if 4chan is organizing harassment campaign against me, for example. My own Google results tell a story about points in my life that I have no control over. In my related searches, when you search for name on Google, it brings up OpalGate. It brings up my dead name from prior to transition. It brings up a lot of pieces that I don&#8217;t think are relevant to the overarching arc of my personal life and there is no way for me to influence that. All I can try to do is do more visible things and get more attention but I can&#8217;t really manipulate those results to own my own story.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think that&#8217;s a really interesting side effect of the current vast amount of information that is being spewed out right now, which is that previously there was sort of a pact in society that you would only lose the control of your own story if you were in public life and you are important enough for a newspaper to spend time writing about you. Obviously, some of that breaks down when we talk about smaller communities and about the economically disadvantaged who can&#8217;t fight back in those situations. But it was a far smaller part of society that was affected and I think over history, you see these vast points of change when pacts breakdown because the scope of things changes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It&#8217;s no longer valid that if someone&#8217;s writing about you, they should be able to say whatever they want and that should be the first Google hit when someone searches for you, as opposed to 100 years ago where if someone went out and chop down a tree and that tree was brought 200 miles to a paper mill, it was chopped up, made into paper and someone printed about you. Then there&#8217;s a whole other story for creating the ink, that is a vast investment by society in writing three or four words about you even. But now there is such a lower cost to writing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The social pact about who gets to say what about whom is no longer really valid because it&#8217;s no longer limited. You have no control over your story no matter who you are and it&#8217;s a really relatively scary thing for the vast majority of us who have a lot of different personas that we present on a day-to-day and it&#8217;s something that can destroy someone&#8217;s life, if one of those stories doesn&#8217;t conform the way people wanted it to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a really interesting dynamic where on the one hand, Twitter and Facebook have democratized the availability of information but on the other, they have served to concentrate the power of the corporate media into fewer, larger, more powerful groups. The Boston Globe used to have offices all across the world and used to be a pretty important newspaper and now it&#8217;s essentially dead so the New York Times has consolidated a lot of that power. It&#8217;s interesting to me that seems to have both effects, both democratizing the availability of information for me and you to publish our information but also sort of concentrating the power that the New York Times has to form a narrative.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and it&#8217;s also divorced a lot of that power from the smaller scale where it&#8217;s no longer true that I know the journalist who is picking the AP stories that are going to be in the town newspaper. While that in many ways has incredible benefits, it has a lot of problems when those stories end up not meaning something to you and you lose a sense of community about the stories you&#8217;re telling to each other. I think that&#8217;s one of the most interesting things I&#8217;ve seen in public libraries as an increased involvement in wanting to build community in creating spaces and to help people build that community for themselves while telling stories about the place that they live.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> On the other hand, I&#8217;m not sure that that is really going to build the power that we would want behind those stories and the feeling of involvement that you want people to feel like they have in telling the story of who they are and who their community is and what we value together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cool. It’s time for reflections. Let’s reflection it. I guess I&#8217;ll go first. For me, this really makes me think about the access we have to information through the media, through Twitter, how that access is controlled and shaped. You can&#8217;t really talk about that without bringing up Noam Chomsky and his work, especially manufacturing consent. He was also, by the way the reason that we call regular expressions, regular expressions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One thing that&#8217;s really struck me throughout this podcast and this discussion is just how economics and politics rear their ugly heads in so many of the things that we&#8217;ve talked about, things like who has their records preserved and who has access to literacy? Who can afford to hire librarians like a tech company versus a public library? Who&#8217;s motivated to put in the time to flood the corpus of a chat bot so they can get to promote their own agenda and who gets to control public stories about any given person? To me, code is part of some of those things but the politics and the economics of those situations are simply inescapable. I feel it&#8217;s appropriate that we talk very little about code and mostly about these other things because those are the real intractable problems and I want us to focus more on grappling with those things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A lot of my thoughts centered around curated history and Amy, what you said in the early days about who at the university is responsible for the archives and how the archival process works and knowing that someone with an ethos is curating that history versus the algorithmically generated histories that we&#8217;re being subject to today and the long term impact on how that&#8217;s going to affect if you are [inaudible] as a society and how future historians are going to use that information to try and put together a picture of who we are as a society.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also, the haring notion that thanks to the corporate players who control the means by which we get our voices out into the public are motivated, like Sam said by economics and only your own narrative is, if not already impossible, at least in peril.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was thinking about the vast amounts of data that there are and how huge that is and then we choose some subset of that to preserve and some small piece of that actually gets stored. Then an even smaller piece of data is accessible and searchable. We can find it and use it to research. It&#8217;s like we have this tiny little keyhole we&#8217;re looking through at this big landscape and everybody looks through different keyhole but certain people control a lot of the keyhole and behind that keyhole is a lot of stuff that&#8217;s there but also some of that stuff is just drawings that people made up and stuck in front of your keyhole and you think that&#8217;s the world because this is the only piece of it that you can see.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think it would be important to give people internet access as a public right, just so they have some chance of contributing their story from their own perspective, to the depth of human history.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like to end with a call to our listeners to consider the possibility of working in the public sector. This isn&#8217;t something that we&#8217;ve discussed on this podcast but I think if what Jessie just said to you pulls a little on your heartstrings and makes you want to be part of making those decisions on a day-to-day basis, then I&#8217;d like you to consider this. I&#8217;ve worked at some really great companies &#8212; for-profit companies &#8212; that are doing really fascinating things, really important things. But I have never worked outside the public sector in a place where everybody had a common mission.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We disagreed about it but you came in to work and you knew that today you were going to help people and literally, everyone in that organization was there to do that and it&#8217;s a thing of incredible power to feel like you are a part of helping your community, your society, answer some of the toughest and most challenging problems and you can do that as a programmer. You’re still writing code but your code works on the edges of coming together to solve these issues.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Sure, sometimes the problems you&#8217;re solving in code are not the most cutting edge of technical problems but the social problems are absolutely far more impactful than any complex algorithm, monitoring solution or whatever the heck you&#8217;re dealing with on that particular day. If any of those conversations made you think like, &#8220;Hey, that&#8217;s really interesting,&#8221; there&#8217;s a great need for people to continue doing this work and they can say, &#8220;It is the most meaningful work I&#8217;ve ever done.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you for doing that work, Amy. That’s greatly appreciated. This has been a wonderful conversation. We’ve touched on a lot of really important ideas. I really look forward to the conversation continuing in the Greater Than Code Slack community which of course, you can join by pledging on Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode at any level. Thank you to all of my fellow panelist today. Amy, Thank you so much for time and your insight. It’s been wonderful having you here. Thank you so much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>AMY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you everyone.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can I just close by saying that I own a trademark on the memes of production which means that I own the memes of production of the memes of production?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good night, everybody.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amy Unger: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/cdwort"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@cdwort</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.heroku.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Heroku</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “JIRA Card Catalogs and The People Who Love Them” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:05</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Superpower Origin Story, Growing Up with a Computer in the Family, and Being a Teenager</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Women-Computing-Press/dp/0262632691/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1494455362&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Unlocking+The+Clubhouse+Women+in+Computer+Science"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher</span></a></p>
<p><b>08:30 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Humanities and History</span></p>
<p><b>10:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Access to and Preservation of Literacy (Who is writing our history?)</span></p>
<p><b>15:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Categorizing Information and Making it Accessible&#8230;But, Also Privacy?</span></p>
<p><b>17:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Reliance on Google as the “Defacto Archive”?</span></p>
<p><b>19:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Digital Records (Algorithms) vs Human Curation</span></p>
<p><b>24:10 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What can librarians and library science offer a company?: Information Architecture</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>For sponsorship inquiries: please contact </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p><b>27:32 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Algorithm Manipulation, Social Engineering, and Information Security</span></p>
<p><b>32:24 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Whose stories are we collecting, archiving, and making available to the public?</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tragedy of the Commons</span></a></p>
<p><b>41:09 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Meme Hacking”, Getting Involved, and Owning Your Own Story</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Rein: </b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_Noam_Chomsky_and_the_Media"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">How economics and politics rear their ugly heads unexpectedly.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Who is responsible for our history? </span></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The vast amounts of data we have and what we choose to preserve.</span></p>
<p><b>Amy: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Consider the po]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Amy Unger: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/cdwort"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@cdwort</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.heroku.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Heroku</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “JIRA Card Catalogs and The People Who Love Them” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:05</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Superpower Origin Story, Growing Up with a Computer in the Family, and Being a Teenager</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Unlocking-Clubhouse-Women-Computing-Press/dp/0262632691/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1494455362&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=Unlocking+The+Clubhouse+Women+in+Computer+Science"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing by Jane Margolis and Allan Fisher</span></a></p>
<p><b>08:30 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Humanities and History</span></p>
<p><b>10:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Access to and Preservation of Literacy (Who is writing our history?)</span></p>
<p><b>15:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Categorizing Information and Making it Accessible&#8230;But, Also Privacy?</span></p>
<p><b>17:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Reliance on Google as the “Defacto Archive”?</span></p>
<p><b>19:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Digital Records (Algorithms) vs Human Curation</span></p>
<p><b>24:10 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What can librarians and library science offer a company?: Information Architecture</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>For sponsorship inquiries: please contact </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a></p>
<p><b>27:32 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Algorithm Manipulation, Social Engineering, and Information Security</span></p>
<p><b>32:24 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Whose stories are we collecting, archiving, and making available to the public?</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tragedy of the Commons</span></a></p>
<p><b>41:09 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Meme Hacking”, Getting Involved, and Owning Your Own Story</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Rein: </b><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent:_Noam_Chomsky_and_the_Media"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">How economics and politics rear their ugly heads unexpectedly.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Who is responsible for our history? </span></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The vast amounts of data we have and what we choose to preserve.</span></p>
<p><b>Amy: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Consider the po]]></googleplay:description>
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					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
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					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>55:11</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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					<title>Episode 031: Retrospectives and Agile Fluency with Diana Larsen</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-031-retrospectives-and-agile-fluency-with-diana-larsen/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 03 May 2017 22:40:33 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=569</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Diana Larsen joins us to talk about an earlier episode (#28) that we did where we touched on retrospectives and Agile Fluency.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Diana Larsen joins us to talk about an earlier episode (#28) that we did where we touched on retrospectives and Agile Fluency.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Diana Larsen: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/dianaofportland"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@DianaOfPortland</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.futureworksconsulting.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">FutureWorks Consulting</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://leanpub.com/u/dianalarsenauthor"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Author: Agile Retrospectives, Liftoff, Five Rules of Accelerated Learning</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>** This conversation stems from an earlier episode when Janelle joined the panel. </b><a href="http://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-028-brains-feedback-systems-demons-and-goats-with-janelle-klein/"><b>You can listen to it here!</b></a></p>
<p><b>02:03</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Retrospectives </span><b>**</b></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">“Software work is learning work.” <a href="https://twitter.com/DianaOfPortland">@DianaOfPortland</a></p>
<p>— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode/status/859885971973828608">May 3, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop"><span style="font-weight: 400;">OODA Loop</span></a></p>
<p><b>11:07</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Documenting Feelings and Emotions</span></p>
<p><b>17:40 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Following Through With and Solving Action Plans</span></p>
<p><b>20:08 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Focusing, Lists of Action, and “Best Practices”</span></p>
<p><b>30:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What is value in the context of software development? / Measuring Waste</span></p>
<p><b>33:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Taking Things in Small, Bite-sized Pieces: Refactoring</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mob_programming"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mob Programming</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Thank you </b><a href="https://twitter.com/iamtjg"><b>Tim Gaudette</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p><b>55:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="http://www.agilefluency.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Agile Fluency</span></a><b> **</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/agileFluency.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Your Path through Agile Fluency on Martin Fowler&#8217;s Blog</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to spill your thoughts and feelings on the new Greater Than Code blog? Send submissions to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>! </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Janelle: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Thinking about the focusing step and how much effort goes into those things versus the benefits of focusing on things from the recent past. Taking human emotions into consideration.</span></p>
<p><b>Diana: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Managing learning and collecting data, and issues around value.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Different forms and cycles of feedback.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, I&#8217;m Janelle Klein. Welcome to Episode 31 of Greater Than Code and I&#8217;m here with my co-host, Sam Livingston-Gray.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello everybody and our guest today is here among other things, to school lesson the art of doing Agile Retrospectives. We apparently got a few things wrong on a previous episode and she was here to make it right. Diana literally co-wrote the book on Agile Retrospectives. It&#8217;s called Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great and it&#8217;s published by the Pragmatic Programmers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In lieu of the usual bio that we do, I want to start with a personal introduction. I first met Diana in the summer of 2006 when I took a class in extreme programming at Portland State University. That was the first and almost certainly the last time that PSU ever offered a class on XP and I was so lucky because they brought in people like Jim Shore, Arlo Belshee, Ward Cunningham and Diana Larsen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Diana came in on the last day to facilitate a retro for the class and when I got home that evening and my partner had asked me, &#8220;How was your day?&#8221; I was just telling her for a good long while all the great stuff that we had done that day and at the time, my partner did a lot of presentations and some group facilitation for her work and she said, &#8220;She must&#8217;ve been good because you hate group exercises.&#8221; I stopped and I said, &#8220;Yeah. She’s good. She’s that good,&#8221; so there you go. Welcome to the show, Diana.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. I hope I haven&#8217;t degraded over the last 10 years but you&#8217;ll never know.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I was working on the Gilded Rose Kata recently so I think that it&#8217;s more like fine wine or brie that your quality improves over time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>All right. Thank you so much. That was great and Andrew Black was the professor at PSU that got that class going and he invited all of us. That was a really cool thing. A great way to end the summer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Diana, why are we here?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, it&#8217;s difficult for me because I am so devoted to the idea that particularly software work is learning work. For years Peter Drucker introduced the idea of knowledge work and so on. What I find that companies and people often do with that is they think of knowledge as something that you archive. It’s not active. It’s something you get and then you hold onto. I don&#8217;t think that fits for my experience with software work and working with people who are doing software development, whether they&#8217;re programming or testing or being the product people or whatever they&#8217;re doing. It seems like it&#8217;s a very intense learning situation. When I hear people talk about retrospectives as we made this list and then we made that list and then nothing happened, it makes me a little crazy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Understandably.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because there&#8217;s no learning happening there. It’s just listing that is happening there. Many people, it&#8217;s not just software but many people have this idea that if I make a list about things, then things will change and learning has happened by virtue of making the list. That’s just not how it works. Working with humans a lot over the last several decades, I&#8217;m very clear it&#8217;s not what I have in mind when I talk about a retrospective, which is really getting clear, getting a common sense of what happened in the past, what impact that&#8217;s having on us now and how we want to either carry something forward or ship something in the future, what experiment does that suggest to us, what hypothesis do we have about how we might get better and then how are we going to do something to test that hypothesis and then learn from the outcomes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> You need all those pieces to have an effective retrospective and if we&#8217;re just listing or we&#8217;re just having fun games like the kind of activities and exercises that used to drive you crazy, that doesn&#8217;t do the trick. You really need to stay focused on the work and you need to stay focused on learning about the work and how we&#8217;re doing the work together and all those kinds of things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You haven&#8217;t said anything that I&#8217;ve disagreed with at all. I&#8217;m like listening and going, &#8220;Yeah,&#8221; so in general agreement and frustrated by a lot of the similar things that I see kind of in general going on in the industry with respect to retrospectives and making lists and things being ineffective, you clearly have a very structured, deliberate approach of how to make retrospectives significantly more effective. Yet, by your comments, I got the impression that you had a lot of dissonance ideas but I don&#8217;t feel like I&#8217;m hearing a lot of dissonance right now and finding myself very much in agreement with you. I&#8217;d like to hear a little more about and specifically, structure-wise what kind of things we&#8217;re different or if there&#8217;s anything specific, I feel like one of the things that you brought up with Agile Fluency model, I guess you didn&#8217;t bring it up at the show but I will start reading &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I will.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; And one of the first steps in there was focusing on value and your specific comment in Twitter was with respect to focusing on ways so I&#8217;m guessing with respective dissonance that might be something that we see things a little bit different way. That might be fun to talk about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay. All right. Also, I&#8217;d like to hear again about the kind of retrospective that both of you are doing with your work. Maybe there&#8217;s an opportunity to do a little helpful critique in there. Always focus on the positive on where I see you being effective and where I see you may be going off the rails a little bit. Yes, we can do both.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> What starts from is that teams of people trying to accomplish something together in general are complex, adaptive systems. One of the things that we know about what works in complex adaptive human systems is an ongoing repetitive cycle of understanding the current state of things, understanding what the implications of that are for us and then creating some hypothesis and plan for action and evaluation out of that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Now, in the retrospective framework that Esther and I put &#8212; Esther Derby, that&#8217;s the co-author of Agile Retrospectives &#8212; in the framework that we propose we start with something facilitation because people in groups don&#8217;t naturally know how to learn about something, think about something and make a decision about something without some coaching and help.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Our framework starts with set the stage. We get people in the room, get their heads in the right place to begin doing this work together. That may be as simple as a very quick check in. It may also include going over what the agenda is for the time we&#8217;re going to spend together. It could include a lot of things but it&#8217;s usually pretty fast. I almost always &#8212; I never say always &#8212; but almost always, I actually include a focus for that. I think one of the places where people get tangled up is if every retrospective is about continuous improvement and that&#8217;s all, then every retrospective starts looking the same and they becomes boring.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I look for some thinner slides of what is it that we&#8217;ve just experienced that we might want to focus on? It might be increasing our adherence to our agreements about engineering practices. It might be improving our connection with our customer. It could be any number of things but in some thinner slice of we&#8217;re going to just continuously improve because that just opens things up way too much for a meeting that is generally an hour or an hour and a half.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How do you choose what to focus is?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Generally, I talk to people on the team, to see what&#8217;s been bugging them. Maybe there is an incident that happened just in the last iteration or if they&#8217;re doing Kanban in the last chunk of time that we are looking at in this retrospective, there may be something that has come up. What I have discovered is that if that turns out not to be the most important thing to talk about, the team will shift very quickly. But we still end up with a thinner slice so either way, it works. We just get people&#8217;s heads in the room ready to do the work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then we do that what we called &#8216;gather data, generate insights, decide what to do.&#8217; other folks have call that &#8216;what, so what, now what?&#8217; There&#8217;s various ways of talking about that but that&#8217;s really the meat of the retrospective and we can dive deeper into what each of those parts are if you like. Then we do another sort of facilitation wrapper at the end where we say, &#8220;Okay, we&#8217;re going to close the retrospective now. What is it we want to remember? What are our agreements about action?&#8221; That&#8217;s also a good time to do just a general round of appreciation and to take a short piece of the time to continuously improve our retrospectives so what in this retrospective do we want to keep carrying forward? What happened here that we want to maybe adjust for next time as their feedback for the person who facilitated it? That is just the rap but &#8216;arrange-assert-act&#8217; is also an interesting way of thinking about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Lots of people have come up with a way of talking about that. OODA Loop is another one. Build-measure-learn is another one. Plan-do-check-act is another one. There&#8217;s lots of folks have noticed that really assessing what just happened before you jump into analyzing what happened is a really good thing, particularly in groups because otherwise, we end up in this place where I&#8217;m talking in terms of my own experience and you&#8217;re talking in terms of your own experience. In spite of what we may think, those may not be matching experiences. Until I understand what happened for you, in this last iteration and you understand what happened for me and all of our other teammates, we don&#8217;t really have the full picture so you really want to spend time getting that full picture. That’s the part that&#8217;s most often left out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. One thing that really jumps out at me still about that retrospective that you did for our class in 2006 was that you started off, maybe not immediately but one of the first things that we did was we went and we built a timeline of the thing that we&#8217;ve been through as a class and we put a post-its about our feelings. &#8220;I was feeling anxious. I was feeling satisfied,&#8221; and that really still jumps out at me as something that was memorable and effective. We don&#8217;t do a lot of the further retrospectives that I&#8217;ve been and even the good ones.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There are two parts to any event. There&#8217;s the sort of factual nature of the event, here is our effort data, here&#8217;s how much we got done. Then there&#8217;s how we, as humans respond to that data, that fact. Both of those things are useful information because if our effort data makes us embarrassed or guilty, that has one set of impacts on us. If our effort data makes us feel proud about it, that has another impact so it&#8217;s useful to call that out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Jim and Michelle McCarthy and their core protocols, they start every meeting with a check in at MAD, SAD, GLAD, AFRAID. We&#8217;re humans and humans have an emotional component and if we ignore that or try to sweep that under the rug, we&#8217;re ignoring a big part of our motivational drivers so we really do want to get those out on the table as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>With respect to emotional drivers, you&#8217;ve also got factors of the things that we measure and the things that we defined as good or best practice-wise drive a lot of those emotions. For example, if discipline TDD is an expectation socially on the team, failure to comply with that expectation, independent of whether the things that you&#8217;re doing are helpful or not, makes people feel good or bad or whatever. Same thing with code coverage metrics where people feel bad for the little progress bar not being in the right place, independent of whether the activities that they&#8217;re doing are actually helpful or not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. I hear a lot of stories of things that go on teams. Recently, I was hearing a story about a team that got a new team member who came from a culture that the original team members weren&#8217;t as familiar with and people persisted in mispronouncing the new person&#8217;s name and one of the existing team members, that was a very troublesome for. He had worked very hard to figure out how to pronounce the new person&#8217;s name and all the names of the people who were already there, which was a little easier and he was troubled by the fact that his teammates weren&#8217;t doing this. That got in the way of working together. It got in the way of pairing. It got in the way of all kinds of practices that they were trying to do together and making agreements.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It can be something that some folks think is small that can really trigger that emotional response. I don&#8217;t know if the emotional response was triggered in the person whose name was being mispronounced but it sure as heck was in the person who was noticing the mispronunciation. Teams can get tripped up by really interesting things that may seemingly be small but if there is an emotional valence to it, it can have an outsized impact.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I can think of a number of uncomfortable emotional situations on teams that I&#8217;ve been on. I mean, I can totally respect that situation. It&#8217;s disrespectful, I think in context of a team to not take the time to learn how to pronounce some of these names. It&#8217;s just kind of an overt statement of &#8216;I don&#8217;t care&#8217;. &#8220;I don&#8217;t care enough about you to learn how to spell your name.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it would think. But you know, how many people do you know that didn&#8217;t come from mainstream American culture into a team whose names get shortened or for whatever reason, at their full presence, their full name isn&#8217;t honored. I mean that just happens.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, I also got the other side of that, just I would think embarrassment with people not knowing how to say a name and not wanting to try and feel embarrassed. Then that becomes its own thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. Well, it happens. Of course, we see a lot of things online about happens with women when people are throwing around the term &#8216;guys&#8217; like &#8216;all you guys on the team. You guys.&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For those who are listening at home, I have a little printed card. I have a couple of them. One says, &#8220;Glitchy audio. One says, &#8220;There&#8217;s a mike rubbing on fabric,&#8221; and the one that I hold up, probably the most often is one that says, &#8220;You guys,&#8221; that I hold up whenever somebody says, &#8220;You guys,&#8221; to remind them that we&#8217;re not all guys here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, yeah. I mean, there&#8217;s just lots of things like that and response to the work. We have an emotional response to the work as well so feelings are facts and we need to include them when we are looking at the full body of factual data about what went on during that period of time that are retrospective is looking at.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> What we noticed is that people with an engineer’s mindset or an artist&#8217;s mindset are problem solvers. They tend to want to jump right into the middle of the retrospective and just start with analyzing and problem solving before they&#8217;ve really done that really clear picture of what actually happened.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Totally guilty.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, this will make you feel a little better. Very often, business people want to jump into the decide-what-to-do portion &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; Before they&#8217;ve done either of the other way, before they&#8217;ve done the collection of data or the analysis. Let&#8217;s just move into action. That&#8217;s what I&#8217;m always alert for. When I hear people describing their retrospectives, are they really giving attention to all three of those parts? It just makes it a better retrospective. You end up with better hypotheses, you end up with better actions, you end up with greater likelihood of follow through and so on, which by the way, is the biggest complaint I hear about retrospectives. No matter where I go is we hold this retrospective meeting and then nothing happens. We don&#8217;t follow through on the action plans.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When I hear that, I say, &#8220;Well then, stop holding a retrospective because that sounds like a lot of waste.&#8221; Or figure out how to do your retrospectives in such a way that you will follow through on your action plan. Those really are the two choices there. I&#8217;m not for people just sitting in a meeting because they were scheduled to have a meeting. That seems kind of silly to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The other thought I see a lot of is retrospectives where people have an action plan but the action plan doesn&#8217;t actually solve the problem is largely because of the dysfunction of the focusing step that you mentioned.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. We may have found the problem to solve but it&#8217;s not the right problem or it&#8217;s not really going to get us the most benefit. On the other hand, if people have not been doing retrospectives and are just beginning to do them, I don&#8217;t care how small a problem they pick to work on. If that&#8217;s something they think they can accomplish and get some traction on and get some feedback about how did that go, that is like building a team muscle. You may start with smaller weights and get successful with the smaller weights before the team starts taking on the big weights, like influencing other people in the organization.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I always counsel to start with things that are well within the team&#8217;s control, something they can actually make happen and that they can actually analyze without having to have reference to a lot of other outside input. As they build that learning and improvement muscle, they will be able to take on bigger and bigger things that are more complex or more difficult, that require more organizational influence or all those other kinds of things. You really want to stay away from starting out with the actions of the sentence begins &#8216;they should.&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I hate the word &#8216;should.&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But we could try this, right? I want to keep teams on &#8216;we could,&#8217; because I think control is really important, particularly in the beginning.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Specifically, the thing I&#8217;m hung up on is kind of the focus in step aspects. I&#8217;ve just seen so many patterns over and over and it well pick some problem that is largely like, &#8220;I think it should be implemented differently. It&#8217;s not scalable,&#8221; or some arbitrary kind of thing or that, &#8220;We should fix this because of X. It feels wrong to me,&#8221; kind of thing. Once the team has the discipline to back into the questioning with respect to value and usefulness, make it faster or accomplish anything, a lot of these ideas that engineers come up to improve things, don&#8217;t actually make things better at all and they&#8217;re just best practice-y kinds of things or ideal vision and what is in front of us being different than that ideal vision.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then these things pop out as problems and often get a lot of intention and you end up with actionable improvements coming out of these retrospectives but because we have no good anchors for defining whether something is valuable, whether something is better, I mean it&#8217;s kind of better is sort of like this fuzzy notion that makes it really easy, regardless of what experiments you run, to have a lot of confirmation bias effect. What kind of things you do to mitigate that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I suspect that possibly what I reacted to in the other episode was the idea of list of actions. Teams have a lot of work to do so if you&#8217;re using more of a throughput Kanban flow and you&#8217;re doing your retrospectives or if you’re an XP team and you&#8217;re doing one-week or two-week iterations, taking on more than one or two if they are small improvement actions, sets you up for failure. Even if you do generate that list, there needs to be some conversation about winnowing that list down.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Sometimes a very small action can have an outsized effect. We call that the &#8216;Butterfly Effect Pattern.&#8217; Looking for what&#8217;s the smallest thing that we could shift in this next, say iteration that we believe would give us the biggest beneficial impact and if you want to create an improvement list backlog or something, that&#8217;s fine. But you&#8217;re only going to pull one thing or possibly two things and people are really enthusiastic about them to do the learning and experimentation on in the next iteration. Otherwise, big list [inaudible] any of it done because you&#8217;ve got work as well and that&#8217;s important. There&#8217;s that. The other thing that we were talking about the focusing, the other thing that that helps is our improvement action this next time is going to being linked to our relationship with our customer or [inaudible] rotation. We&#8217;re going to experiment with a new pairing rotation or whatever it might be.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m kind of allergic to the term best practices because I think there are good practices that work for some people in some instances and very often, those don&#8217;t translate into whatever that instance is. There were worthwhile things to try but to try with a curious and open mind, is this going to work for us in the way that work for somebody else. Then I think about companies who are just trying to adopt, say this Spotify model, [inaudible] without really noticing that Spotify is a very different kind of business than they have, etcetera, etcetera, anyway.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I made a comment about making big lists of to-do items ending up with these new management problems of managing things and [inaudible]. In terms of in a typical practice of filling up a big backlog of technical debt items, I would totally agree on that aspect of it. At the same time, with respect to being able to make intelligent improvement decisions, what I found from practice, considerably more data to improve the quality of decisions just because of the sheer amount of complexity and variation and interaction that goes on the project itself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As opposed to creating a big list and then trying to make intelligent decisions just based on instinct of reading through these things and winnowing down what&#8217;s important, what we&#8217;re basically doing is creating a graph-structured based database of past historical experiences and then taking all of our knowledge and continually grooming it in a software developer insight system. Then when we go into the retrospective meeting, we&#8217;re not just talking about the last week. We&#8217;re looking at the patterns across the last six months, year of type of trends that have happened on our [inaudible] for improvements or in choosing a focus topic based on complex historical patterns that we&#8217;ve seen emerged. I feel like that level of rigor is needed to be able to intelligently choose a focus.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, certainly a laudatory. I don&#8217;t see a lot of teams putting that much into it. I still would say, &#8220;Take them off one at a time.&#8221; As you would address of those issues, you want to make sure that you are taking something. In the five rules of accelerated learning book that I wrote with my son, Willem, we talk about focusing on the flow of learning and talk about bite-sized pieces. What is it that your team can easily take in, consume, digest before they take on the next thing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> What you&#8217;re talking about really looking at that history, for one thing I think you&#8217;re looking at a longer retrospective than something that you would use to just look at a couple of weeks’ worth of data. Retrospective things and sizes and numbers of people involved and all of those are kind of complexity factors. But I think that kind of analysis that you&#8217;re talking about doing is super. That would really help to focus you in the right direction for where can we get the most beneficial impact.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> People talk about what&#8217;s most important for us to do all the time and I try to [inaudible] an official impact because importance is kind of vague and fuzzy but if we really want to get the goodness out of this, let&#8217;s stay focused there and I like what our colleague, Woody Zuill talks about when they were creating mob programming. He talked about every day just figuring out how can we turn up the good. That&#8217;s what we&#8217;re looking to do, how incremental improvements toward more benefit to the team and to the product that we&#8217;re creating into our organization as we go along. I think that sounds great and I don&#8217;t see a lot of teams doing that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I don&#8217;t either.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>At the same time, in the context that we started inventing tooling where our project was going off the rails despite doing all the best practice things and it was a ten-year old project. The things that we were doing weren&#8217;t working to solve our problems so we resorted back to gathering data as a method to figure out where our problems were and pretty much, as you were saying with respect to best practices, we basically abandoned all best practice wisdom at that point and said, &#8220;Okay, let&#8217;s see what the data says and start [inaudible] good software.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the other things as opposed to doing kind of bi-weekly retrospect is as we do per developer, per task reflection, before and after each individual task as a pair and because we have a lot of the thinking and reflection at such a fine [inaudible] model, two-week reflection where we&#8217;re sort of looking at culminating things as a group, the dynamics of that discussion change significantly when we&#8217;ve already got a good bit of context on reflecting on the things that happened over the last two weeks. I think that&#8217;s the another significant reason for &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, that&#8217;s awesome. That is just awesome, Janelle. The idea of maintained culture of reflection and inquiry as just a part of your ongoing work, has to stand you in really good stead. That has to benefit you because it makes such a difference to be in that space. That really is continuous learning and I congratulate you for it very much. That&#8217;s awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, one other thing that is specifically with respect to value versus waste and I wanted to get your thoughts on what is value in the context of software development. How do we define that as a team?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting. That&#8217;s a conversation I was just having about an hour and a half ago with somebody else. I think that&#8217;s one of the toughest nuts actually in software development. I think that&#8217;s a thing we really have to where product owners, in particular or the product management folks are tasked with prioritizing according to value but nobody has figured out what&#8217;s valuable in their organization. There are some rough ideas about that. Do we prioritize things that might increase or we prioritize things that are going to increase our revenue over the short haul? Are we looking at things that are going to protect our current revenues? Are we looking at things that are going to reduce our current cost? Are we looking at things that are going to avoid costs in the future? Are we completely focused on what our customer tells us as most valuable to them? [inaudible] or is that some particular feature?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That&#8217;s a very complex set of stuff to look at and I don&#8217;t see enough teams and organizations doing the work to sort through that whole pile of potential value to say, &#8220;For us right now, which of these things is going to give us the most beneficial impact, either for the team or for the organization, whether we&#8217;re IT or whether we are a company that is producing a product for sale in the marketplace, all of those things all go together and we don&#8217;t spend enough time looking at that for sure.&#8221; It could be any of that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting. A lot of time focusing on measuring waste as anti-value just because it is something that is easier to define. I think value has a lot of challenges with defining things. We&#8217;ve got a feature that we want to add to the product but generally speaking with product sales and our product sales model, the revenue from a feature that you&#8217;re putting in the product. How is this feature going to ultimately affect customer behavior kind of things when it comes to trying to associate these things with money? One of the things that we started focusing on was optimizing for joy and that our customers having a joyful experience with our products matters and is it [inaudible] to us build in a shift in revenue. It&#8217;s part of our purpose as an organization.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, it&#8217;s a much sure path than many other [inaudible]. Yeah, I like that a lot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to go back to something you said a little while ago about taking things in small bite-sized pieces and picking the things that maybe will give us the biggest bang for our buck. I guess the entire idea of doing Agile Development is that you focus on the thing that&#8217;s going to deliver the biggest value to your customer first for the smallest amount of effort. But when you said that I saw that in terms of the way I do refactoring and the way that I approach refactoring is different in a way a lot of people talk about what they think of is that word.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> What I like to do is I start with the tiny things like renaming variables until they make a little bit more sense to me, inserting white space between sections like little tiny things where I&#8217;m cleaning up the tiny mess, removing a little bit of noise so I can free up the mental capacity to see the next smallest mess and so on. That sounds to me a lot like what you&#8217;re saying about taking things in small pieces and focusing on just one thing at a time. Does that match?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. I&#8217;ve been for many, many, many, many years but I recently went to a mob programming workshop. I was part of a mob and we were programming together. I had the experience that I have had other times when I observed our colleague, Jim Shore doing some kind of public [inaudible] or those kinds of things, where you can actually see the code get more beautiful: adding in those white spaces, making the names more consistent, all of those kinds of things, all those small things that you&#8217;re talking about really do make a difference.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I have just developed the belief in taking the time with that detail of I can make this small improvement and that small improvement and that small improvement ends up having a big impact. I totally agree. That&#8217;s right there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>All right. I&#8217;d like to take this time to give a quick shout out to one of the new supporters of our show. We would like to mention as noteworthy, Tim Gaudette who describes himself on his Twitter bio as a web developer and cynical idealist and I&#8217;m not quite sure how that works but I like it. Anyway, you can check out him on Twitter at @IAmTJG. If you would like to support the show, you can do so at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode and donation at any level will get you into our Slack community where we have a bunch of wonderful people talking about interesting things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We also wanted to talk on this episode about Agile Fluency. I think on the previous show, Episode 28, Rein had been talking about a Capability Maturity Model of some sort and then I jumped in with Agile Fluency because I love the model and you were clear about mentioning that it&#8217;s not a maturity model so I don&#8217;t know what that means but I&#8217;m curious to find out. But I&#8217;d really like to jump in first with just this idea of what is fluency and what is the sort of multilevel model of fluency. I&#8217;ve played with that a bit myself. I ran across it with your son, Willem and I absolutely love it. Can you start by introducing that to our listeners?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Jim Shore and I had been working together on a number of different projects. We were looking for the next thing and taking what we had been working on to the next level. One of the things was a workshop that we were doing and we were having some difficulties. We were getting really good feedback on the workshop but we were having difficulty sort of sequencing the content. We just like the best for sequencing the content. As you do, when we were dealing with a hard problem, we started talking about something else entirely &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You think it&#8217;s about something else but really it&#8217;s not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, but really, it turned out it wasn’t because both of us had just been engaging with Willem around the idea of language fluency and what was going on there with the nonprofit that they had called Language Hunters. Those epiphany is about what if we applied that idea of fluency to the things we were trying to teach about software development. That was kind of the genesis. It definitely was a feeder idea and the piece of that is fluency is what you can do routinely. It&#8217;s the thing you automatically go to. It&#8217;s like you are a pianist. It&#8217;s the piece you would always go back to the simple piece that you can count on, you can play all the way through.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Generally, if we use the language example, we try to match fluency to me so if I&#8217;m taking a vacation in foreign land, to me where they speak a language that is not my native language but I&#8217;m going to be there for a week and I need to be able to get on the bus and I need to maybe understand how much things are going to cost, I need one kind of fluency. I need to be able to ask how much is this cost with routine [inaudible]. I don&#8217;t want to fumble around with that but I probably don&#8217;t need &#8216;or open a store&#8217; or any of those kinds of things. There&#8217;s a certain level of fluency that is my sweet spot for that use.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> On the other hand if I&#8217;m going to stay there for a few months and I plan to attend social events and things, I&#8217;ll need to be able to have small talk and chit chat and maybe tell a story about what I did yesterday of fluency level that I would need to do that. My friend, Steve tells me a story about a time when he thought he was fluent in a foreign language but he was riding a bike and got stopped by the police because as it turned out in the end, he was riding in a place he wasn&#8217;t supposed to be riding. It wasn&#8217;t going too fast or anything else but he very quickly found the limits when the police were in his face shaking their finger at him.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Jim and I formulated this idea of software development fluency being what can you do and what will you do as a teen, even when you are under pressure, even as it comes in and tells you need to be able to deliver this tomorrow? What are the things that you fall back on? What is kind of your native tongue software development in that situation? As we began working on it and talking to different people about it and about what their experiences was, as we got to a new idea about what this model should look like, we would take it out and test it with folks who were really doing software development with real teams and being successful at it. We came up with this concept that we could identify at the time, for sort of proficiency. That sets of proficiency, of fluent proficiency that seemed to go together and that&#8217;s how we made up the model.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> While each set of proficiencies builds on the previous one, you don&#8217;t always need to build on the previous one. It just depends on your need and that&#8217;s why we don&#8217;t call it a maturity model. A maturity model tends to imply that you want to get as mature as you can possibly get and what we&#8217;re saying with the Agile Fluency model is you only need to get as fluent as matches the need that you have for fluency so that&#8217;s why we are where sensitive around the maturity model.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Fair enough. Thank you. That&#8217;s a useful clarification.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it has been a very useful model to us over time. First, we just wrote an article and Martin Fowler, very kindly offered to publish it and then we thought, &#8220;Well, that&#8217;s interesting and that&#8217;s done,&#8221; but then people kept asking us questions, particularly about how to operationalize it in their organization so a couple of years ago, we form something called the Agile Fluency Project and brought in a few more people to help us with that and we&#8217;re looking at all the ways in which the model can be used inside organizations to help them find their appropriate level of fluency, make sure they&#8217;re not over-investing in some things and under-investing in others and so on so getting the appropriate level of investments and training and attention and all those kinds of things that the team might need.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But I&#8217;d like to take another moment to mention that as we announced on a previous show, we are now accepting submissions for blog posts. If you would like to write something and have us put it up on our blogs, you can maybe reach a little bit wider audience than you would on your own blog, feel free to email Mandy@GreaterThanCode.com and picture ideas and your submissions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I did want to mention one thing that I really got out of the fluency model that came out of Language Hunters, which was prior to encountering this model, I would see people talking about how, &#8220;Oh, I&#8217;m fluent in Spanish,&#8221; and I would always see it as this like unattainable goal of, &#8220;Wow, you&#8217;ve been like living in this culture for a couple of years and you can carry on a conversation with Charlie Rose in that language.&#8221; That was really transformative to me in making this idea that a level of fluency at a low-level of proficiency is accessible, it gives me somewhere to start, which somebody with ADD that I often have trouble digesting this things all at once. I just wanted to mention that I found that really appealing about fluency model in general and I was thrilled to see the way that you adapted it to Agile Adaption.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, thank you. I think it does link to the things we were talking about earlier about the sense of inquiry and learning and the things that we&#8217;re talking about value because as we put the model together, one of the things that we discovered, the great thing about creating models is that at a certain point is they start teaching you back.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mostly in the ways that they break down, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and it&#8217;s been a really fascinating thing for me over time as I&#8217;ve contributed different models to the Agile world but in this case, in particular what we started noticing was that fluent sets a fluent proficiency that we were identifying as a part of this model, tended to be very much in relation to how the team was connecting with value. The first fluency that we identified was this idea of focus on value, which means the team can be counted on. Assuming they&#8217;re getting good information from the product people in the business side, the team can be counted on to always work on the next most valuable thing, that whatever they are producing is going to be the next most valuable thing from the backlog or wherever they&#8217;re getting their work assignments from.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The next part of what we call the path through fluency or the bus drive &#8212; sometimes we call it bus zones &#8212; is delivering value which means not only is the team producing the next most valuable thing but they are delivering that on a certain cadence and they can be counted on to deliver that on a certain cadence. Then the third one &#8212; I won&#8217;t keep going through the whole thing &#8212; is that the team, we call optimize value which means not only can the team respond to the customer and the business and give the next most valuable thing on a certain cadence but also they can begin to contribute ideas of value that the customer may have or need and they can anticipate what will be valuable to their customer because they understand them so well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That has led my inquiry into the ideas around what is valuable that we were talking about earlier. It&#8217;s like how do we talk about that and how do we feed that information into the team so that they can continue to learn about value in their organization and what they need to be responding to. I just think that&#8217;s an interesting link back to our earlier discussion about what really is value. The fluency model ended up that we didn&#8217;t necessarily start out wanting to build it in that way but it ended up telling us it needed to go in that way. We are now actually working on some ideas around, is there a fluency progression for people and product management or product ownership and in that role because that seems to be really important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, interesting. We&#8217;re hoping to see that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, fluency models are really fun to create, by the way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ll keep that in mind. Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We usually finish the show with a few comments and reflections on things that stood out during the show that you&#8217;ll take with you, maybe something somebody said. Probably the main thing that stuck with me was thinking about that focusing step and how much effort goes into those things versus the benefits of focusing on things from the recent past. It really got me thinking about, especially with taking human emotions into consideration as what you focus on. I&#8217;m thinking about that a lot now so thank you, Diana.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, you&#8217;re welcome. I&#8217;ll just throw mine in here. I was really intrigued by, certainly the things you were talking about in terms of the way your team is managing and learning and collecting data and stuff. That&#8217;s an impressive story. I&#8217;d like to learn more about how you do that and where you do that at some point in the future. And your questions about value, I don&#8217;t always get to hear from other people that are as passionate about a particular little arcane bit of whatever that is involved in Agile like that so getting that question and being able to really talk about those issues around value, that&#8217;s clarifying to me actually.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I mentioned earlier the idea of small-bite sized pieces and I talked about how I saw that in terms of refactoring but really what stood out to me throughout this entire podcast is that we basically just keep talking about different forms of feedback and different cycles of feedback, which is as I see it, sort of the fundamental idea in all of Agile Development. It&#8217;s interesting to see how that can be applied in various different contexts and again, it was a really useful reminder to me that even though sometimes I really want to start with the big boom, maybe sometimes it&#8217;s better to be able to take tiny steps because if you don&#8217;t know how to take the bigger step, at least you can take a smaller one and get yourself that much closer. Thank you for that reminder.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;re welcome. It is my pleasure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Before we go, I want to mention that we are, as mentioned listener supported but we would totally love to have a company sponsoring the show as well, if there&#8217;s a good fit for us. If you are somebody in a company that might be up for that, please talk to folks there and get in touch with Mandy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Diana for joining us. I had a lot fun.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DIANA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had fun too.</span></p>
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Diana Larsen: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/dianaofportland"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@DianaOfPortland</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.futureworksconsulting.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">FutureWorks Consulting</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://leanpub.com/u/dianalarsenauthor"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Author: Agile Retrospectives, Liftoff, Five Rules of Accelerated Learning</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>** This conversation stems from an earlier episode when Janelle joined the panel. </b><a href="http://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-028-brains-feedback-systems-demons-and-goats-with-janelle-klein/"><b>You can listen to it here!</b></a></p>
<p><b>02:03</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Retrospectives </span><b>**</b></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">“Software work is learning work.” <a href="https://twitter.com/DianaOfPortland">@DianaOfPortland</a></p>
<p>— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode/status/859885971973828608">May 3, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop"><span style="font-weight: 400;">OODA Loop</span></a></p>
<p><b>11:07</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Documenting Feelings and Emotions</span></p>
<p><b>17:40 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Following Through With and Solving Action Plans</span></p>
<p><b>20:08 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Focusing, Lists of Action, and “Best Practices”</span></p>
<p><b>30:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What is value in the context of software development? / Measuring Waste</span></p>
<p><b>33:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Taking Things in Small, Bite-sized Pieces: Refactoring</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mob_programming"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mob Programming</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Thank you </b><a href="https://twitter.com/iamtjg"><b>Tim Gaudette</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p><b>55:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="http://www.agilefluency.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Agile Fluency</span></a><b> **</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/agileFluency.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Your Path through Agile Fluency on Martin Fowler&#8217;s Blog</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to spill your thoughts and feelings on the new Greater Than Code blog? Send submissions to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>! </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Janelle: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Thinking about the focusing step and how much effort goes into those things versus the benefits of focusing on things from the recent past. Taking human emotions into consideration.</span></p>
<p><b>Diana: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Managing learning and collecting data, and issues around value.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Diana Larsen: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/dianaofportland"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@DianaOfPortland</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.futureworksconsulting.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">FutureWorks Consulting</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://leanpub.com/u/dianalarsenauthor"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Author: Agile Retrospectives, Liftoff, Five Rules of Accelerated Learning</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>** This conversation stems from an earlier episode when Janelle joined the panel. </b><a href="http://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-028-brains-feedback-systems-demons-and-goats-with-janelle-klein/"><b>You can listen to it here!</b></a></p>
<p><b>02:03</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Retrospectives </span><b>**</b></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">“Software work is learning work.” <a href="https://twitter.com/DianaOfPortland">@DianaOfPortland</a></p>
<p>— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode/status/859885971973828608">May 3, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OODA_loop"><span style="font-weight: 400;">OODA Loop</span></a></p>
<p><b>11:07</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Documenting Feelings and Emotions</span></p>
<p><b>17:40 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Following Through With and Solving Action Plans</span></p>
<p><b>20:08 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Focusing, Lists of Action, and “Best Practices”</span></p>
<p><b>30:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What is value in the context of software development? / Measuring Waste</span></p>
<p><b>33:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Taking Things in Small, Bite-sized Pieces: Refactoring</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mob_programming"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mob Programming</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Thank you </b><a href="https://twitter.com/iamtjg"><b>Tim Gaudette</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p><b>55:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="http://www.agilefluency.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Agile Fluency</span></a><b> **</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/agileFluency.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Your Path through Agile Fluency on Martin Fowler&#8217;s Blog</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to spill your thoughts and feelings on the new Greater Than Code blog? Send submissions to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>! </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Janelle: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Thinking about the focusing step and how much effort goes into those things versus the benefits of focusing on things from the recent past. Taking human emotions into consideration.</span></p>
<p><b>Diana: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Managing learning and collecting data, and issues around value.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style]]></googleplay:description>
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					<itunes:duration>50:25</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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					<title>Episode 030: Essential Developer Skills with Tom Stuart</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-030-essential-developer-skill-with-tom-stuart/</link>
					<pubDate>Fri, 28 Apr 2017 20:54:35 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=557</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Tom Stuart stopped by to talk about software development over the years, “junior” and “senior” developer nomenclature, good mentorship, and OOP.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Tom Stuart stopped by to talk about software development over the years, “junior” and “senior” developer nomenclature, good mentorship, and OOP.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tom Stuart: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/tomstuart"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@tomstuart</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://codon.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Codon</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Cycles in Philosophy of Software, Common Principles with Different Names &amp; Reference” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:47</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Superhero Origin Story</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">BBC BASIC</span></a></p>
<p><b>04:45</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Nomenclature: “Junior” and “Senior” Developers; Differences Between “Early Career” Developers and “Experienced” Developers</span></p>
<p><b>13:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Solving the Skill Assessment Problem; Learning Methodically</span></p>
<p><b>20:55 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Software Development Now vs Then</span></p>
<p><b>29:51 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Do Programming Languages Create Certain Biases?</span></p>
<p><b>44:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Good Mentorship and Telling People What’s Next to Level Up</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to spill your thoughts and feelings on the new Greater Than Code blog? Send submissions to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>! </b></p>
<p><b>55:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Cohorting/Teaching Classes with </span><a href="https://twitter.com/sandimetz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sandi Metz</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">; </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_design"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Object-Oriented Design</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Object-Oriented Programming</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Thank you </b><a href="https://twitter.com/kiraemclean"><b>Kira McLean</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Janelle: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Looking at things as multidimensional problems.</span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-General-Systems-Thinking-Anniversary/dp/0932633498"><span style="font-weight: 400;">An Introduction to General Systems Thinking by Gerald M. Weinberg </span></a></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The importance of the skill of metacognition.</span></p>
<p><b>Tom:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> How the work as changed as being a developer. </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Nonviolent-Communication-Language-Life-Changing-Relationships/dp/189200528X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1493412666&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=non+violent+communications+marshall+rosenberg"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nonviolent Communication: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships by Marshall B. Rosenberg PhD</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to Episode 30 of &#8216;Cycles in Philosophy of Software, Common Principles with Different Names &amp; Reference&#8217;. I&#8217;m one of your host, Sam Livingston-Gray and I&#8217;m here to welcome to the show, my co-host, Janelle Klein. Welcome Janelle.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi. Yes. That&#8217;s me and I also like to introduce, Rein Henrichs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you so much. I am excited. This is my birthday so this is like a special birthday podcast for me because I get to introduce Tom Stuart. Tom gave us what he calls a standard boring conference bio which I will nevertheless read, which is that Tom is a computer scientist and programmer. He has lectured on optimizing compilers at the University of Cambridge and written about technology for The Guardian. He co-organizes the Ruby Manor Conference and he is a member of the London Ruby User Group and London Computation Club.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Tom is currently writing an e-book called How to Write a Web Application in Ruby. His previous book, Understanding Computation was published by O’Reilly in 2013. Now he did tell us that he is in fact not actively writing that book at the moment because, &#8216;it turned into a slog,&#8217; which to be fair as someone who has developed web applications in Ruby for the better part of a decade, it is sort of a slog to do so. I can understand that. Tom, thank you so much for being here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I guess, I like what you also included after the standard boring conference bio which is that you get a lot of enjoyment out of programming and that you want to share that with people and better communicate some of the mathematical or computer or scientific aspects of it to help people get more enjoyment out of those. I&#8217;m big fan of that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. Thanks very much for the intro and happy birthday. I feel very honored to be here on this special day.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We, sometimes like to start the show with superhero origin story where our guests talks about what got him into this whole technology thing. You are welcome to either do that or skip it as you see fit. What do you think, Tom?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m happy to give a superhero origin story. I guess what got me into technology in the first place was when I was a kid, my dad was a teacher and he taught computers among other things. From an extremely young age, there was always a computer around the house so it&#8217;s always been a normal part of my life. It&#8217;s not something that I chose to get into something. I was just exposed to from a really young age and it was always very normal for me to have a computer to play with. I was incredibly privileged and this is in the 80s and home computers were a thing but they were expensive but because my dad was a teacher, we could borrow computers from school and stuff like that. I was very, very lucky to have access to the BBC Micro. That was one of the early home computers in the 1980s, in the UK and I learned to program on that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> All through school, while the other kids were outside playing sports and stuff, I was indoors writing little programs in BBC BASIC and figuring out how things work and typing in computer programs from magazines and taking them to pieces and trying to figure out how they worked and then that just naturally continued into my adult life. I still basically do that. I still spend a lot of my leisure time and evenings doing stuff relating to writing computer programs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> My job has become increasingly less and less oriented around actually writing code and more around of people-y stuff but I still have this real urge to tinker with computer programs and figure out how things work. I get involved in a bunch of meetups and go to events and just spend some of my time in the evenings hacking on stuff and building little things on the weekends for my own enjoyment. Sometimes for some of the meetups that I go to organize, I build fun little tools and visualizations and things like that so there&#8217;s the through line from my origin story to right now is I suppose that I&#8217;m really fascinated by computer programs and by computation and by these all mathematical underpinnings of that stuff and I just get a lot of joy out of fiddling around with them and figuring out interesting new things to do with programs. It&#8217;s not much of a superhero but that&#8217;s me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Being able to persist and focus on difficult technical topics is most definitely a superpower.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Short aside, was BBC BASIC, the one that didn&#8217;t require parenthesis around the function arguments?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can&#8217;t remember. Possibly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Would that entirely explain your later interest in Ruby?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Are you saying that Ruby is like the BBC BASIC of the 90s?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think they&#8217;re [inaudible], sir.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay. Fine. All right, well, birthday prerogative.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>With that wonderful base, shall we talk about people?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Lets.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things, Tom threw out as a topic when we were setting up this episode was this idea of the differences between &#8216;junior&#8217; and &#8216;senior&#8217; people and what differentiates the two. But before we get into that, I would really like to talk about nomenclature a little bit.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I hesitate to label people as junior and senior because I feel that it implies that this assessment we&#8217;re making of their technical skills applies to them as an entire human being. It reminds me a bit of when I was working in a law firm earlier on in my career and one of the things that I learned about legal culture is that it doesn&#8217;t matter what you&#8217;ve done before you came to law school. You could be a doctor or you could have been a bike messenger. The only thing that matters, at least in theory is how long you&#8217;ve been in law and how long you&#8217;ve been practicing and whether you worked your way up through the ranks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> At the time that struck me as a certain level of hubris that the profession is saying that ours is the only thing that matters in the world. I feel like labeling people as junior and senior developers sort of recapitulates that hubris. I like to borrow what Coraline has been saying about people who are early career or people who are more experienced in software development but I&#8217;ve been talking for way too long. Tom, tell us about early career versus experienced folks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I completely agree with you on that. I also find that junior and senior naming to be probably at best, a little bit patronizing and at worst, potentially alienating to people. It is really interesting the extent to which experience in itself is a useful proxy for determining skills. I think increasingly as I&#8217;ve spent more time working with developers, both extremes of that spectrum, as I get more experience and the people around me, the people that I know of are becoming more experienced but also because there&#8217;s now a much healthier supply of new developers into the industry. Things like boot camps are producing a much healthier supply of lots of different kinds of people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Some of those will be young people who are looking to do development as a first career but there are also a lot of people who are changing. They may be in their 30s or 40s or 50s and they want to switch away from whatever they were doing before. I&#8217;m getting exposed to a lot of different kinds of people who you might notionally want to put in that bucket labeled junior but it doesn&#8217;t really make sense for that to be the label. Also, people will come to the role of software development with a bunch of pre-existing skills, regardless of how many weeks or months or years they&#8217;ve been working.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As a software developer, in many cases, a lot of the people who I&#8217;ve met who are doing their very first software development job, they already have a very impressive array of skills that I see as being absolutely essential to being a developer. It may be that they have not spent very much time actually writing computer programs but especially if it&#8217;s at a previous career, they might have spent the last decade dealing with other people and learning how to communicate and learning how to negotiate difficult conversations or learning how to empathize with other people&#8217;s perspectives and things like that. Obviously, that&#8217;s just as important an aspect of being a developer as kind of memorizing the whole active record API or whatever.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s sort of an interesting thing that where it&#8217;s firstly difficult to know how much experience in each of those areas a person has because it&#8217;s not necessarily the case that someone who has only just become a developer, has also only just begun dealing with other humans or learning how to organize their time or learning how to solve problems in an abstract way. They might already have those skill so that&#8217;s one thing that&#8217;s problematic about judging people on this kind of one dimensional scale of experience.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I supposed the other one is ultimately what I&#8217;ve come to realize is that I&#8217;m actually not really interested in experience in and of itself. Experience can be helpful because it&#8217;s a simple proxy for other things that I care about. For example, one of the main things that I see more experienced developers doing is just having a slightly more bloody minded approach to problem solving. It&#8217;s interesting because I have seen it several times where a new developer has sat down and paired with a more experienced developer and the less experienced of the two quite often bring some expectations along with them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think it&#8217;s easy for them to assume that the more experienced developer is some kind of wizard and they are going to know all the magic spells and all the keyboard shortcuts and they&#8217;ll already have all of the answers to every possible question in their head so the less experienced person sits down and says, &#8220;I want to try and solve this problem. I may be tried it for five minutes and I hit a brick wall and I couldn&#8217;t figure out how and so I guess I&#8217;m just not smart enough to solve this problem,&#8221; and they&#8217;ll turn to the more experienced developer and say, &#8220;Please. Oh, wizard, can you tell me how to solve this problem,&#8221; and the more experience developer would just say, &#8220;I also do not know how to solve this. I don&#8217;t have the answer to this in my head but what I am going to do is show you that it is normal and fine for us to spend a couple of hours banging our head against this problem and it may be that we need to go search stack overflow or we need to go and look on Google or we need to go and read the Rails source code to figure out how the heck this thing works and the test we were trying to write is not even correct so we&#8217;re going to try and write a smaller test and when that doesn&#8217;t work, we can go figure out that we need to upgrade this dependency.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The fact that software development in large part is just this kind of joyless slog through one problem after another is I think that it&#8217;s very, very difficult to internalize when you haven&#8217;t done it for a long time. It&#8217;s very difficult to teach to someone. It&#8217;s very hard to take someone who&#8217;s fresh out of a boot camp and say, &#8220;It&#8217;s fine for you to just spend a lot of time bashing your head against things and struggling and feeling inadequate because even someone who&#8217;s been doing software development for 10, 20 or 30 years feels like that every single day.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I feel like that every single time I sit down and try to do something. I feel frustrated and inadequate and feel like I should know the answer but I don&#8217;t. The only difference is I know that&#8217;s normal and the number of years that I have been exposing myself to that experience has gradually built up a resistance to that sensation. Now, I don&#8217;t mind sitting down and struggling with something and actually I have &#8212; I think most more experienced people have done this &#8212; gradually developed a kind of arsenal of weapons against that feeling. It might be for example, that you always try to make the problems smaller.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you&#8217;re bashing your head against something and you spend an hour or two trying to figure out and you can&#8217;t, then rather than continuing to bash your head against the same problem, you take a step back and you try to look at it from a different angle and you say, &#8220;Is there are a sub-problem that I can attack?&#8221; Or, &#8220;This test that I&#8217;ve been trying to make pass is actually testing three different things at the same time so can I make a more focused test?&#8221; Or, &#8220;This thing that&#8217;s currently a private method, could I expose that as a public method and try and write a unit test of that, rather than trying to test this off public method that actually calls into a bunch of private ones?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Those are the things that I think are really important. Those are the skills that really matter in terms of how productive you can be and how much you&#8217;re able to multiply the productivity, this old generativity anything that you&#8217;ve discussed on this show before like how will you able to support other developers and being able to be productive and feel smart and feel able to attack problems. All of the skills that actually mattered there, none of them is the skill of having sat in a room for 10 years writing code. That doesn&#8217;t matter at all but I also don&#8217;t know a good way to teach people that kind of resistance to the day-to-day experience of problem solving with computers faster than sitting there and doing the job for a decade. There&#8217;s an interesting interplay there between, &#8220;I don&#8217;t want to care about the number.&#8221; It&#8217;s not about how many years that your butt been in that chair, trying to do this job. That&#8217;s not interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But also, I would like to get better at figuring out. How do we teach those of what I&#8217;m characterizing as the really important skills of being able to be bloody minded and be persistent and have confidence in yourself and not constantly worry that because you haven&#8217;t immediately solved a problem, because you&#8217;ve failed and failed and failed, how do we get better at teaching people that is normal and fine and then maybe we don&#8217;t need to worry so much about how many years someone has done in the industry because if we can teach those skills in addition to the skill of knowing how to write individual lines of JavaScript code or knowing how to write tests or knowing how to deploy an application or whatever, then you have the same inherent value as a senior or more experienced person. After a few years on the job, just because we found a more effective way to teach in those skills directly, rather than hoping that they all develop independently by being in a painful situation year on year.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;ve got a few different problems here. One is with respect to defining things across this one dimensional spectrum and there being lots of other dimensions to what is experienced. We&#8217;ve also got this problem where you can have one person with two years’ experience that is capable in a way, from a problem solving perspective as somebody with 20 years’ experience is sometimes significantly better where you&#8217;ve got a huge lack of correlation because those things that you&#8217;re describing &#8212; these problems break down skills and things &#8212; are largely tacit knowledge and things that were not directly teaching at all.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Ultimately, we&#8217;ve got, from a hiring standpoint and from how much do I pay somebody standpoint, companies are trying to figure out a way to solve these problems. At the end of the day, we&#8217;ve never had any way to assess these skills that other than having a bunch of experienced people go and drill and trying to get a better feel for a person&#8217;s problem solving capabilities. But at the end of the day, we have these market problems that we need a way to solve somehow. Otherwise, this whole arbitrary ranking thing isn&#8217;t going to fundamentally go away unless we can solve the assessment problem, as well as the how do I transfer tacit knowledge into somebody else&#8217;s brain.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> These things that you&#8217;re talking about are huge gaps in knowledge and we teach things in terms of follow the rules and follow best practices. A lot of that core knowledge that we&#8217;re just expecting people to come up with these new things through us most of us but what you generally see is people pick up the habits from the folks that they end up working around. If they&#8217;re working with somebody who&#8217;s religious about best practices but doesn&#8217;t have a lot of context of making tradeoff decisions or breaking down problems in those kind of things, we&#8217;re missing a lot of this core ability to just turn our tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge and make it teachable in our field so that we&#8217;ve got a huge expert-beginner problem in our industry.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, definitely. I have been very pleasantly surprised by the stuff that&#8217;s happened over the last &#8212; I don&#8217;t know how many years &#8212; five years with boot camps. I didn&#8217;t know how to feel about boot camps initially. When they first started happening and I first started meeting graduates of boot camps, I didn&#8217;t know what to expect. On the face of it, the idea that you can take someone who has literally never written a line of code before and then in N weeks, make them a productive software developer, I wasn&#8217;t sure whether that was a thing or not. But now having met a bunch of those people, I&#8217;ve actually been incredibly impressed by how well the curricula of these boot camps are preparing people for the realities of software development. Particularly, drilling into them some of the skills and some of the craft of being a developer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It&#8217;s not just about we&#8217;re just going to relentlessly drill you on APIs and on the syntax of programming but a lot of it is focused on ways of working. By that, at one end of the spectrum, agile in people to have stand ups and work in sprints and just like get a feel for what it is like to work in a small team of people who are all working on a thing together. At the other end of the spectrum is things like teaching people TDD from the beginning and presenting test driven development as just the way the software is written.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That approach to teaching people how to be developers is effectively leapfrogging years and years of struggle and failure until now of being an ordinary part and certainly was part of my thinking back to the 90s when I first started doing Ruby and I first learned about test-driven developments going into the 2000s and figuring out like that this is a thing and I need to figure out how to be good at it and it&#8217;s taken me like 15+ years to feel confident with those kind of things. Whereas, if I had had the same introductions to the world of writing software as people nowadays are having through boot camps and the like and not just boot camps but also online courses and all of the ways that you can learn to code now, a way better than they used to be and that&#8217;s partly because of this focus on, as you say, of previously tacit knowledge. Also, a hard won knowledge about not just how the computers work, how does computer programs work but also how do we work within these systems, how do we interact with a computer, how do we interact with other people in a team where we&#8217;re trying to build software.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I have a little bit of hope that trend can continue and that maybe now, it seems like a bunch of people have figured out how to teach that set of tacit knowledge and working practices to people who are new to the industry, can we project that line now into the future and say, maybe in another five years or 10 years, boot camps or online training courses or however people are professionalizing into the tech industry is also going to teach, somehow all of the other tacit knowledge of being bloody minded, being persistent and I didn&#8217;t mention this but also, I think a very important part is learning to work methodically, to be able to take the work at sustainable pace. Not thinking that it&#8217;s normal and expected to be jumping ahead and taking huge leaps. That&#8217;s something that I had to and I still learn every day.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Every time I try to do something, I am now getting better at quickly realizing that I&#8217;m trying to buy off too much and I need to dial it back, take a much larger number of much smaller steps, make sure that at every point I&#8217;m feeling safe. I&#8217;ve got to commit. My tests are passing. I don&#8217;t ever get into a situation where I type &#8216;git status&#8217; and I find out that I&#8217;ve got like 30 files that I&#8217;ve changed and I can&#8217;t remember what I was doing. But all of that stuff is very hard to get beginners to do because they are de facto enthusiastic and because they&#8217;re new and because they haven&#8217;t been worn down to this little featureless, smooth surface of like, &#8220;I just know what working with a computer is going to be like.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That enthusiasm that people bring to the job is incredibly powerful and valuable but it can also work against them because again, they don&#8217;t have this tacit knowledge. They don&#8217;t have this years of scars of like, &#8220;Every single time I&#8217;ve tried to do a big bang or try and drop a huge commit that change 5000 lines or whatever, a bad thing has happened.&#8221; I wonder whether we can keep pushing things in that direction so that gradually the boot camps and the other ways that people are learning stuff get better and better keep leveling up from that kind of TDD, Agile, good software development practices, how do we start turning out people to have all of these next level tacit skills. I don&#8217;t know if that&#8217;s possible but maybe it is and that would be fantastic.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve got a question for you. You&#8217;ve been developing software for a long time and seeing the industry go through a number of different changes. In developing software now, looks very different than it did 10 years ago or 20 years ago. Thinking about how software development itself has changed, how would you characterize your early experiences versus now? What are some of the major shifts you&#8217;ve seen in the industry, in terms of how that&#8217;s affected development?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>To be really honest about it, I think the biggest change that I&#8217;ve seen is just how people think about it as a job. It&#8217;s a little bit embarrassing to talk about really. When I first started working as a developer, again in the 90s, I&#8217;ve been writing software for fun for a long time before that. But when I got my first job as a developer, I feel at that time, I was very much playing into the stereotype of a programmer: programmers were the kind of people who just sit in the corner and either literally or figuratively, they&#8217;ve got the headphones on. They&#8217;ve just got a big black window with green text on it and it&#8217;s all scrolling by like in The Matrix and we don&#8217;t talk to those people. We know not to disturb them because they&#8217;ll be cranky if we do. You know, that whole kind of stereotype of basically what you have to put up with when you hire a developer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I guess the flip side of that is also what you have to put up with when you&#8217;re working as a developer. You&#8217;re going to be working with a lot of people who are not smart enough to understand what it is that you&#8217;re doing and they&#8217;ll be constantly distracting you with their inane questions and you&#8217;ll just have to sigh and patiently deal with them. I hope that I wasn&#8217;t like that but it felt like that was the prevailing industry narrative of what it meant to be a developer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Whereas now, I think that we&#8217;ve got tremendously better at that as an industry. I think we still have a long way to go in a lot of areas and there are loads of things that could be dramatically better again but comparing now the expectations of someone who is working as a developer and the expectations of other people who are working with the developer, to the expectations that those people had 10 or 15 or 20 years ago is just like a night and day difference in terms of dysfunction, I suppose. Certainly, the places that I have worked and I&#8217;ve been very fortunate to, more or less be able to say yes or no to various jobs. When I&#8217;ve seen there&#8217;s an organization that I might not want to work with, I just not have done that. It&#8217;s a massively privileged position but given that kind of selection bias, I&#8217;ve been very lucky to work with lots of people who are very grown up and very, very adult in their approach to doing the job of being a software developer and people who take a much more holistic view of it, just the very existence of this podcast is evidence of the fact that we now take much more seriously the idea of people being at the center of the work that we do as technologists.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This is not a technological answer to your question but I think that this is more significant than anything technological. We could talk for hours about trends in programming languages and things like that but ultimately, I think the important thing that&#8217;s changed is the way that we think about our roles as technologists and what kind of responsibility do you have. If you&#8217;re building algorithms to do things to people&#8217;s lives, then how do you do that in an ethical and responsible way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Not everyone has got answer to that question but I think at several orders of magnitude, more people are at least thinking about that question than they used to. The biggest difference that I have seen &#8212; for a variety of reasons and some of them are just like raw economic factors &#8212; is now not really economically viable to be a fully evil employer or to be a fully evil employee. Those things, it feels like when you watch films in the 80s, they are about corporate greed and money and always be closing and stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There was a narrative in the 80s of greed is good and the more unpleasant you can be, the faster you&#8217;re going to be able to climb the corporate ladder and be successful. I know that recent events don&#8217;t necessarily put a light to that notion but within the tech industry, I think we&#8217;ve got a lot better at it so we&#8217;ll say no. As an employer, you can&#8217;t just tell your developers that they have to work late every night and come in at the weekends because that&#8217;s unreasonable.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As a developer, you can&#8217;t expect everyone else in the business to automatically understand all of your technobabble and you can&#8217;t tell them to never interrupt you because you&#8217;re working with the pure thoughts stuff in your head and if anyone comes and pricks that bubble, then it&#8217;s all just going to evaporate. We&#8217;ve got a lot better at that. I think that is fundamentally, incredibly important in turning software development from a kind of actually quite nascent, poorly defined job, like a new industry that we didn&#8217;t really know how to make sustainable and how to make something that we can actually attract people into. I think we&#8217;re getting better at that and that&#8217;s really important to me and I think it&#8217;s really significant.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I can see the changes happening already in the industry, in terms of the basic diversity of people who are interested in it. We are now much better at including a much wider range of people and it&#8217;s much less likely, although still more likely than it should be, the people are just going to be turned off immediately from the whole notion of working as a developer because it so fundamentally unpleasant. I don&#8217;t think it is as unpleasant as it used to be. That being said, it could be a lot more pleasant and I&#8217;m super interested in ways that we can make that happen too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, a lot of work we could do in that area but the fact that we&#8217;re talking about it at all is, I take that as a sign of progress.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think the industry has changed so much and just looking at unpleasant versus pleasant, it&#8217;s again another one-dimensional spectrum to something that isn&#8217;t fundamentally one-dimensional. One of the huge things that&#8217;s fundamentally changed, since the dawn of the internet is we have this plethora of options and choices for everything and we&#8217;ve built abstraction on top of those abstraction on top of those abstraction.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Now, the software we built, as opposed to building something from scratch and having to figure out how to debug through our own code that we&#8217;re developing, now we&#8217;re in these days where 90% of our software is off the shelf parts. We get some funky error message on our screen through some magic code base that we&#8217;re using and we spend hours and hours of time debugging and trying to Google our way through stuff and then churn through our libraries and dependency chain stuff. You end up with stuff that breaks from upstream dependencies that causes all these problems downstream with integration.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then suddenly, you&#8217;ve got this new family of problems of, &#8220;When I Google for something, all the examples and stuff online are all out of date so nothing actually works,&#8221; and Google-ability basically becomes a big part of usability of the software itself. Those dependencies that fundamentally changed in the skills that we need also changed with it and being able to learn things quickly in this rapidly changing world and being able to find what the library that you need or the example it&#8217;s going to work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It seems to be more shifting toward ability to identify the information you need quickly and being able to track that down in addition to there&#8217;s this tacit knowledge side of development and then there&#8217;s this whole new family of learning skills that we need. I don&#8217;t even think those things are really being taught in boot camps at all.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, maybe to some extent, they are but that to me harkens back to something that Tom was saying about memorizing the entire active record API, which I have not. I have been working in Rails for 10 years and I still don&#8217;t know all of the API of active record. But there was a time like I had the GW-BASIC manual with the computer that I had in my house when I was 14 and I could have sat down and memorized it end-to-end and know everything there was to know about that programming language. That is in no way possible for anything that we use now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One thing I was going to mention is that it&#8217;s a legitimate problem for languages to use a lot of symbols and operators and other symbols that those things can&#8217;t be Googled.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I was thinking about that. There&#8217;s the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that our language shapes the way that we think but there&#8217;s something else about how the tools that we use like Google and its complete disregard for punctuation changes the way we interact with our programming languages.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know that hypothesis is more or less been discredited but I think it&#8217;s probably hard to argue that our language shapes the way we communicate with other people, which is almost as important because it&#8217;s not just about having an idea. It&#8217;s about sharing ideas.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, which is why you have to type &#8216;go lang&#8217; anytime you want to search for anything from Google&#8217;s programming language.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m wondering if the language itself just creates bias in this discussion. You all are in Ruby world, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Uhm-mm.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So that&#8217;s something that is fundamentally different. My background is Java so the challenge of having this proliferation of options for ways to do everything has its own bag of problems with it. I&#8217;m just wondering if just being in more of a bounded box with Ruby on Rails world, you have a lot more scope on options.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m not sure I follow.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>With Ruby on Rails, you have a community around Ruby on Rails and sort of an isolated box of places to go to find answers for things with respect to Ruby and at least the Ruby world is smaller than the Java ecosystem, I would say. Is that an accurate &#8211;?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s probably fair. It seems big to me but that&#8217;s my own myopia probably.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think if you went to JavaOne Conference or something like it with 10,000 people. It&#8217;s kind of scary.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I mean it&#8217;s just a huge mess of problems related to dependency management in a lot of different spaces. Just a whole new class of problems that we have to figure out how to solve with respect to collaboration because all the complexity these days is falling into the wires and the dependencies and when things blow up from something like five levels deep abstraction-wise, having to figure out how all that stuff works when a lot of the code isn&#8217;t yours. I realized to some extent, we all have the same problems but at the same time, there&#8217;s this effect of the bigger the ecosystem is, the more choices and options there are. The faster the infrastructure itself is churning, the more painful all of these dependency management-type related issues are of trying to figure out how all this is supposed to work together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, and they suppose there&#8217;s a co-editorial effect of like, &#8220;I&#8217;ve selected these different packages to do what I want to do and nobody else has chosen that particular thing so I&#8217;m on my own integrating them.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and it&#8217;s much easier to get into that position, especially in JavaScript land, where everything is churning so insanely fast that it&#8217;s like, &#8220;Oh, that&#8217;s so last year.&#8221; Then the community just disappears on you, and then what do you do?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think you&#8217;re right and it ties back into an interesting point you made earlier about how the actual nature of the work is changing. I think that&#8217;s a really, really good point and I hadn&#8217;t really thought about it until you said it but it&#8217;s a smart way of thinking about what does the actual day-to-day work of writing software look like and what does it consist of? I think that necessarily has changed over the last, say 20 years.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As someone who works in a high-level language, if you are writing JavaScript or Ruby or Python or C# or whatever, I think that you do have a different experience of what are the challenges of writing software than someone 20 or 30 years ago, trying to write probably lower-level software or at least a less sophisticated computer or less sophisticated operating system. I think you&#8217;re right that a lot of the work the developers do nowadays could be classified as being&#8230; I don&#8217;t know what the right word is&#8230; I kind of want to say janitorial. That sounds bad but like you said, connecting the pipes together and making sure they&#8217;re correctly connected.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s actually not the same as writing lines of machine code and there&#8217;s no value judgement there about one or the other being more useful or more difficult even. They&#8217;re both difficult and they&#8217;re both useful in different ways but I think it&#8217;s true that at the moment, a lot of the work that people do probably is more to do with dealing with the complexity of systems. Having to employ these kind of system thinking skills to reason about something that&#8217;s complicated and trying to figure out, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know why it&#8217;s not doing the thing you want it to do,&#8221; or how to make it do a new thing that you want it to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Those are the problems that are present in the minds of most developers these days, I would say. Whereas I&#8217;m sure that there is some point in the past where people were more thinking of, &#8220;How do I get this frustratingly simple system to do anything?&#8221; That seems like less and less the kind of problems that we&#8217;re having to deal with now and it is more of this information overload, so many choices, how do I even pick a library to do this thing? I can see that there are 50 different ones and how am I meant to pick one? Do I just pick the one that&#8217;s got the most GitHub stars or do I pick the one a friend of mine said is really cool? Those are really, really difficult problems and there are a lot more kind of human scale because they&#8217;re just as much about society and our culture as an industry and the politics of open source software.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There are so many difficult things to think about and actually, I would hazard a guess that fewer of those problems are fundamentally technological. They&#8217;re all related to technology but I think the hard problems and the difficult end of the decisions that a developer who&#8217;s just getting into the industry will needs to figure out now are probably more to do with those kind of everything that you said, &#8220;What&#8217;s the community like for the language that you&#8217;re using? What’s the ecosystem like? What are the third party libraries like? What’s it like to use the tooling? How do you keep up with the fact that the tooling might change daily or weekly or monthly? What’s the new hotness and how do I make sure that my skills remain relevant?&#8221; Those are really challenging and difficult and it&#8217;s a full time job just dealing with all of that stuff and figuring out which of these Google results do I trust, which of these stack overflow are just seems correct. That is difficult work and it takes a lot of skill and judgment to be able to do that stuff effectively but that&#8217;s, more or less what the job is now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s interesting specifically with package managers. I think a lot about package managers because they&#8217;re biggest force multiplier for any language that wants to build a bigger, denser, more connected ecosystem or enable people to solve harder problems by building on previous work. The package managers is what enables that. It&#8217;s the most important part of any ecosystem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The hard problem technically in package managers is the dependency graft, the transitive closure operation of get me all of the dependencies of the dependency of the dependency, etcetera, in a way that list them out so I can install them. That&#8217;s a hard problem but it&#8217;s also solved. The hard people problems are discovery, getting signals for the quality of the packages that we can use to determine which one is fit for our purpose or things like that and those are less solved.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Are there ways that we can teach people how to, at least get better at solving them?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t know. Although I will say, step one is get a package manager, looking at you, [inaudible]. I love you. Get a package manager.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it is difficult to teach these skills to people. I don&#8217;t know a better way of doing it than spending time with them. I would love to find a way to scale up this thing and figure out how do we teach the world how to be better at these things but because part of what we&#8217;re talking about here is to do with confidence and judgment and with more methodical/bloody minded approach to work. If I need to teach those skills to someone, I really need to spend some serious time with them. I need to sit down with them. Ideally in the same physical space so they can see my face and they can hear the tone of my voice and I can see how they&#8217;re feeling about what it is that they&#8217;re trying to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It sounds very touchy-feely but it&#8217;s fundamentally an emotional journey to develop these skills because it is all about how do I go from a position where I don&#8217;t know what good looks like. I don&#8217;t know what&#8217;s expected of me as a developer. I think there is just all this arcane magic out there in the world and I&#8217;m just going to need to memorize every single page of the spell book before I&#8217;m able to participate in this society. This isn&#8217;t an answer, this is just a question like how do you get those people to level up and feel more confident and feel less like the constant failure that they&#8217;re experiencing as part of they&#8217;re trying to do. A job as a developer is any reflection on them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The fact that they&#8217;re failing, the fact that it&#8217;s difficult is intrinsic in what they&#8217;re trying to do. The systems are complex, the problems are hard and the only mechanism we have for approaching hard problems in complex systems is to persistently poke at them and try to pick them apart and try to allow them to go through periods of organic growth and then periods of pruning back where we figure out like this software has developed over the course of the last six months and we bolted on a bunch of features. Now, it&#8217;s time to step back from it and try and figure out is there a better underlying domain model here? How do we use all of the mistakes we&#8217;ve made over the last six months to help us to refine our understanding of the problem we were trying to solve?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If I could send some information back in time, what would I tell myself six months ago that would mean I didn&#8217;t make a bunch of these mistakes and how do I re-organize and re-design the software so that my construction, those kind of mistakes can&#8217;t be made. All of those skills, I don&#8217;t know how to teach them other than just being patient with people and telling them upfront that I want them to get better at them. I think there&#8217;s a problem with people who are new to software development don&#8217;t really know what is expected of them. They know they want to get better but there are not very many high-fidelity, high trust sources of information that are telling them what that means and how to do it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Whenever I find myself in that mentorship position, I&#8217;m always trying to begin by just being as upfront as possible with people and saying, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to lay some stuff out for you. None of this is intended as an implied criticism of you.&#8221; This is what I tell everyone. Everyone that I sit down with and try and help them to get better as a developer, I say to them, &#8220;However bloody minded and methodical you are right now, you need to be more so. However, patient you are right now, you need to get more patient. These are the skills you need to build up. You need to slightly set aside the notion that this job is all about just memorizing APIs or becoming super good at one particular programming language.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> All of those craft level skills of just knowing your tools better are valuable and that&#8217;s something that does differentiate more experienced programmers from less experienced ones. Obviously, if you know all of the Git commands and you know exactly how to reorder commit so you know how to pull that one commit out or you know how to split that one commit into two or you know how to do an interactive rebase so it will automatically runs your tests for every commit or whatever, that is going to save you a bit of time. You will get 10% or 15% faster at your job if you&#8217;re able to internalize all of that muscle memory of how do I use Git, how do I use Vim, how do I write a test, what is the API of this thing look like?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Those are valuable skills but they are not as valuable as those of meta-cognitive skills of how do I approach a problem. How do I not just get defeated by the experience of trying to write software? For me, the best way to communicate that to someone is just to sit with them and talk to them and work through a problem together and always be reflecting back to them and saying, &#8220;I feel a little bit frustrated now. I was hoping that that line of code we wrote was going to make the test pass but it didn&#8217;t make the test pass. Why do you think that is?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then, they&#8217;ll be looking at the error message and then they&#8217;ll be confused and they&#8217;ll say, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know,&#8221; and they&#8217;ll look to me and expect me to have the answer. I&#8217;d say, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know either. Let&#8217;s look closer at the error message.&#8221; Or, &#8220;Let&#8217;s go and reread the test.&#8221; Or, &#8220;Let&#8217;s go and look at that line of code that we write.&#8221; Try to keep pushing people towards that realization that all you got to do is just grinding away at it. I don&#8217;t want to make it sound bad because this is the stuff that I love. I could do this all day every day. I absolutely love this process of grinding and leveling up and playing this never-ending, open worlds, RPG of trying to get better as a developer. I find it fantastically rewarding. I love spending hours and hours trying to get that one ridiculous test to finally pass. It&#8217;s very satisfying but actually communicating why it&#8217;s satisfying and communicating but that is the thing that you should be trying to do is in itself like a big job to someone who is new in the industry.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As far as they&#8217;re concerned, they have a completely legitimate motivation which is they want to be good, they&#8217;ve got an app they want to make or they&#8217;ve got a job that they want to have or they&#8217;ve got a salary that they are aspiring to earning and they just want to know how do I get there? How do I build that app? How do I progress as fast as possible? How do I absorb the skills of more experienced people? It&#8217;s a real challenge to steer those people in the right direction because it&#8217;s the opposite of what they want to hear. They want to be told like a listicle, &#8220;Here are the seven tips to being an awesome developer and like number five will shock you.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I don&#8217;t think there is that list of things other than each of the things in my own personal list. That&#8217;s kind of boring and don&#8217;t sound fun because they&#8217;re all about &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Refactoring.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, like patiently refactoring and methodically progressing through the problem and always stopping to reflect on your own understanding of what you&#8217;re doing and what is the story that you were trying to deliver here? What was the thing that you originally started researching? Have you gone down the rabbit hole? That stuff is actually quite hard to teach and the only mechanism for communicating now, I think is to have this honest dialogue about it and say, &#8220;I find this difficult,&#8221; or, &#8220;I find this stressful,&#8221; or, &#8220;I feel defeated in this situation but let&#8217;s go get a cup of coffee. Let&#8217;s take five minutes away from the computer. Let&#8217;s talk about what we watched on Netflix last night and then let&#8217;s come back to it and take another run and I promise you, we&#8217;ll have cracked this by the end of the day.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> What seems to get people closer to being able to do it independently is to see someone else who they think knows the secret. It&#8217;s kind of tell them that there isn&#8217;t a secret and they can do exactly the same thing as you if they&#8217;re prepared to just grit their teeth and power through it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can I suggest that there&#8217;s one other thing that I think is related that as someone who has had great mentors in my career, I think for me, aside from that the most useful thing which is having someone tell you what&#8217;s next. As someone who&#8217;s trying to learn programming, there is this giant undifferentiated mass of stuff I might want to learn. There are hundreds of programming languages. There are thousands of books, millions of blog posts, hundreds of different things. There&#8217;s so much to learn. In any given point in your career, a lot of those things aren&#8217;t going to be useful for you or they&#8217;re not the right thing for you to focus on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; In your point, I can learn 0% of the things that are out there so which 0% should I pay attention?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and just having someone tell you, &#8220;Given where you are in your career, here are some things that will help you progress from here. Here are the things that should be next for you,&#8221; and they don&#8217;t have to be right but they&#8217;re better. I mentioned this last week, they&#8217;re better than just guessing what you could learn next. It&#8217;s better than selecting that thing by chance.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe there&#8217;s something that could be done. I think, to your point Rein that there&#8217;s this custom problem of that everybody is on their own path and has a different set of experiences and mentors and things that they&#8217;ve learned in gaps that they still have: bad habits or whatever. Maybe, if we could come up with a way to understand where people&#8217;s gaps are in the moment and recommend what&#8217;s next thing. Again, maybe breaking down that problem of how do you get better, what does better even mean and how do we assess where somebody is at, well enough just so that we can answer that what&#8217;s next question.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I was going to say think about the level of connection and almost, I guess I can say intimacy that you need with a mentor to really understand where you are, what your goals are, how your learning process works to really be able to give you the best advice on, on how to proceed. A good mentor is a very important and well-connected. It&#8217;s a close part of your relationship to learning. We talked about senior developers and how they should be mentors and I don&#8217;t think people understand necessarily what that means.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and I think there&#8217;s a risk that the people think that it is just about teaching the more obvious skills is just about I&#8217;m going to pair with you and I&#8217;m going to tell you and there&#8217;s a method to enumerable module that will do this for. You don&#8217;t need to write a loop there like I&#8217;ve memorized the thing &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Then I&#8217;m going to teach you. This one weird Vim tracking.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. Again, that stuff is cool and it&#8217;s fun and it&#8217;s useful but it&#8217;s not the essential bit of what we&#8217;re talking about. I mean the conversation that you just had that reminds me of my personal hobby horses which is this idea of trying to help people to focus more on what I consider to be the fundamentals. I&#8217;m not going to disappear down the rabbit hole and talk about computer science because that&#8217;s not what I mean by fundamental. I just mean something like I&#8217;ve seen a lot of people struggle with learning React and I think that&#8217;s unfortunate because React is fundamentally a simple idea.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The actual implementation of it is increasingly complicated but I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s anything in that a beginner developer can&#8217;t quite easily grasp. It&#8217;s just goes back to this problem of ecosystems and incidental complexity of if you sit down and try to learn React, you will find yourself also trying to simultaneously learn several other things at the same time. You&#8217;ll be trying to figure out what is ES6 and what is JSX and potentially things like what&#8217;s a Promise is or what is the DOM.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There are so many things that people try to learn simultaneously and I think this is related to the issue of what do people learn next is kind of where do you start. How do you find a beginning thread for someone to start walking along and figuring out what&#8217;s the first thing that I can learn? What’s the first thing that I can understand? Then once they&#8217;ve understood &#8212; this is opinionated &#8212; what is the most important fundamental idea that you need to grasp to be able to make progress with this technology because that something that a beginner is fundamentally unable to determine from themselves. From outside, they&#8217;ve got zero basis for judging like which of these 10 things that all seem to be piled together into these tutorial are actually important and which ones are things that I could ignore.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As part of mentoring someone, I feel like one of the things I&#8217;m constantly doing is giving them feedback on what aspects of what they&#8217;re trying to learn are actually fundamental and which ones are incidental. That might be something as simple as someone&#8217;s asking about like how do I write this test and might be what they&#8217;re looking for is some kind of biblical revelation about a magical matcher in RSpec that will do all of this for you and sometimes they get frustrated with me because I categorically refused to tell them about those things. I am much more likely to say, &#8220;Let&#8217;s not even install RSpec. Let&#8217;s just write a file of Ruby code where every time we want to test something, we&#8217;ll just say &#8216;raise unless foo.bar=42.'&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> And they&#8217;re like, &#8220;But what about the testing framework?&#8221; And I&#8217;m like, &#8220;We&#8217;ll get to that later. That is a thing that will level you up. Once you&#8217;ve got to level 10, learning RSpec will take you to level 11 but we need to get you from zero to 10 first,&#8221; and I know that&#8217;s sometimes can be frustrating for people because usually people do just want to learn the cool things. For me, to be sitting down with someone and saying, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to teach you about React but actually, we&#8217;re not going to get to use Babel and ES6 and JSX. I&#8217;m just going to show you this Bare Bones of how do we use React just with ES5 and we&#8217;re not going to use JSX and it&#8217;s going to be so Bare Bones. We&#8217;re just going to concentrate on these two methods that are part of the React and React DOM APIs.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Sometimes, they&#8217;re a bit like, &#8220;This seems boring and not the thing that I wanted to learn.&#8221; I feel like I have to help people to, at least I have to try to persuade them that are like, &#8220;Just trust me. This might not feel like the cool thing that you wanted to learn but I have some degree of faith that if we can get through this fundamental stuff, what that&#8217;s going to give you is enough of a mental model to be able to start making your own decisions about what&#8217;s next.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If all you&#8217;re doing is just constantly relying on other people to tell you what&#8217;s interesting on what&#8217;s worth learning, you&#8217;re never going to be independent. You&#8217;re always just going to be at the mercy of how convincing a blog post or how entertaining a conference talk you just saw or read. Whereas what I want people to do is to feel like they have technological self-determination where they&#8217;re like, &#8220;I&#8217;ve got the basics of this down. Now, I think what I would really like is to not have the right react.create element all over the place,&#8221; and at that moment, if they learn that JSX is a thing, they can be like, &#8220;Perfect. That&#8217;s the solution. That frustration I was feeling, now it&#8217;s time for me to go and learn that thing and that&#8217;s going to be a bit of incidental complexity but now I understand why I should learn it and what the utility of it is,&#8221; and like trying to bootstrap that process in people&#8217;s minds.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Another hobbyhorse I&#8217;ve got is like people feeling overwhelmed with object-oriented programming and how many potentially conflicting pieces of advice there are out there about objects and how to do object-oriented design all over that thing. Whenever I&#8217;m trying to help people with OO stuff, I&#8217;m always trying to focus in on one idea or two ideas and just say, &#8220;Let&#8217;s start with a very simple premise here and then we can gradually work our way out through all of this advice that&#8217;s in books and blog posts. You can gradually learn to find your own path through that advice because you get it fundamentally from the beginning,&#8221; and I think that&#8217;s a thing that&#8217;s very difficult for anyone to do without someone else to, at least who they trust to like find them a way in so they can begin that journey for themselves and have enough support from someone else to be able to keep nudging them in the right direction, even if you&#8217;re not spoon-feeding them the answers at every stage.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think you&#8217;ve just touched on another one of the fundamental skills that in my mind differentiates earlier career from people who are more experienced. This is just the ability to form a mental model to be able to look at an undifferentiated mass of stuff and figure out what categories of things are in there, what buckets of functionality are in there and how can I start separating those things out. Just looking back at my own career, certainly for the past six or seven years, most of what I&#8217;ve learned has been essentially how to be more disciplined about no &#8216;this goes here and that goes there and never the twain shall meet.&#8217; Maybe there&#8217;s a way that we can help people figure out that ability to form a mental model. It&#8217;s a thing you need to figure out soon and maybe help them practice it a bit.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess for me, mentoring falls into two buckets. One is there are, I think general global problem solving tools and techniques that can be taught and the other has to be finding out where they are and what they want to learn, where they want to go, how they learn best and coming up with a artisanal hand-crafted plan to get them there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There is one announcement that we do need to make on the show, which is that we have a new idea for a thing that we would like to do with you, our listeners and our community, which is we love the movement and the ideas that are coming out of this show and we love the messages that we&#8217;re sending but there are only 52 weeks in a year and we can&#8217;t podcast every day, although obviously we wish we could, we do have jobs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We want to open up opportunities for anybody to be able to submit blog posts about what it means to be greater than code. If you have experiences or stories or anything that sends a positive message to the community or help somebody learned something useful, we know that some of you have your own blogs. In fact, I do not. I shut mine down years ago but many people don&#8217;t. Maybe you think you don&#8217;t have enough content to justify your own blog. That certainly what keeps me from starting mine up again. We want to give everybody a medium where you can share one-off ideas and maybe generate some discussion around them. If you have something you&#8217;d like to write a blog post about, please get in touch with us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I also want to mention that you get access to an excellent editor which if anyone has tried to write a book, can tell you having a good editor is very important and really makes the process much more feasible.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. We have more stuff that we would like to talk about but unfortunately, Janelle has a hard stop today. We&#8217;re going to take a moment and Janelle, if you have any reflections that you&#8217;d like to share about today&#8217;s show or any closing thoughts before you drop out, now is your chance.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Probably the biggest thing that stuck with me that Tom said was just about looking at things as multi-dimensional problems as opposed to one dimension. I think that applies to so many different situations where we boiled down the world into this one-dimensional spectrum, whether it&#8217;s junior or senior versus how much of something there is. It doesn&#8217;t seemed to matter what problems. We have a tendency to look at the world in these simplified dimensions and almost everything we deal within software is a multi-dimensional problem and multi-dimensional tradeoffs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> While walking away, I think probably the one thing I&#8217;m going to ask myself is when I&#8217;m just recognizing that if I&#8217;m ever boiling something down into a single dimension to just take a step back and think about, &#8220;Are there actually multiple dimensions to this that I&#8217;m ignoring and blind to because I&#8217;m boiling down the world that way?&#8221; I think that&#8217;s the biggest thing I&#8217;m going to start thinking about differently now. Thank you, Tom.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>All right. Tom, you had a bunch of ideas that you shared with us. One of them had to do with your experiences coming out of helping Sandi Metz as teacher, practical OO design in Ruby classes. Do you want to talk about that a little bit?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. Last year, I co-author that class with Sandi. She does a lot of teaching. Some of the teaching, she needs other people in the room to help out because of the number of people there. I don&#8217;t want to misrepresent that. It&#8217;s still basically Sandi teaching people but me being in the room and being able to help out with people and answer questions and stuff was really fun. It&#8217;s great to just spend time hanging out with Sandi and all of the other great co-instructors that worked with her.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But it&#8217;s also useful to keep re-exposing myself to either beginners or people who are trying to get better at various ideas. It&#8217;s a great way to have a different conversation with people than you would normally have as part of your day to day work because it&#8217;s quite often the case that when you&#8217;re working with some other developers trying to solve a problem and you are also talking about it in kind of developer-speak and you already know that the main language and you know the problem space and you&#8217;re going deep on all of these ideas, you don&#8217;t necessarily get a chance to question your fundamental assumptions. Going back to this point I made about thinking about the fundamentals of what you&#8217;re doing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the things that I go out of teaching those classes with Sandi was just giving myself the chance to think a bit more clearly and a bit more separately about object-oriented design because something that is so implicit in a lot of the work that programmers do is trying to plug objects together and trying to build systems that are easy to change and have a low-cost of change and have a low chance of containing bugs and stuff like that. But it&#8217;s nice to have the opportunity to talk to people who don&#8217;t already know how all of that stuff fits together and they have lots of questions about what the point of this stuff is and there&#8217;s so much advice out there about how to do object-oriented design and how am I supposed to learn all of it and synthesize all of it. I found it very helpful to have those conversations.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It&#8217;s, I guess a bit of a cliché this thing about you don&#8217;t really understand something until you told it to somebody else but it&#8217;s true every time. Every time I do teaching or I run a training course or I&#8217;m mentoring someone, I feel like it&#8217;s such a massive learning experience. There&#8217;s something about a particular groups of people who are interested in getting Sandi to come teach them about OO and just a really interesting audience to teach and not an audience that I would be able to attract on my own. One of the great things about that is spending time with a room of really motivated people, really smart people, people who really care about their work and they&#8217;re doing the best thing they can think of to level up and to learn more about stuff. They&#8217;re the most self-motivated and interested learners you could possibly hope for and being able to have conversations with those people about what are objects, why do we have them, what&#8217;s the point of them. It was a really eye-opening experience for me, for someone who&#8217;s been doing object-oriented programming among others.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For what I feels like a very long time, I was a Java programmer in the 90s and then I became a Ruby programmer in the 00s. Although I do a bunch of programming in other languages and Ruby in particular, makes it very easy to not think about objects some of the time. It&#8217;s just as easy to write a functional style program and not even define any classes or whatever and doing most of closure style maps and lists and stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I still work with objects a lot of the languages I use. I have got some notion of objects even when I went through academic periods of my life. In the mid-2000s, I was doing a lot of programming in OCaml, which is a functional language but the &#8216;O&#8217; in OCaml stands for &#8216;objective&#8217; but because it&#8217;s got objects in it. It feels like one of the unifying themes of the last couple of decades of my programming career has been thinking about how to work effectively with objects. I&#8217;m trying to figure out how to distill some of the thoughts I had down into a way that might be useful to people. I supposed that the simple thing has become increasingly clear to me over the last decade but it was only really last year to co-teaching with Sandi a couple times that it gave me the time and the space and the opportunity to have conversations that really brought it into sharp focus for me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s only really one important idea in object-oriented programming which is &#8212; I want to try and explain it without using any buzz words &#8212; the idea that you can call a method on something but you don&#8217;t know which implementation of the method is going to be triggered by that call.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> [inaudible] any way that would be saying that the one important feature of OO is you get subtype polymorphism. This idea that you&#8217;ve got an object, you know something about the type of it. I&#8217;m not talking about static types here. I&#8217;m just saying that you know that it is an instance of some subclass of a thing. It matches some interface or whatever, even if you don&#8217;t have static type. If you&#8217;re just thinking about duck typing, I know that this object implements this method or I know that it will respond to this message or whatever but the fact that you&#8217;re able to program &#8212; guess what one of the things that Sandi would say is &#8212; to a role. You’re not assuming anything about the actual concrete implementation of that thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That is what allows you to segregate knowledge in your program and that&#8217;s the most important thing. The fact that you&#8217;re able to control which bits of your program know stuff, rather than just saying, every line of code, every class, every method, every bit of this software project has got maximal knowledge of every other part. That’s when it becomes impossible to change and maintain your software. It’s this very gradual dawning realization for me that although when I learned about OO, I was taught like a bunch of different principles.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For example, cost is a very important and inheritance is very important and the idea of having private members and an object being an encapsulation mechanism for hiding information. I think all of those things, they&#8217;re all things but I don&#8217;t think any of them is necessary or sufficient to have the benefits of OO. This is the thing, if I was sitting down with someone, I haven&#8217;t been in the situation but if I was sat down with someone who was saying, &#8220;I&#8217;ve never used an object-oriented programming language before and I want to start learning one. Can you give me a summary of what the point of this is?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think I would probably begin by talking about this, by saying, &#8220;The point of an object is a piece of data that carries operations around with it but because we identify operations by names,&#8221; because languages have a concept of binding and because either through message passing or some other [inaudible] or mechanism or whatever, we have some way &#8212; I&#8217;ll probably find a more friendly way of explaining this &#8212; of dereferencing names into operations. We are able to refer to operations on objects by their name and that means, we don&#8217;t know what implementation of that operation we&#8217;re actually going to get.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That means that something in a very distant part of your program can make a decision about what thing it&#8217;s going to make. There’s going to be a factory somewhere or there&#8217;s going to be a method that&#8217;s going to say, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to instantiate the foo class rather than the bar class or maybe there aren&#8217;t classes at all.&#8221; Maybe you&#8217;re just manufacturing objects and you&#8217;re creating a completely new implementation of this operation for every single object that you instantiate and then at that point, those objects become data and they flow through your program. Those values travel around your program and they bring that knowledge with them and the bits of your program that they reach, don&#8217;t know anything about. All they know is there&#8217;s an operation called &#8216;foo&#8217; and they can activate the operation. They can execute it and whether there&#8217;s one underlying implementation of the operation or if there are a million underlying implementations is completely unknowable to the part of the program that is saying it wants operations to happen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that&#8217;s the fundamental thing. That is the strength of object-oriented programming. There are a lot of problems with those as well and people are quick to complain about it and I sympathize with those complaints. But I think unless you&#8217;re aware of this idea of values carrying operations with them and you not having to know what that operation is apart from just knowing that there is an operation called foo and it&#8217;s going to be attached to that value, that&#8217;s what lets you segregate the knowledge in your program in a way that makes it more likely that you&#8217;re going to be able to change and maintain it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> To me, that&#8217;s the underlying theme of a lot of the stuff that Sandi teaches, what she wrote in her book and what she says in her talks. Also for me, it provides a bit of a unifying theme for all of the advice that I read about OOPs, things like the solid principles and various other blog posts and conference talks. Now, when I go back and reread those things and rewatch them and try and look at them through the lens of how is this advice a consequence of the importance of this subtype polymorphism by dynamic dispatch in OO. It also makes sense to me in that way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I don&#8217;t think I would have got quite as much clarity on that without having an opportunity to talk to lots of individual people who were curious and smart and they had questions about how does this work, why is it important, why do we want to write programs like this. Fundamentally, why do we want to attach operations to values? Why is that a thing? Why can&#8217;t we just have data and then have operations that inspect the data and make decisions at the point of views, as opposed to this thing where you can make a decision that the value is created and only much later on, does that decision have an effect when you actually call the operation called foo and finessing that conversation with individual people who are curious and interested to understand it better, like massively improved and [inaudible] my own understanding. That’s very valuable.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The way that I&#8217;ve said this for a while, which is quite a bit less nuanced is that object-oriented programming was invented because we wanted to write programs by having things talk to each other and more importantly, tell each other what to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. It seems to me as you were talking, it really helped to clarify this idea in my head that there are several blind alleys in the way that we teach OOP. I think the first one that many people like I think the first level of unlearning the bad things that we learned about OOP that many people encounter is the idea of inheritance being important. I think at some point, people realized that it&#8217;s not necessarily inheritance that matters. Just the idea that you may have several different types of a thing and they all have the same interface.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But then, we talked about encapsulation and data hiding and I feel that even the way those are presented, an object to protect access to its own instant variables, we think that the contents of those variables is specific values or what is important where as I see it now, what really is important is the idea of hiding where we make decisions about those things so that if you are looking at a number and if you&#8217;re deciding that if it&#8217;s 42, it means one thing and if it&#8217;s 17, it means something else. That information about that knowledge about what those things mean should live in that object or they get scattered throughout your system and then everything depends on everything else.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s interesting that this has been said in a variety of different ways, by a variety of different people, including Alan Kay when he originally came up with the idea which is that the thing of importance, the thing that you should be focusing on in an object-oriented system is the messages and not so much of the objects.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s the punch line of all of this, I suppose. Nothing that I just said is new information. We’ve understood this for decades. Again, it&#8217;s kind of going back to the previous discussion about incidental complexity and how hard it is &#8212; no matter how experienced you are and how much time you spend with the thing &#8212; to retain that focus on what is the thing that&#8217;s actually really important? As opposed to all of the other stuff around it or all of the other ideas that stuck on to the fundamental idea or all of the advice you&#8217;ve heard and how can you use threads that you battled through of people saying, &#8220;That thing is awesome,&#8221; and another person is saying that it sucks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s very difficult to keep your head straight and to keep focusing on what is fundamentally the important thing here. What is the guiding principle that I&#8217;m using to make decisions? Am I trying to memorize a thousand different slogans that I&#8217;ve read in a thousand different books and heard in conference talks? Or am I just trying to cultivate this very clear and straightforward mental model of why something is important and use that as my guiding principle to make all of those decisions for myself? Whether that is understanding in full detail or at least in some detail, what&#8217;s the underlying model of something like Git?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This is another example of a thing that if you try to get good at using Git, just by memorizing every single command, it will probably gradually just zap the life out of you because fundamentally, the way you make progress in that problem of I&#8217;ve learned like three commands that allow me to do some basic stuff but I keep finding myself in these situations where I&#8217;m getting a weird error or it says that it&#8217;s not happy or it says my head has become detached or something and I don&#8217;t know what that means. It’s not until you sit down or someone sits down with you and draws you some pictures of, &#8220;Here&#8217;s a miracle tree,&#8221; or, &#8220;Here&#8217;s some notion of we got this content addressable database.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We&#8217;ve got a bunch of things that we put into it and they&#8217;ve just got references to each other and we gradually building up this depend-only data structure and these things that we call branches are just like sticky notes that stuck on like individual commits and that&#8217;s what allows you to then kick starting judgement. You can&#8217;t have an opinion about what the right way to use Git is, until you have that mental model and then you can start using that mental model as a basis for making informed decisions about whether something is a good or a bad idea.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think there&#8217;s an equivalent of that in the world of OO programming or functional programming or any kind of software development work where the fundamental thing is figuring out what&#8217;s the principle that I believe in here. I don&#8217;t mean to imply that what all of that stuff I just said is objectively true. This all is just my opinion. I have found that for everything that I want to be good at, or I want to teach other people about, I need to crystallize and clarify what I think the organizing principle is there and that what allows me to then, when someone shows me a page of code and asked me what I think of it, I&#8217;m not just like shooting from the hip with some completely irrational gut reaction. It’s more that I&#8217;m able to go back and reinspect like what are my principles? What are the things I care about? What do I think is the foundational model here that allows me to make judgments and make decisions? Then I can give them so meaningful and actionable feedback where I say not just like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t like the way you&#8217;ve invented that function definition,&#8221; or, &#8220;I don&#8217;t like the tense that you used in the name of that local variable.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Maybe I do think those things but I can wind it back to some kind of, why do I think that&#8217;s a bad name for the local variable. Well, let&#8217;s try using in a sentence or let&#8217;s imagine that local variable in a different context or let&#8217;s imagine someone coming in looking at this code and not understanding what that thing is used for and they&#8217;re just looking at one line. Being able to provide that context in that case, in that example, the foundational principle is we&#8217;re writing code for other people to read so that&#8217;s why names are important. The computer doesn&#8217;t care but ultimately, this thing that you&#8217;re writing is going to be read by someone in a week or a month who is tired and angry and frustrated and by the way is probably going to be you so let&#8217;s start from a position of maximum empathy for that poor person and try and figure out what decisions can we make now to make their life easier then.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Having those kind of principles to go by and iteratively refining those principles is a thing that I think is really important and a big part of why I get so much enjoyment at teaching and mentoring and coaching people is the purely selfish desire to keep tightening the screws on all of those things that I think are true. The more I can believe in them, the more I&#8217;m able to use them to drive all of these other decisions. When people ask me for advice, I&#8217;m always just going back to the same of like, &#8220;You&#8217;ve asked me a question about OO design. I&#8217;m just going to try and answer it just based on this one thing that I think is important.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This actually goes all the way back for me to when we&#8217;re talking about teaching and mentoring and I mentioned that there are universal skills and then there are the specific things that are useful in this situation. The most important universal skill for me, by far is being able to use system models, be able to build a mental models of the thing you&#8217;re trying to understand, to test it against the thing you&#8217;re trying to understand, to validate it, to use it for understanding and to make predictions and learning. If there&#8217;s one thing that I, as a mentor try to impart on people, it&#8217;s how to use mental models.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And not just about your software but about the processes in your own head or the interpersonal things that happen on a team. You need to be able to use those skills at that level as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, very important to be able to have an accurate model of other people&#8217;s mental state. This is a thing that most children at some point in the first few years of their life, they go from being a completely oblivious entity that doesn&#8217;t really have any theory of mind and most children go through a process of gradually developing that theory of mind and then beginning to understand these other blobs of meat around you actually have their own internal life and their own internal states and I think continuing to level up in that area.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When you&#8217;re working in a company with five or 10 or 50 or 1000 other people, on some level, you are running a little simulation of everyone else&#8217;s what do they know, what do they believe, how are they feeling right now and using that to guide your interactions and your discussions and like, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to review this pull request and I&#8217;m going to try and give this person some feedback but I also know that having a hard time at the moment or I know that they&#8217;ve only just learned this thing,&#8221; if you don&#8217;t have that mental model of what is going on in other people&#8217;s minds, then you don&#8217;t stand a chance of being able to be constructive and consider in your interactions with them because you&#8217;re just going to be treating them as the median human, which no one is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Everyone reacts differently. Everyone has different ebbs and flows of their moods and what they&#8217;re worried about and what their energy level is and what they feel confident about. It’s a lot of work. It difficult to keep that whole spreadsheet and constantly maintained in your head but it&#8217;s just as important a skill as having mental models of OO or of Git or of testing or whatever. That&#8217;s the depressing truth, I think about being really good at software development is you get me to get really good at that meta-cognitive skill of having very high-fidelity mental models of all the things and that is a lot of work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Although looking at it a different way, to some extent being able to maintain mental models of what&#8217;s happening inside of other people&#8217;s head is what we were evolved to do. Some of what I&#8217;ve done in my own career is just collect ways of mapping abstract software problems onto pretending that I&#8217;m thinking about people so I can use those parts of my brain that have evolved to do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a good mind hack.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just had realization. You know how a lot of people say that object-oriented programming is good because it&#8217;s such a close mapping onto how the real world is and then cats are animals and cars are vehicles and that&#8217;s how the world is and that&#8217;s how classes are. That’s good. I think they&#8217;re right but I think they&#8217;re right for the wrong reason. I think the reason that object-oriented programming does in some ways model real life is that object-oriented programming is basically what I said before, which is trying to get other people to do things without knowing anything about how they&#8217;re feeling or what state they&#8217;re in or how they&#8217;ll respond to your request. The only thing you can do is say, &#8220;I want this. Can you do that?&#8221; and then sending that message.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow. That’s a good link.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nailed it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, before we move on, I&#8217;d like to take a moment to remind everybody that this is a 100% listener supported show. The way that you can support us, if you like what we&#8217;re doing and you would like us to do more of it is to go find us at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode and give us the money. Any contribution at any level will get you access to our wonderful Slack community which is full of dozens upon dozens of wonderful people with interesting things to say to one another and who are interested in providing emotional support, which is just really great.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of those people who has joined us recently is Kira McLean. Kira on Twitter describes herself as a Canadian software developer from the East Coast. She loves travelling and politics and she says, &#8220;I&#8217;m doing what I can to spread reason and quickly realizing how screwed we are.&#8221; On that wonderful, cheerful note, thank you Kira for supporting us and welcome to our community.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Reflection segue. I am going to get back on my horse and recommend Gerald Weinberg&#8217;s book on system models, An Introduction to General Systems Thinking. It is the book that really led my awakening, if I&#8217;m going to use a slightly suspicious way of describing it, in terms of understanding the world through my mental models of the things I interact with. It was hugely influential in my own growth as a software developer and as a person so I&#8217;m going to give it a plug.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cool. One of the things that I&#8217;m really going to take away from this conversation is just a renewed appreciation for the importance of the skill of meta-cognition. It seems like you can&#8217;t get better at any of the other things that we&#8217;ve talked about without being able to examine your own internal processes and see and evaluate what you&#8217;ve been doing and how you might be doing those things better. Thank you, Tom for making me think about that for so very long today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TOM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, you&#8217;re very welcome. I guess that feeds into my reflection. I have two reflection, sorry. One of them was that I found very interesting Janelle&#8217;s point about how the work has changed of being a developer and that point about how now is more about learning to cope with the complexity and learning to deal with complex systems and wiring things together and understanding how the big picture fits together. That’s something I&#8217;m going to go and think about some more.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Your point, Sam, it makes me think of &#8212; this is an obvious recommendation &#8212; Nonviolent Communication book by Marshall Rosenberg is great for this automatic cognition issue. It’s a book all about how to communicate effectively with someone but my interpretation of the content of that book would be that it&#8217;s all about how to build and communicate about the underlying reasons why you are saying or thinking or feeling a thing. It&#8217;s all about improving your own mental model of your own self and also improving your mental model of other people with whom you might be disagreeing, by finding a way to communicate about you tell me what&#8217;s in your head and I&#8217;ll try and tell you what&#8217;s in my head and maybe we&#8217;ll figure out why we&#8217;re disagreeing or maybe we don&#8217;t disagree and we&#8217;re just both reacting to something external to the two of us. I found reading that book really helped me to refine that picture I have in my head of my own behavior and the reason why I do things and it helps me to understand why other people do things as well. I think that&#8217;s a nice companion to Rein&#8217;s recommendation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you for bearing with us through the end of an epic Greater Than Code and we love you all and we&#8217;ll talk to you next week.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tom Stuart: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/tomstuart"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@tomstuart</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://codon.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Codon</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Cycles in Philosophy of Software, Common Principles with Different Names &amp; Reference” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:47</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Superhero Origin Story</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">BBC BASIC</span></a></p>
<p><b>04:45</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Nomenclature: “Junior” and “Senior” Developers; Differences Between “Early Career” Developers and “Experienced” Developers</span></p>
<p><b>13:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Solving the Skill Assessment Problem; Learning Methodically</span></p>
<p><b>20:55 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Software Development Now vs Then</span></p>
<p><b>29:51 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Do Programming Languages Create Certain Biases?</span></p>
<p><b>44:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Good Mentorship and Telling People What’s Next to Level Up</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to spill your thoughts and feelings on the new Greater Than Code blog? Send submissions to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>! </b></p>
<p><b>55:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Cohorting/Teaching Classes with </span><a href="https://twitter.com/sandimetz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sandi Metz</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">; </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_design"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Object-Oriented Design</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Object-Oriented Programming</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Thank you </b><a href="https://twitter.com/kiraemclean"><b>Kira McLean</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Janelle: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Looking at things as multidimensional problems.</span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-General-Systems-Thinking-Anniversary/dp/0932633498"><span style="font-weight: 400;">An Introduction to General Systems Thinking by Gerald M. Weinberg </span></a></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The importance of the skill of metacognition.</span></p>
<p><b>Tom:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> How the work as changed as being a developer. </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Nonviolent-Communication-Language-Life-Changing-Relationships/dp/189200528X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1493412666&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=non+violent+communications+marshall+rosenberg"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nonviolent Communication: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships by Marshall B. Rosenberg PhD</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tom Stuart: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/tomstuart"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@tomstuart</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://codon.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Codon</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Cycles in Philosophy of Software, Common Principles with Different Names &amp; Reference” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:47</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Superhero Origin Story</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.bbcbasic.co.uk/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">BBC BASIC</span></a></p>
<p><b>04:45</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Nomenclature: “Junior” and “Senior” Developers; Differences Between “Early Career” Developers and “Experienced” Developers</span></p>
<p><b>13:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Solving the Skill Assessment Problem; Learning Methodically</span></p>
<p><b>20:55 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Software Development Now vs Then</span></p>
<p><b>29:51 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Do Programming Languages Create Certain Biases?</span></p>
<p><b>44:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Good Mentorship and Telling People What’s Next to Level Up</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Want to spill your thoughts and feelings on the new Greater Than Code blog? Send submissions to </b><a href="mailto:mandy@greaterthancode.com"><b>mandy@greaterthancode.com</b></a><b>! </b></p>
<p><b>55:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Cohorting/Teaching Classes with </span><a href="https://twitter.com/sandimetz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sandi Metz</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">; </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_design"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Object-Oriented Design</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_programming"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Object-Oriented Programming</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Thank you </b><a href="https://twitter.com/kiraemclean"><b>Kira McLean</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Janelle: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Looking at things as multidimensional problems.</span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b> <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-General-Systems-Thinking-Anniversary/dp/0932633498"><span style="font-weight: 400;">An Introduction to General Systems Thinking by Gerald M. Weinberg </span></a></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The importance of the skill of metacognition.</span></p>
<p><b>Tom:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> How the work as changed as being a developer. </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Nonviolent-Communication-Language-Life-Changing-Relationships/dp/189200528X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1493412666&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=non+violent+communications+marshall+rosenberg"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nonviolent Communication: Life-Changing Tools for Healthy Relationships by Marshall B. Rosenberg PhD</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/tom.jpg"></itunes:image>
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					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
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					<itunes:duration>01:20:56</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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					<title>Episode 029: p=eMPathy with Ariel Waldman, Ashe Dryden, and Brad Grzesiak</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-029-pempathy-with-ariel-waldman-ashe-dryden-and-brad-grzesiak/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 19 Apr 2017 23:57:26 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=525</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Science technology, the influence of science fiction, machine learning, and congruency with guests Ariel Waldman, Ashe Dryden, and Brad Grzesiak.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Science technology, the influence of science fiction, machine learning, and congruency with guests Ariel Waldman, Ashe Dryden, and Brad Grzesiak.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ariel Waldman: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/arielwaldman"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@arielwaldman</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1452144761/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=1452144761&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=ariewald-20&amp;linkId=P4NWAXDUYI4MU43S"><span style="font-weight: 400;">What&#8217;s It Like in Space?: Stories from Astronauts Who&#8217;ve Been There</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://spacehack.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">spacehack.org</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://sciencehackday.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Science Hack Day</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://arielwaldman.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">arielwaldman.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ashe Dryden: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ashedryden"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@ashedryden</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://alterconf.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">AlterConf</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://joinfundclub.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Fund Club</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span><a href="https://www.ashedryden.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">ashedryden.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Brad Grzesiak: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/listrophy"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@listrophy</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://bendyworks.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Bendyworks</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “The Tale of Space Cat Burritos” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>02:26</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Space Technology and the Cultural Portrayal of Science</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://explorers.gsfc.nasa.gov/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">NASA Explorers Program</span></a></p>
<p><b>08:24</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – The Influence of Science Fiction on the Current Developments in Science</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (NIAC)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.nasa.gov/content/comet-hitchhiker-harvesting-kinetic-energy-from-small-bodies-to-enable-fast-and-low-cost"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Comet Hitchhiker</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Supernatural Horror in Literature By H. P. Lovecraft</span></a></p>
<p><b>14:47 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What is sci-fi telling us about the world we live in now?</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/0765382032"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expanse_(novel_series)"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Expanse Series</span></a></p>
<p><b>18:34 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– “Hard” vs “Soft” Science Fiction; “Hard” Conference Talks vs “Soft” Talks</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czvgHSYKkNU"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke: Metaphors Are Similes. Similes Are Like Metaphors @ Rubyfuza 2017</span></a></p>
<p><b>24:43 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">–  Understanding How People Work to Build Better Technology; Fighting for Accessibility in Science</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Lacks"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Henrietta Lacks</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://rebeccaskloot.com/the-immortal-life/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks</span></a></p>
<p><b>33:11</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Machine Learning</span></p>
<blockquote><p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.” &#8211; Jeff Goldblum as </span></i><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">Dr. Ian Malcolm</span></i><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in Jurassic Park</span></i></p></blockquote>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Thank you </b><a href="https://twitter.com/davetapley"><b>Dave Tapley</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p><b>37:52</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Scarcity and Exploitation: Looking at Power Dynamics and Relationships Between Groups and People</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway%27s_law"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Conway’s Law</span></a></p>
<p><b>41:34 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Reasons We Prefer to Focus on Technology; Siloing and Specialization</span></p>
<p><b>50:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Control: Who is the manager? Treating People Equally</span></p>
<p><b>52:46 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Congruency and Being Congruent: It’s a People Problem!</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Weinberg"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gerald Weinberg</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Secrets-Consulting-Giving-Getting-Successfully/dp/0932633013"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Secrets of Consulting: A Guide to Giving and Getting Advice Successfully by Gerald M. Weinberg</span></a></p>
<blockquote><p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Emotions are valid inputs to every thought process.” &#8211; Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></i></p></blockquote>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.thestranger.com/features/2017/04/19/25082450/the-heart-of-whiteness-ijeoma-oluo-interviews-rachel-dolezal-the-white-woman-who-identifies-as-black"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Heart of Whiteness: Ijeoma Oluo Interviews Rachel Dolezal, the White Woman Who Identifies as Black</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ashedryden/status/854707674403012609"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ashe’s Tweets</span></a></p>
<p><b>01:01:44 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– How do we know we are right?</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blog.intercom.com/the-orange-juice-test/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Orange Juice Test</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.audible.com/pd/Business/The-Art-of-Negotiating-the-Best-Deal-Audiobook/B00JLJI8AK">The Art of Negotiating the Best Deal by Seth Freeman</a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Rein: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">These issues go straight up to the top in terms of the philosophical ladder we’re trying to climb of what do we value? How do we get other people to share our values? It doesn’t get easier by ignoring that the problem is that difficult and pretending that it’s just technical.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">It’s the responsibility of technologists to think about the social impact of the technical solutions they are making, whether that means by being better informed and striving to be generalists, or by making sure we are being inclusive and giving voice to people with different perspectives and levels of expertise on our teams to make sure we are addressing problems deeply and not just from one particular silo.</span></p>
<p><b>Ashe:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Understanding how we are looking at a problem ethically, how we’re looking at it technically, and how we’re looking at it from a human point of view? What are the potential effects?</span></p>
<p><b>Brad: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The laws of nature still exist in the absence of humans. Humans are the reason things are messy and complicated.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to Episode 29 in our ongoing series, &#8216;The Tale of Space Cat Burritos&#8217;. I&#8217;m Coraline Ada Ehmke and I am joined today by Astrid Countee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Coraline but I&#8217;m pretty sure that our show is called Greater Than Code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;re such a joy-kill.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] I&#8217;m sorry. I&#8217;m also here today &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Was that killjoy? I was messing stuff. Sorry.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Joy-kill sounds way cooler. I&#8217;m also here with Rein Henricks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi and I&#8217;m pretty sure that they are called &#8216;purr-itos&#8217;. I am here with our three guests today. I&#8217;m very excited about this. I have Ariel Waldman, Ashe Dryden and Brad Grzesiak.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">Ariel sits on the council for NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts, a program that nurtures radical science-fiction inspired ideas that could transform future space missions. She is the co-author of a congressionally requested, National Academy of Sciences Report on the Future of Human Spaceflight and the author of the book, &#8216;What’s It Like in Space?: Stories from Astronauts Who’ve Been There.&#8217; Ariel is the founder of SpaceHack.org, a directory of ways for anyone to participate in space exploration and the Global Director of Science Hack Day, a grassroots endeavor to prototype things for science that is now in over 25 countries. In 2013, Ariel received an honor from the White House for being a champion of change in citizen science.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Ashe Dryden is a programmer of over 15 years, turned diversity advocate and consultant, White House fellow, a prolific writer and speaker. She is the founder of AlterConf and co-founder of Fund Club. Ashe is currently writing two books: The Diverse Team and The Inclusive Event. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Scientific American, Wired, NPR and more.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Brad is CEO and co-founder of Bendyworks, an application development consultancy in Madison, Wisconsin. He started his career as a mechanical aerospace engineer and has at least one payload in space. He now seeks out better ways to write robust, yet flexible software from Bendyworks&#8217; clients, from Fortune 100 Enterprises to brand new startups.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Welcome, Ariel, Ashe and Brad.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIEL, ASHE, BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is such a cool lineup of people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know. It&#8217;s pretty crowded in here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Some of my favorite people are here today. This is really great. We&#8217;d like to start off by getting to know as everyone here has an amazing resume and an amazing list of accomplishments and really interesting backgrounds. We&#8217;d like to get to know who you are behind the scenes, who are behind your public profile and what makes you tick. Brad, I know you got your start in space technology, in rockets and I know you from outside of the podcast. I see the enthusiasm you get whenever there&#8217;s a Space X launch. What got you interested in space?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am actually in Florida right now and the thing that got me excited about space was when I was in Florida at age&#8230; I don&#8217;t know, five or six? We had a family vacation to Disney World and on the last day, we&#8217;re sitting in the hotel, watching TV and there&#8217;s a shuttle launch going on right at that moment and I had the bright idea to go to the window, looked out at it and sure enough, in the distance I could see tiny plume rising into the sky. That was the moment, I think that I got really excited about the idea of space. Unlike a lot of the other kids, you said, I want to be an astronaut. My initial thought was I want to be a rocket scientist so I kind of followed that throughout my schooling and ended up working in aerospace firm since college.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So cool. Ariel, you&#8217;ve done quite a bit of scientific work yourself. What got you started on that path?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Actually, I don&#8217;t have a background in science or whatsoever. I went to art school and I got my degree in graphic design but a few years ago, I was watching a documentary about NASA during the early days and how they were trying to figure out how to send people into space. I got so incredibly inspired by that documentary that I decided that I wanted to send someone at NASA an email saying, &#8220;I was a huge fan of what they were doing and if they ever needed a volunteer or someone like me, I was around.&#8221; I, serendipitously and very unexpectedly, ended up getting a job at NASA from that e-mail. It completely changed my life and really set me on a trajectory to try and give other people the same experience of making space exploration more accessible, whether it&#8217;s getting a job at NASA or contributing to discovering galaxies and the like.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Ashe, you&#8217;re best known for your diversity work. What&#8217;s your connection to space?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Space is really cool. Growing up, I actually wanted to be a marine biologist and since I was in about fourth grade, I was super interested in all different aspects of science, especially ones that we didn&#8217;t know everything about. The idea that there was more stuff out there to learn and to discover and something that we hadn&#8217;t quite place on a map yet, was really fascinating to me. It kind of falls into the category of completely fascinating and in love with the idea of exploring and learning and discovering new things for me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome. We&#8217;re going to talk about more than space but there&#8217;s this common thread that I think is worth exploring right now. I actually had a run in with NASA when I was in my formative years. When I was in high school, my computer literacy teacher told me about a program called the Explorers Program, which was a scouts program. I have the opportunity to go learn Fortran at NASA Langley. Twice a week, my dad had to drive me out to Langley Air Force Base to go to NASA and sit down in front of a dumb terminal and write Fortran programs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I remember being really disillusioned because the computers that I was working on had no screens. All the output was to line [inaudible]. On the other side of this wall, there are tape drives and we could just see all these wheels turning. They look like open audio recorders or something like that. I remember being really disillusioned because I was like, &#8220;This is just so low tech,&#8221; and I expected so much more from NASA. It was very strange but it is a great experience and I really learned a lot from it. That was kind of cool but I&#8217;m wondering if anyone else had that kind of impression where you think that from the cultural portrayal of science and the role of science that when you actually get into the heart of it, it&#8217;s a lot more low tech than you expected?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I certainly have that experience because I remember when I ended up getting a job at NASA, originally I was expecting that all of NASA looked like those mission control rooms where most rooms you would walk into would have a huge picture of the Earth and people would be typing away as they are seeing this big Earth projection and there were men and that would look really cool. Pretty much, none of NASA looks that way whatsoever. There&#8217;s maybe one or two rooms across the whole 10 centers that look like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Walking into NASA Ames for me, a lot of dilapidated buildings, a lot of buildings scheduled for demolition, a lot of buildings that say, &#8220;Just so you know, there&#8217;s asbestos in this building.&#8221; It was the antithesis of glamour. I remember being legitimately surprised that it looked that way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I remember visiting Johnson Space Center in college and feeling the exact same way. There was the mission control room but everything else, correct me if I&#8217;m wrong, I think all those buildings were basically built in the 60s during the Moonshot Programs, the Apollo. They haven&#8217;t really changed a whole lot of them because the budget has been dwindling ever since so they have the buildings that they have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But the current administration loves space so we&#8217;ll see a huge investment in NASA, I&#8217;m sure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I heard he wants to have us go to Mars. I&#8217;m sure that will change in a week.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As only because it&#8217;s a red planet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Coraline, one. Everyone else, zero.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Ariel, with your background during the bio reading, it was kind of interesting to me and that&#8217;s you mention the influence of science fiction, the idea of some science fiction on the current development of science. Most of the science fiction I read is not hard science. I&#8217;m a huge fan of Octavia Butler and dystopian cyberpunk futures. I&#8217;m wondering what&#8217;s more relevant in our current political climate, hard science fiction or the science fiction that deals with socioeconomic and political scenarios where we&#8217;re not seeing the best case scenario play out, like what should we be drawing on right now for inspiration?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, there&#8217;s realism which is of course, the most relevant stuff to right now is the socioeconomic dystopias. Pulling on for inspiration, in this climate that you&#8217;re talking about that something to look forward to, I&#8217;m not quite sure. In terms of how science fiction is influencing specifically science and getting away from a little bit of recent administration and everything, more often I&#8217;m seeing stuff that should be influencing science fiction rather than the what other way around, which I think to me is incredibly encouraging.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> With the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program, which shortens to NIAC, they are the only program at NASA that funds the more futuristic sci-fi, out there concepts that could go on to transform future space missions, maybe 10, 20 or 30 years down the line but concepts that aren&#8217;t quite ready to be implemented yet but you can do the initial research and development for. They&#8217;re looking into things that some of which are science fiction inspired like can we actually hibernate humans on the way to Mars.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But there&#8217;s other ones that I haven&#8217;t really seen actually in science fiction before so there&#8217;s a concepts called the Comet Hitchhiker, which is a concept to send a spacecraft to a comet, have it harpoon into the comet and then reel out an incredibly long tether and then harvest the kinetic energy from the comet to be able to explore the solar system twice as fast. There&#8217;s a lot of things like using comets as propulsion systems, which I haven&#8217;t exactly seen in science fiction. I think what&#8217;s really exciting about right now to me in space exploration and science is that, I think we have sort of almost as equilibrium where science fiction is still inspiring science but I think there is new things being developed in science that should be in science fiction.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s great. Science fiction is my favorite thing ever. I love reading science fiction, I think that something that people who are kind of on the cutting edge of using technology as we change our culture in our societies, whether or not it&#8217;s in space, science fiction provides this futuristic fable of what we can learn by not having to do the thing. It takes it to the farthest, logical conclusion so we can plan for those things well in advance of actually getting there which is really nice because a lot of the time we&#8217;re kind of going into this without being able to see all of the different aspects of what problems it could create. Science fiction helps us plan for those things that it ends up affecting in a positive or negative way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I remember reading HP Lovecraft&#8217;s essay on horror fiction. Lovecraft, of course being a very problematic person. I have to mention that every time I referenced him but he talked about horror as being a way for psychologically preparing for worst case scenarios. I think sci-fi does an interesting job of preparing us both for best case scenarios and the unexpected consequences thereof, as well as worst case scenarios.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I agree.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think a lot of people were kind of like, &#8220;I&#8217;ve read William Gibson. I know how this works now.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I also think science fiction is a nice landscape to talk about contemporary moral issues because it can be painted in this world that you&#8217;re not actually in so that it can give you some distance. Then you can really start to examine things that would normally make you kind of uncomfortable but it&#8217;s a little bit easier if it&#8217;s not really you and it&#8217;s not really your community when it&#8217;s this other community that&#8217;s dealing with something that&#8217;s very similar to yours.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s easier to talk about race if you&#8217;re talking about aliens?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, if they&#8217;re blue people who have random weird skin and other stuff, it&#8217;s not the same but it actually is the same issue.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How much do you think science fiction influences is felt outside of hard sciences? Are there sociological studies on the culture of Star Trek? Is it pervasive?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know for sure that there&#8217;s an entire group of anthropologists who study science fiction and they&#8217;re all about it. I definitely think in some ways, it&#8217;s the thing that brings people to science because science fiction can be such a great story. A lot of people who feel really intimidated by science can at least relate to the stories.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can I just mention on the subject of Star Trek because I watched this episode the other day that Star Trek is a socialist, post-hunger, post-poverty, etcetera utopia but Deanna Troi still went to a science conference and got sexually harassed.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] That&#8217;s so horrible. What I&#8217;m thinking of is when I first saw 2001: Space Odyssey, which it took me a really long time to watch, to me was more like a comment on the 60s than it was about the future.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think that science fiction allows us to reflect a lot on the cultural touch points and that kind of thing throughout time. If you look at the difference in science fiction and the things that we&#8217;re focused on by decade, the things that people are afraid of, the things that people are interested in change pretty dramatically from decade to decade from sub-genre to sub-genre even. That gives you a glimpse into what things we&#8217;re like at the time. It was written as well. It&#8217;s both like for when they are writing it, compared to our time it&#8217;s like past science fiction, looking at the future. It&#8217;s like looking behind us and looking forward at the same time which is really neat.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, totally.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I remember reading about the [inaudible] phenomenon where the cultural climate of the day influences both sci-fi and horror and looking at some of the cultural study of science fiction fantasy and horror media that was being produced during the Cold War and how you can just trace the influence of the prevailing fears at that time and see how that&#8217;s reflected in the media. What is sci-fi telling us about the world we&#8217;re living in right now?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As somebody who reads a lot of science fiction from a lot of different time periods, at least for what I read because my viewpoint is going to be colored by that regardless. From what I read, definitely much more of social movements in that kind of thing are influencing the kind of science fiction that I&#8217;ve been reading, where those kinds of topics are much more at the forefront. This is somebody who reads much more sociological science fiction, what are the effects of having this technology versus the super hard science fiction which is mainstream, mostly just about the science and how it works and why it works and that kind of thing and less so about how it actually impacts people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Seeing more on socio sci-fi that&#8217;s focusing on what it means to have a society where either racial justice, for instance exists or justice for women exists or the exact opposite where if things devolve from where they are right now. This is what we&#8217;re looking at. I&#8217;m seeing a lot of what the cultural changes that have happened over the past five or so years, especially around Black Lives Matter and the kind of new awakening for a lot of people like this new generation of feminism.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Are we seeing middle-aged, white guys about that, Ashe or is it marginalized people who are finding a voice in those sci-fi community?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Interesting fact about me, I do my best to only read books by and about marginalized people so I couldn&#8217;t tell you that. I try very hard not to read and consume media that&#8217;s created solely by very privileged people because that just kind of replicates the problems that we already have. In doing so, it kind of becomes like a PBS special for me like it&#8217;s entertainment and I learned something from it, which is really good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One thing that I&#8217;ve noticed with some of the more recent literature is this idea of living within the current time, the poor societal choices that had happened in the past and dealing with that. For example, I&#8217;m currently reading The Three-Body Problem. I might screw-up his name but I think it&#8217;s Cixin Liu. The first half of the book is all about the Cultural Revolution in China and everything that&#8217;s still in place in China in this, of course sci-fi world, was completely influenced by the Cultural Revolution. If you look at that same idea for The Expanse Series which is obviously been turned into a pretty successful TV show where you have Earth contingent and this Mars contingent and they have these past societal problems with each other, as well as&#8230; What do they called the people who live out world, like on the rocks?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You mean, the Belters?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The Belters. Thank you. Then you have the oppression of the Belters and they&#8217;re still fighting with each other due to the societal problems they have in the face of this great threat that&#8217;s coming from outside and yet, they still can&#8217;t resolve their differences. That&#8217;s one thing that I&#8217;ve been seeing where we&#8217;re reflecting on the poor decisions that society has made in the past but we still can&#8217;t get past them so it takes the new threat.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Earlier we talked about hard science fiction and soft science fiction and I wonder is this a cultural thing where if the author explains it in great detail, things related to physics or chemistry or maybe biology that we call it hard science fiction but if it instead sociology or anthropology, we call it soft science fiction? Am I mischaracterizing that? There&#8217;s something, maybe at least for me going on there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We see the same thing with the conference talk, we talk about hard talks and soft talks and there&#8217;s this [inaudible] that even though hard and soft is that the antonyms of each other, there&#8217;s this other idea that the hard talks are because it&#8217;s difficult and here&#8217;s the thing. For most of very technical people, it&#8217;s the soft talks that are actually the difficult part. We&#8217;re not wired necessarily to have the empathy that we&#8217;re expected to have. That&#8217;s, to me the hard part because it&#8217;s something that I&#8217;m constantly working on and all the technical stuff comes fairly easy to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I do think that something that The Expanse, I don&#8217;t think they always had but I think they&#8217;re attempting to sort of blended. I think it&#8217;s the first science fiction I&#8217;ve seen in a while that attempts to do that because it&#8217;s a show that so steep in politics and because it&#8217;s steeped in politics, that&#8217;s deep in social economic realities of their world and everything but what The Expanse usually gets a lot of acclaim for is how hard they work on trying to get the science right or mostly right, on the TV series specifically.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think it&#8217;s nice to see a science fiction series that really does care about building a world around politics and social issues but also really cares about if we spin Ceres a certain way that the gravity will work exactly this way and if someone&#8217;s head gets blown off that&#8217;s in zero G, this is exactly how it&#8217;s going to look or something. Some of it is definitely more fantastical than others but the fact that they&#8217;re working both sides of those issues is unfortunately rare but I&#8217;m hoping they&#8217;ll set more of a trend to really dig into both sides because too often, it&#8217;s one or the other. It&#8217;s a little bit too much void of reality in a lot of science fiction because they&#8217;re picking their [inaudible] and not fully doing world building on issues that I think people would be genuinely interested in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m curious, I&#8217;m really glad we mentioned soft talks and hard talks in terms of conferences. I typically give what is referred to, and I hate the term soft talks but at the keynote I gave in South Africa this year, I gave a talk called, &#8216;Metaphors Are Similes. Similes Are Like Metaphors&#8217; and it was about the way we think. I went into graph theory and it was really interesting the breakdown of people who talk to me after the talk. It was mainly men who came out to thank me for my introduction to graph theory and I had people tell me like, &#8220;It never made sense to me before you explained it,&#8221; and it was mainly women and people of color who came up to me to talk about the parts of the talk that are more about how brains function and how we interact with each other and how we model thought. I wonder if a show like The Expanse is using the hard sci-fi to draw in audiences that would otherwise not be interested in the sort of political drama or the sociological questions that are being asked by the show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a question for your question. Do you think that with the audience of your talk that the people who need that message are still missing it and looking instead at the science?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s my underlying concern.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As somebody who gives a lot of those kinds of talks as well, I tell people that people are much more complicated and there are so many more variables with humans than there are with computers. People are the really hard problem in computer science, in my opinion. As somebody who gets kind of boxed into this gives soft talks, even though I&#8217;m an engineer and I&#8217;m talking about the way that these kinds of things apply, to the things that we create, the way that we interact with each other and the way that we are shaping the world, you still end up with the people that you expect to be in the room.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The people who need those kinds of messages most are somewhere else. Especially, that&#8217;s a multi-track conference, they&#8217;re sitting somewhere else where they&#8217;re picking out the things that seem most relevant to them in the understanding of the world that they already hold. Does that make sense?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, definitely. I have some frustration right now because I have this talk idea. I&#8217;m working on a book on empathy for software developers, in particular called &#8216;The Compassionate Coder&#8217;. I have a chapter devoted to modeling emotions as state machines and that seemed to me like a really great way of getting people in the room who would not otherwise attend to talk about empathy because I&#8217;m modeling it in terms that they would understand. Frustratingly, not a single conference has picked up that talk yet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, in case you don&#8217;t know, I run a conference called AlterConf that brings together marginalized people to talk about views on different aspects of sociology in the way that they interact with technology. Whether you&#8217;re talking about, racial justice and having to go into work where you&#8217;re the only person of color and having a lot of rather ignorant white people ask you questions or treat you in a certain way, while you’re out of work life, you&#8217;re fighting for your life and you&#8217;re fighting for justice. That&#8217;s a huge difference.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Talking about those kinds of things are still seen as something that&#8217;s less mainstream, as less important because those are the concerns that more privileged people have and those tend to be the people that make up the vast majority of the industry so it&#8217;s a self-perpetuating problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess one of the questions I would have about that is that even if you are privileged and you don&#8217;t understand other people who are not like you, they are still people so why are you not interested in understanding how people work in general so that you can actually build better technology? I&#8217;m still trying to understand why there is a break there between people who only want to focus on just the hard science and engineering and don&#8217;t really want to talk about the other people parts because they kind of feel like it&#8217;s extraneous soft stuff. It&#8217;s not always about the social justice part. Sometimes it&#8217;s just like do you understand how people think, how they act, how they use things?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think that&#8217;s unfortunate is just the reality, especially on the science side of things is that the science culture and science industry really suffers from trying to promote that science is this thing that exists without humans, as opposed to being a human pursuit. I think you see it everywhere and it really seeps in in a really insidious ways. I find that pursuit of science being something where an objective truth exists out there. If humans weren&#8217;t here, science would still be there. I think people take that as being almost literal that science, instead of it being humans trying to actually explore and understand and find the objective truths for which we live in. It&#8217;s seen as this thing that is completely external to us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think this gets promoted in so many different ways and so many different places and by people who aren&#8217;t even aware that they&#8217;re really promoting this. I think the science industry really suffers from unknowingly promoting things that are actually disrespectful or harmful to people. It&#8217;s not that I think they&#8217;re completely clueless. I think they&#8217;re just not using a lot of critical thinking about how things affect people. Because science is seen as this thing that&#8217;s devoid of humans, they end up thinking that you can just focus on the work in front of you and it doesn&#8217;t really have to affect humans.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But the reality is if you&#8217;re someone fighting for science to be accessible, to me my argument to someone who doesn&#8217;t really care about the human side of things would be that it&#8217;s not just about caring so much about who is doing the work and making sure that marginalized communities are getting into science. Obviously, that&#8217;s something I care very deeply about. But I would tell them don&#8217;t you agree that there is a lot of underfunded, overlooked, not appreciated science out there and I think a lot of people would agree with that statement, even if they&#8217;re the heads down, I don&#8217;t need to pay attention to humans thing. Although, the reality is that there are humans behind that underfunded, overlooked science.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A lot of them are going to be people who are in marginalized communities. To me it&#8217;s like if you care that there&#8217;s not a lot of research into how humans have sex or there&#8217;s not a lot of research into a specific type of snail &#8212; it could be a white guy who is doing that sort of work &#8212; but there&#8217;s so many people who are not getting funded, who are not being included in science that you start to think about if we&#8217;re not really making sure to find every last human we can and make science accessible to them and make it equitable, then how much science are we actually losing out on and that&#8217;s quite a bit.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That would be my argument to someone who is not very human-centric. Something that is just incredibly frustrating is I think promoting science that it&#8217;s not a human endeavor and when you do that, you forget about how much science we don&#8217;t actually have. I think a difficult concept for most people, whether it&#8217;s space exploration or tech or science is trying to have them think about exactly what we haven&#8217;t discovered yet, what we don&#8217;t know, we&#8217;re maybe not far as far along as we should be in our knowledge of something.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Also, the assumption that as scientists, as people who are lovers of science that what we bring to the table is 100% objective, also influences the science that we create in the way that that science influences all of society. There have been lots of studies and research projects in that kind of thing that in their time were determined to be good science that we know now are motivated by misogyny and racism and just general lack of empathy and the assumptions that we make about other people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The idea in all of these different fields that we&#8217;re coming into this, 100% objective, we don&#8217;t care about who the people are that are interacting with us or who are affected by it is 100% false. We need to look at all of those different aspects. One part of being able to correct that is making sure that we do have all different kinds of people involved in science at all different levels.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think we see the same sort of thing in the open source community, which is a little near and dear to my heart or more familiar to me, where the default open source developer is maybe a 40-year old cisgender, heterosexual, white male, employed by a large corporation to do open source and simply doesn&#8217;t see what is not being created by people who are denied access to the resources and needs exposure and the communities that will support them to solve problems for people other than the 25-year old Silicon Valley guy named Chad.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s disheartening to hear that science suffers the same thing where the problems that are being solved or the solution to their being presented are being presented as if they come from the subjective reality. When in fact, they&#8217;re serving the default human being who most people think of as Chad.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think one of the issues of being in a society that is not post-scarcity is that we, by default have this idea of what&#8217;s in it for me. Not only that, but what&#8217;s in it for me right now. If you&#8217;re not seeing the value in someone else&#8217;s work in your life, then you tend to dismiss it. That applies to so much science because you don&#8217;t necessarily see what&#8217;s the value in someone doing space research, anything in space and then you look 20 years down the line and it&#8217;s going to revolutionize your life. But it&#8217;s difficult to understand how that&#8217;s going to affect you so far in the future because we have to do that now in order to have an effect on you in the future.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, oftentimes using the marginalized people as resources and non-consenting resources. There’s a movie coming out right now and there was a recent book about Henrietta Lacks, a black woman in, I want to say the 50s or 60s, who went to the hospital with a type of cancer and instead of properly treating her, the scientists took her cells and used them and still use them today for a lot of research. Her family has not benefited in any real way. That science in particular is built on a long history of racial injustice and gender injustice and continues to this day.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you think that&#8217;s because of what Ariel was saying about taking the human out of it and just seeing it as an objective pursuit?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that by the people doing the science, they see it as a worthy sacrifice on that person&#8217;s part even though that person hasn&#8217;t consented to that sacrifice. In Henrietta Lacks&#8217; case in particular, she wasn&#8217;t even ever notified that this was happening to her. She didn&#8217;t have the opportunity to consent because she wasn&#8217;t aware that that was going to happen at all.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that definitely agreeing with Ariel because they&#8217;re not seeing particular individuals as humans. It becomes something that they can kind of zoom out from but also, it&#8217;s perpetuating the same problems that we see society as a whole. The idea that science isn&#8217;t affected by those things or that science doesn&#8217;t further that kind of oppression is untrue.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like we could talk a little bit about some of the stories we&#8217;ve seen over the past year or two about biases in machine learning as an example of what happens when you treat data and people as objective points in space, as opposed to complex beings who are intersecting with society along a lot of different axes of oppression.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That makes me think about Facebook and the whole fake news and what it appears as them not really taking much responsibility for it because apparently, they may have not known a whole lot about it but a lot of what ended up getting through was partly because they removed the humans from the process of filtering the news in the first place because they believe that it was appropriate to just use the machine learning. It had been matured enough, I guess in that perspective, to be able to filter properly the news for people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then obviously, it was not. It was putting out a lot of things that people were promoting that were not true. Then now Facebook is not really doing much about that, which concerns me because it makes me question, when you have made these big decisions that affect so many people, since there&#8217;s over a billion people who use Facebook and then you decide that you&#8217;re not responsible for that but it is affecting people, then who is really to blame?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I know that&#8217;s kind of a different question that you were suggesting but it&#8217;s still get back to this what you do to people and how it effects everything else. Since you&#8217;re not really considering how other people are going to be affected or are being affected as enough of a factor to make changes, then what does that really mean?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s time to bring out the classic Jeff Goldblum quote, &#8220;Your scientists were so focused on whether they could. They didn&#8217;t question, whether they should.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s fair.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think what really needs to happen is that there needs to be a whole lot more human learning in the field of machine learning.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s terrifying that the companies that are making the greatest progress in putting machine learning to some practical value are also not studying societal and political and cultural effects. That&#8217;s absolutely horrifying.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When people like Elon Musk talk about how AI is scary because it&#8217;s going to kill us one day, I&#8217;m not worried about the AI. I&#8217;m more worried about something like this because when you have masses and masses of people using your platform and you make even a small change, it&#8217;s going to have a huge effect. It seems as though a lot of, at least these tech companies are not prepared to be able to handle when they do that and that&#8217;s very concerning to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and that kind of technology, especially when it comes to things like machine learning and crunching big data is being used in a lot of real world, long-lasting scenarios like when people go before a judge to determine what a sentence will be for any given crime, all of their information is fed into an algorithm that spits out what their likely recidivism rate would be so they&#8217;re being judged based on all of the data of all of the people that they&#8217;ve collected before, not taking into the account that some communities are far more police than others, that being poor, it makes you a target for the police. You&#8217;re more likely to be arrested &#8212; being a person of color, being a transwoman &#8212; all of those things make it much more likely that you&#8217;re going to end up in the criminal justice system and them using all of those traits to determine how long you&#8217;re going to be in prison, leads to this huge epidemic that we&#8217;ve had over the entire United States history of the vast number of people that we have in our prison systems, people that are put on death row and all of those different kinds of things. It&#8217;s not just how we&#8217;re using technology specifically in tech spaces but also how we&#8217;re determining, whether or not we should be hiring teachers or hiring more police officers or over policing different areas and doing things like stop and frisk. All of those things motivated, based on the machine learning and the big data that were using and collecting every single day.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Ariel, I know your time with us today was very limited. I wanted to really thank you for being in this very important conversation and it was really great talking to you. Thank you so much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ARIEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for having me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ALL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Bye, Ariel. Thanks a lot!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Let&#8217;s take this time to do a shout out to one of our Patreons, Dave Tapley. Dave is a Patreon at the $10 level and we want to say thank you so much to everybody who participates on Patreon.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wanted to bring back up what Brad said about scarcity and also point out Conway&#8217;s Law, which is that organizations with design system produced designs that are copies of the communication structures of the organizations that produced them. My point here is that if you look at the structure of our society, the scarcity and exploitation are both really deeply baked into the structure of our society. I don&#8217;t think it should surprise us when we find those qualities in the systems we produce.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and scarcity isn&#8217;t equally distributed is something else that&#8217;s really important to note. There are definitely communities that experience far more scarcity in income and access to education and access to opportunities and material goods than others do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. All of these things have to be understood through looking at the power dynamics and relationships between groups and people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that what it&#8217;s going to take is sufficiently large and/or sufficiently frequent external stimuli to bump the system into a different track, if you will. We&#8217;re running on a negative feedback loop, which means that any sort of deviation gets negatively fed back into the inputs to bring it back on your status. What we need is a large enough stimulus to push us out of that rut of getting us back into that groove &#8212; I&#8217;m using too many metaphors here but &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If you continue the physics metaphor, both of the size of the impulse and how long it&#8217;s applied for.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, also because where a human society, sometimes frequency of small impulses is going to be enough.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There is another &#8212; I&#8217;m a big fan of these laws &#8212; Gerald Weinberg has a law. It&#8217;s an aphorism, I guess that he calls the Law of Cucumbers in Brine, which is that cucumbers get pickled far more than brine gets cucumbered. The idea there is that if you have a small system interacting with a much larger system, the small system tends to change much more than the larger system. The small system tends to become more like a large system far more than the large system tends to become a small system, especially when there&#8217;s a power dynamic involved, as there always has. The way to combat that is through persistent action: find something that you can do and keep doing it until it works.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you think our issue is we&#8217;re hoping that the impulse comes in the form of technology versus human intervention?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that we all tend to prefer technical solutions to problems even when they aren&#8217;t technical problems and the secret there is that there aren&#8217;t really any technical problems. They are all just people problems that we try to apply technology to with varying success. I&#8217;m not sure if that answered your question.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, it definitely does. Especially as technologists, I feel like we always want to extract what can be easily repeated by a machine so we don&#8217;t have to do the same thing over and over again. But I think that ends up perpetuating the problem. We&#8217;re feeding off of &#8212; I don&#8217;t want to say mixed signals &#8212; incomplete or incorrect data. We&#8217;re building on that again and again and again. When you start with that shaky foundation, it&#8217;s not going to lead to the outcome that we hope or want.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think, I get what you&#8217;re saying, Ashe. Because in the beginning, we don&#8217;t want to do messy stuff. We&#8217;d rather do a very clean, &#8220;I know how to build the stuff,&#8221; then later, we just get lazy about it and just rely on it, even though there&#8217;s no proof that what we started out with is even right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it may be interesting to unpack some of the reasons that we prefer to focus on technology. I think some of it might be that our experiences in technology, we have a better understanding of technology, it&#8217;s easier to form mental models of technology that are useful to us. If you compare that to understanding people and their interactions, it&#8217;s much more difficult. We have much less experience doing it. I think those are, at least some of the reason why people are reaching for technical solutions and looking at problems as technical problems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If we look at the distribution of job roles at a typical technology company, what you&#8217;ll see is often times you have &#8212; ignoring the sales aspect side which more on the creative side of the business &#8212; many more engineers than designers and UX people. When you have that disparity in number of people, the engineers tend to have more weight. That&#8217;s just the generally accepted way of doing business, even though it might not actually be the correct way of doing business.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really think exception to that too because one of the more interesting developments in software development or in particular, web development over the past few years is the devops movement where people have started to think and say and do that the software we produce is inseparable from the way we deploy it and a way it operates in production. I hate the fact that we have to have a specialist in UX or UI and separate that from the engineering work when really all of us should be generalist and all of us should be considering the human impact of what we&#8217;re building at every step in the process that&#8217;s not something that should be delegated.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Even stepping farther back from that because we&#8217;re so heavily siloed, especially when we&#8217;re talking about technology as an industry we so heavily silo all of these different roles. We&#8217;re also not learning from each other. I worked with a lot of startups and a lot of other technology companies to tell them that the way that they need to start changing things so they can have a more inclusive culture, so they can actually support and sustain any kind of diversity internally.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the things is making sure that everybody is on a level playing field when it comes to different departments, especially because the vast majority of diversity, the vast majority of marginalized people exist in roles outside, explicitly engineering. Those roles include things like what we would call customer service or dev relations. Any kind of front-facing, consumer-facing role, people who tend to know our products and our services very well, who tends to know our users and our consumers very well, they don&#8217;t have any say in the way that products are created. They might pass things on to an engineer if they can&#8217;t solve the problem but that doesn&#8217;t then get turned into this is a UX problem or this is not what our users want or need. Failing that, how are we able to create the best products and services, if internally we can&#8217;t even communicate the things that we are building and the things that our consumers and our users actually want and need.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s an emphasis on speed and delivery that gets in a way that process too. I know with my work at GitHub, I had a lot of ideas for things that I wanted to put in place right away and I thought of that same trap that you&#8217;re talking about, Ashe, I wanted to get a technology solution out the door to solve what I saw as some severe problems in open source in the way that people come together to do open source. But luckily, I&#8217;m a very talented UX specialist in our team and we don&#8217;t release anything without in-depth collaboration with our UX person and that&#8217;s really opened my eyes to the fact that if you create a technology, even when that sets out to address inequality or an injustice, if people can&#8217;t use it or if you don&#8217;t understand how people are going to use it, you might as well have not wasted the effort.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yep.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>To bring it back to space just a little bit, this reminds me a lot of my past experiences as an aerospace engineer. This idea of silos is not unique to the software tech industry. We have them in the aerospace as well. But they weren&#8217;t necessarily institutionalized silos. Sometimes, it&#8217;s just an individual who wanted to live in a silo by themselves. On a payload team that I worked on, we had software engineers, we had electrical engineers, we had mechanical engineers, which is what I was and we had scientists.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The best teammates that I had on that payload were the ones who would overlap what they did with one or more of the other sub-teams. As a mechanical engineer, I worked a lot with the electrical team in order to make sure that, for instance the boards that they were designing fit well within the mechanical idea of what we&#8217;re building. Working with another team like that is what made the best engineers on the team and the people who decided to erect silos for themselves were the people that we just didn&#8217;t enjoy working with.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I fear that the way that we are producing software engineers is only emphasizing that siloing because we&#8217;re training people for frontend jobs. Maybe, you come out of a CS degree, you have no critical thinking background, you have no sociology background, you have no anthropology background. You&#8217;re solving problems algorithmically. It seems like the people who are generalists have either been in the field long enough that they got to start when those areas specialization didn&#8217;t exist like me or people who are self-taught.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t know if I agree with that. I will work with a lot of companies where in the beginning it makes the most sense to have the most generalists because everybody has to be able to work on everything at once. I think what we need to move toward is that we have multi-disciplinary teams. You should have somebody from marketing and somebody from customer support and an engineer and somebody who works with devops, product manager and all of these different roles and all of those things working directly together because that specialization does bring about a lot of important things where they&#8217;re seeing issues before they can come up. They can create the best and most efficient solutions to problems where a generalist might not be able to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Especially because we see very many people that are looking at getting into the industry as people that are new graduates from university versus things like boot camps or are self-taught, especially when we&#8217;re looking at marginalized people, that helps it to even that playing field. Having somebody who is, for instance a full-stack developer, having your entire team made up people that are full-stack developers means that you&#8217;re looking for somebody who has a lot of experience in a lot of different areas and that&#8217;s going to mean that you&#8217;re only looking at people who have been in the industry for a long time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a very fair point. I guess I would refine what I said a little bit. I think that there needs to be at least a common language so that there can be conversations across these silos. I think generalist maybe are better equipped to have some of these conversations than people who are siloed into, &#8220;Oh, you&#8217;re only a frontend developer. You only know JavaScript. We&#8217;re not going to talk to you about these other situation.&#8221; I guess I&#8217;m looking for is people who are well-informed enough to know that they need to tap into the expertise of a specialist.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>At the risk of playing my own little one note samba here. I want to point out that it&#8217;s much easier for a manager to blame a line engineer than the reverse and it&#8217;s much easier for an engineer to blame a customer service person than the reverse and this isn&#8217;t a coincidence. These are sub-groups that have different power, different status within the organization and you&#8217;ll find that blame and back passing always flows downhill in the power differential.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, absolutely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that that&#8217;s just points to the fact that although we were recognizing that the multi-disciplinary teams are really important that the person who leads that team is probably the most important because that person will have the power to say that the customer support person has a voice and they should be heard and the engineers can&#8217;t just talk over what the UX designers would say is the best thing to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, the correction here is to find a way to equalize those groups, to put them on an equal playing field. Diversity and equality is the solution.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or the people were promoted to manager so we have that responsibility.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s the biggest problem. Who is the manager, I think is the biggest problem. I don&#8217;t even worry so much about the equality if you have managers who are brokering that conversation. But I think a lot of times that&#8217;s not what&#8217;s happening.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Speaking as someone who went from a technical role to a managerial role and I think I can speak for everyone who has done the same transitions that that&#8217;s really hard. A lot of our companies do not provide the training necessary to get any good at it and &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The biggest understatement I&#8217;ve heard today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As one of the owners of my company, the only person to blame is myself. We have had business coaches come in and help us through that process of realizing that not everything is solvable with technology, you actually have to listen to people and all that stuff. These are things that I effectively knew innately but wasn&#8217;t willing to bet the farm on and actually execute on but it&#8217;s tough.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What happens in most organizations is that someone says, &#8220;You&#8217;re the best technical person we have. We&#8217;re not going to give you this other job that is completely different where almost none of your skills transfer.&#8221; Good luck with that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and you&#8217;re no longer touching code. Whatever you feel like you have control over, you&#8217;re going to try to exert that control anyway so promoting them almost makes the situation worse because now they want to have that control &#8212; their backseat driving is basically what I&#8217;m trying to say.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The thing that I want to emphasize here quickly is that knowing how to treat people equally and creating a culture where people are treated equally is how you begin to fix these power differential problems that I think have caused a lot of the problems we&#8217;re describing so equality isn&#8217;t just for marginalized people. It helps everyone else, the entire organization.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What can we do, as people participating in the tech industry to affect that kind of change?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I honestly think that the most radical thing that we can do is to listen to people. I don&#8217;t know why it&#8217;s so difficult for very many people but being able to listen and actually hear what somebody is saying and where they&#8217;re coming from, oftentimes people will tell you exactly what they to change, exactly what they need to be successful and to be an integral part of your team. Listen to what people need, listen to what people are saying and actually take action on it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would like to propose something to you. I would like to propose that the most important quality here is congruent and I&#8217;d like to talk about what that might mean. What do you hear when I say the word congruent?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Trigonometry?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, that&#8217;s one. One thing that congruency might mean or being congruent might mean is saying what you&#8217;re thinking and thinking what you say. There is a congruence between your thoughts and your actions. I think that&#8217;s the one that a lot of us have used. The one that I want to offer &#8212; this is again from Gerald Weinberg &#8212; is congruency as being able to pick the best action in the situation, which means being able to overcome your biases, being able to overcome your lack of information about the situation to find the best action to take, taking everything into consideration and then taking that action.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But Rein, how do we get there?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the best things that you can do is to listen until you know all of attention where everyone is coming from. You can&#8217;t act congruently because you won&#8217;t have all the possibilities available to you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Now, I would say, I&#8217;d paid attention to what Ashe said as I was preparing my next point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In addition to listening, another key quality or key decision that you have to make for yourself is to recognize your own biases and try to set them aside when you&#8217;re listening.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, you can&#8217;t act congruently if you&#8217;re taking actions based on your preconceived notions, your emotions are overriding your decision making things like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And not to bring Jerry Weinberg in again but he wrote a book called The Rules of Consulting and the first rule for a consultant coming into a large company is, &#8220;There&#8217;s always a problem, otherwise you wouldn&#8217;t be brought in.&#8221; The second rule is probably the more important one is, &#8220;It&#8217;s always a people problem.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I snuck that one in earlier but I too, didn&#8217;t want to make the entire thing about Jerry all the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. But as a very technical person, it is so hard to realize that it is always a people problem, whether it&#8217;s because they don&#8217;t know how to hire and train people, they don&#8217;t know how to attract people to do the work and that&#8217;s why are being brought in, to do technical stuff or if there&#8217;s just an internal issue of the team. That&#8217;s a people problem. That&#8217;s not necessarily a technical problem. Sure, technical problems come along with it. It&#8217;s really a people problem and it&#8217;s so hard to drop the bias that everything can be fixed with technology.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can share &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m going to write a gem to remind people that it&#8217;s always a people problem. Would that be good?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can share something I&#8217;ve been working on getting better at that I hope will make this easier, which is when someone approaches me or talks to me about something that I don&#8217;t agree with, I&#8217;m trying to consider their perspective, even if I don&#8217;t like their perspective but to actually try it on before I dismiss it. I think it&#8217;s easier to try to have a conversation with the person if you can find some sort of common thread and doesn&#8217;t mean that I have to accept everything that they&#8217;re suggesting. But it does mean that if I, at least really think it through and see maybe there is a point that I&#8217;m missing, that I am not as angry about it so I can actually hear what they&#8217;re saying, as opposed to being like, &#8220;Stop bringing this up. I don&#8217;t want to hear this. This is stupid,&#8221; which is normally how I feel when people do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[inaudible] that environment where discourse is mutually appreciated. There are some people that it&#8217;s pointless to do [inaudible] with because they will not engage and they will never change.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t tend to engage with them. It&#8217;s more so for me so I don&#8217;t always respond to them. I just think it in my own head because &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think this is all predicated on people acting in good faith at all and if that&#8217;s not the case, then none of this should apply.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, I don&#8217;t expect people act in good faith. It&#8217;s more like if I&#8217;m having an argument with my sister, for instance like she wants to have pasta for dinner and I want to have salad, then it&#8217;s easier if I actually consider why she wants it, even if I don&#8217;t agree, even it might be stupid. But if I do actually think about it, it makes me less angry. That&#8217;s something I&#8217;ve just noticed because I think a lot of times, we respond from our ready set place, where we already have a response for this and it&#8217;s already gearing up to go and there are people who are just trying to rile you up so I don&#8217;t expect that everybody acting in good faith. But it doesn&#8217;t mean that I have to be angry. If I can to find out how somebody else is thinking even if I don&#8217;t agree with them, it still helps me understand how to deal with people better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would just caution that emotions are perfectly valid and emotional responses are perfectly valid and emotions can give us the energy to have conversations that we would not ordinarily have. I get angry a lot. I try, at least to choose how I direct that anger and how, you said anger and try and turn it into something that&#8217;s constructive and positive. But one of the things I learned into the period of my transition is that emotions are valid inputs to every thought process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m reminded to of feedback that my manager gave me. I tend to hold very strong opinions. I think everyone who knows me knows that and what she told me once after observing me, I basically shot down a conversation with people who didn&#8217;t have the same perspective that I did was that it&#8217;s incredibly important to weigh the impact of your words and how you&#8217;re saying them but more so, when you&#8217;re right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>More so when you&#8217;re right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Saw it all the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah because it&#8217;s not enough to be right if you can&#8217;t convince someone of what the outcome should be according to your perceptions or according to your experience, if you can&#8217;t communicate that back to them and you just shot a conversation down and not reach someone that you really need to reach in order to effect a change and the stakes are so much higher when you are right because of the perspective that you have or the experiences that you&#8217;re drawing on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And it&#8217;s so hard for the person who, in this hypothetical is not right to admit that they&#8217;re not right and not just to you but also to themselves like what you want to do is make it as easy as possible for them to make the transition to being right. This is all, of course for supposing that you are right in this situation. But in that situation like you do want to make sure of that, you make it as easy as possible for that person to see the light for themselves and admit it to you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And it&#8217;s really a matter of choosing how to approach the conversation or using pathos or ethos and that&#8217;s a very tricky subject. Ashe brought up in chat that the point I raised verges on tongue pleasing and it absolutely does verge on tongue pleasing. It&#8217;s difficult and complicated and messy and I don&#8217;t have an answer to that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, a lot of human problems absolutely are messy. I think that it&#8217;s also something that was hard won over many years of me looking at these kinds of problems to realize that we can&#8217;t change anybody&#8217;s mind. We can present them with all of the information that we have and the reasons why we believe the things that we do but we can&#8217;t make anybody do anything else. Especially when it comes to any kind of issues around justice. When it can feel like you have a conveyor belt of people that want you to educate them about something that is so personal that it affects your life every single day and your survival every single day. It&#8217;s not on you to approach those conversations in a teacher-like way because that is not your job. It is on us, as privileged people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There was a really great article that was posted this morning and I was kind of tweeting about it. It&#8217;s on us as privileged people to look at those situations and to learn from that. We need to do our research that we need to understand how we are perceived and how we benefit from the mistreatment of other people. Whether that is an identity-type power dynamic or that is a manager-to-employee type dynamic, it doesn&#8217;t matter. It&#8217;s the same kind of thing. How could we look at the way that we communicate and the way that we come across to make sure that we&#8217;re all hearing the same message?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wanted to look at, Coraline, the example you provided of being right but then not doing the extra work to figure out how to communicate that effectively through this framework for congruent that&#8217;s part of that thing that Jerry talks about because this is, I think the most useful thing I&#8217;ve ever found for helping me understand the situation. For any interaction to be congruent, there are three parts that have to have an equal share. A failure of congruent is often leaving what are more goes out. Being right but then getting it wrong thing is not caring about the other person. It&#8217;s only caring about yourself and the facts of the situation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can I ask a really simple question?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How do we know that we&#8217;re right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;re asking me but we don&#8217;t.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can make this very concrete. I can talk about the situation. We were talking about the ability of a project owner to edit comments in an issue. The case is being made for why a project maintainer needed to be able to edit comments in an issue and I pointed out that through my own experience with harassment on GitHub that, let&#8217;s take in particular the Opalgate incident, if the maintainer to Opalgate project had been able to manipulate the words that I was saying in that issue, it would have been disastrous.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It was already a disastrous, already a terrible situation and already nothing good came of it but if I was out of control of the way my words were being portrayed, it would have gone much, much worse. I shut down the conversation by sending my own experience into saying, &#8220;No, a maintainer should never be able to edit comments.&#8221; I think about that conversation a lot and like, &#8220;What did I do? Or what could have I done differently to have made a case that was very personal and I did have a lot of personal impact on me but that was also effective?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Let me step back. I assume that there was some person that brought up the idea or the reasons why they thought that it was valid for a maintainer to be able to edit a comment so wouldn&#8217;t they also feel that they were right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly. It wasn&#8217;t a matter right or wrong opinion but I think in this case, there&#8217;s a right and wrong decision that could be made. What I failed to do was to bring to light some of the unintended consequences of what that particular picture would bring in a way that put it on equal footing with the valid reasons for allowing someone to edit the comment.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess my biggest concern here is how do we know that we&#8217;re right. How did you know that you were right versus the other individual? On the other side of this, you had an experience in those kinds of things. Often, people say, &#8220;The good outweighs the bad,&#8221; like I&#8217;ll sacrifice your experience for the greater good kind of thing. How do we determine that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wish I had an answer to that, Ashe.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What we never know that even in scientific things, which is traditionally in an area where we can say, &#8220;Yes, that is proven to be right.&#8221; For example, with the discovery of relativity. A lot of things were kind of thrown out the door or modified to accommodate relativity and not to turn this into the Jerry Weinberg show but there&#8217;s this idea called the Orange Juice Test and the short of it is if someone says yes or no to a request, then they&#8217;ve probably failed the Orange Juice Test. Instead they should counter back with the repercussions of their request.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One way is that we could hypothetically say in this editing GitHub comment situation like, &#8220;We could create a thing where the project maintainer who wants to edit a comment has to pay $50 to buy a GitHub personnel&#8217;s person time in order to review whether this is censorship or changing someone&#8217;s words or not.&#8221; It&#8217;s not necessarily a great solution but it&#8217;s exploring the possibilities. I don&#8217;t know where I&#8217;m taking that but that&#8217;s around the idea of like, &#8220;Do you ever know that you&#8217;re right?&#8221; You really don&#8217;t. If you make the assumption, then you can start moving forward.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess we could get very philosophical here and say that right or wrong depends on the context, depends on the situation what you&#8217;re asking the question.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just feel like my job is making sure that we put the needs of marginalized people first, that we consider the impact of what we do on the most vulnerable people first and that is very complicated but that is the position of advocacy that I have to take and that makes me feel justified in what I do and that makes me feel right and that influences the way I&#8217;m interact with other people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess my only concern is when you meet somebody who feels that they are just as concerned about &#8216;the greater good&#8217;, as we are about what it means to have full participation from all different kinds of people. I&#8217;m absolutely on your side here and I do not, at all mean to be a devil&#8217;s advocate. Just that so often, we run into the situation where ethically I know I&#8217;m correct but technically, from a literal technical perspective, they may feel that they&#8217;re right so who ends up having more weight in those conversations and how do you come to any real conclusion, whether that&#8217;s some kind of compromise or an actual change that moves it towards something that&#8217;s much more ethical?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess I could point out that this is a conflict between two incompatible sets of values. Historically, the way that&#8217;s resolved is the person with power makes the decision and then that&#8217;s how it goes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, but I&#8217;m saying how do we mitigate that then.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I got nothing for you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>People are so hard.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If someone doesn&#8217;t value doing the right thing, how do you get them to value doing the right thing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I don&#8217;t know. I feel like this is so much of the work toward actual real justice in so many different areas. It&#8217;s like how do we get people to see what justice is because right now we don&#8217;t have a shared vocabulary for that and how do we get them to empathize? Even if they don&#8217;t fully understand it, they can take someone&#8217;s word for it that this is going to have negative consequences that you may not fully understand and therefore, this isn&#8217;t the right decision.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think maybe the most important first step that we can take is having those conversations.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This reminds me of the book, &#8216;The Art of Negotiation&#8217;. When you hear that title, you think, &#8220;This is how you beat other people at negotiating,&#8221; and that&#8217;s not at all what the book is about. What it&#8217;s about is trying to forget the ‘what’ of the negotiation and trying to understand the why of the negotiation. Why is this other person advocating for this? Why am I advocating for this? Because it&#8217;s so easy to focus on what you&#8217;re advocating for but to pull back and think about why and figure out why they are and measuring those two things together, often results in win-win situation. Not always but the majority of the book actually focuses on those win-win situations because you&#8217;re focusing on why, instead of what.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just like to say a couple things. One is that, maybe Brad and I should go get a room and read Gerald Weinberg books to each other &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That one was not written by Gerald.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This has been an amazing conversation and I am so happy that we had the three of you on the show today. What we&#8217;d like to do at the end of an episode is to reflect a conversation that we&#8217;ve had and see what sort of takeaways or calls to action may have come up or things that we want to spend more time thinking about. Rein, do you want to go first and talk about what you&#8217;ve got out of this conversation?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I guess what I got out of it is that these issues go straight up to the top in terms of the philosophical ladder we&#8217;re trying to claim of what do we value, how do we get other people to share our values. It doesn&#8217;t get easier by ignoring that the problem is that difficult and pretending that it&#8217;s just technical.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think for me, I&#8217;ve talked about some of the challenges that I faced in doing the work that I do and trying to be informed by that perspective and I try to be informed by it. There&#8217;s definitely a personal aspect in terms of thinking about how I can be a more effective change agent. Also thinking back on the earlier part of our conversation. I want to reflect more and maybe do more to promote the idea that it&#8217;s responsibility of a technologist to think about the social impact of the technical solutions that they&#8217;re making, whether that means by being better informed and striving to be a generalist or by making sure that we are inclusive in giving force to people with different perspectives and different levels of expertise on our teams to make sure that we&#8217;re addressing problems deeply and not just from want to take your silo. Ashe, what are your thoughts?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have so many. I think that we all need to understand approaching any kind of problem, whether it&#8217;s in technology or in any other field. It requires us to bring this multi-disciplinary approach, understanding how we are looking at a problem ethically, how we&#8217;re looking at it technically and how we&#8217;re looking at it from a human point of view: why do we actually need this, why is this the way that we&#8217;re doing it and what are the potential effects?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that often, we are only looking at what we have simplified as the problem and therefore, creating simplified solutions. I think a lot of people brought up a lot of good points about being much more broad when we&#8217;re looking at where we should be pulling information from and how we should be applying it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How about you, Brad?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like what Ariel said earlier about the science and the laws of nature still exists in the absence of humans. If you look at the science discussion that&#8217;s happening around the world today, it&#8217;s messy and complicated. I guess the answer to why that is, is humans. We&#8217;re the reason it&#8217;s messy and complicated. If we want to advance the frontiers of our understanding of the laws of nature through science, we&#8217;re going to have to figure out how to work better together and have the empathy to understand other people&#8217;s points of view and convince others and ourselves that we can&#8217;t always assume that were right because the whole point of science is to learn and understand.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This has been an absolutely amazing episode and to give people a behind the scenes look, we talked about what we&#8217;re going to talk about at the very beginning as we&#8217;re sort of organizing things and we came up with space cats and burritos. Sadly, we did not touch on burritos but I think some other, perhaps more important topics did get covered. I hope everyone has enjoyed this conversation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you want to continue the conversation, go to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode, pledge at any level and come and talk to Ariel, Ashe and Brad and the panelists about the topics that were brought up. We&#8217;d love to continue the conversation with you. Ashe, Brad, Ariel, thank you so much for being on the show today. It was really amazing. This is definitely one of my favorite episodes and I&#8217;m so pleased you joined us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASHE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks for having me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>BRAD:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, thanks I had a great time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That wraps up Episode 29. We will talk to you all next week.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ariel Waldman: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/arielwaldman"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@arielwaldman</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1452144761/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=1452144761&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=ariewald-20&amp;linkId=P4NWAXDUYI4MU43S"><span style="font-weight: 400;">What&#8217;s It Like in Space?: Stories from Astronauts Who&#8217;ve Been There</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://spacehack.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">spacehack.org</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://sciencehackday.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Science Hack Day</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://arielwaldman.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">arielwaldman.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ashe Dryden: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ashedryden"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@ashedryden</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://alterconf.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">AlterConf</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://joinfundclub.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Fund Club</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span><a href="https://www.ashedryden.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">ashedryden.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Brad Grzesiak: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/listrophy"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@listrophy</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://bendyworks.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Bendyworks</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “The Tale of Space Cat Burritos” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>02:26</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Space Technology and the Cultural Portrayal of Science</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://explorers.gsfc.nasa.gov/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">NASA Explorers Program</span></a></p>
<p><b>08:24</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – The Influence of Science Fiction on the Current Developments in Science</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (NIAC)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.nasa.gov/content/comet-hitchhiker-harvesting-kinetic-energy-from-small-bodies-to-enable-fast-and-low-cost"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Comet Hitchhiker</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Supernatural Horror in Literature By H. P. Lovecraft</span></a></p>
<p><b>14:47 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What is sci-fi telling us about the world we live in now?</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/0765382032"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ariel Waldman: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/arielwaldman"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@arielwaldman</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1452144761/ref=as_li_qf_sp_asin_il_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=1452144761&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=ariewald-20&amp;linkId=P4NWAXDUYI4MU43S"><span style="font-weight: 400;">What&#8217;s It Like in Space?: Stories from Astronauts Who&#8217;ve Been There</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://spacehack.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">spacehack.org</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://sciencehackday.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Science Hack Day</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://arielwaldman.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">arielwaldman.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ashe Dryden: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ashedryden"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@ashedryden</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://alterconf.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">AlterConf</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://joinfundclub.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Fund Club</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span><a href="https://www.ashedryden.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">ashedryden.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Brad Grzesiak: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/listrophy"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@listrophy</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://bendyworks.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Bendyworks</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “The Tale of Space Cat Burritos” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>02:26</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Space Technology and the Cultural Portrayal of Science</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://explorers.gsfc.nasa.gov/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">NASA Explorers Program</span></a></p>
<p><b>08:24</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – The Influence of Science Fiction on the Current Developments in Science</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (NIAC)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.nasa.gov/content/comet-hitchhiker-harvesting-kinetic-energy-from-small-bodies-to-enable-fast-and-low-cost"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Comet Hitchhiker</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Supernatural Horror in Literature By H. P. Lovecraft</span></a></p>
<p><b>14:47 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What is sci-fi telling us about the world we live in now?</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Three-Body-Problem-Cixin-Liu/dp/0765382032"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/code900.jpg"></itunes:image>
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										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/525/episode-029-pempathy-with-ariel-waldman-ashe-dryden-and-brad-grzesiak.mp3" length="39156918" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>01:13:14</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>Episode 028: Brains, Feedback Systems, Demons, and Goats with Janelle Klein</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-028-brains-feedback-systems-demons-and-goats-with-janelle-klein/</link>
					<pubDate>Fri, 14 Apr 2017 15:41:47 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=486</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[In this episode, Janelle Klein, author of Idea Flow, talks about designing releases and best practices, measuring effort, and Agile Fluency.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[In this episode, Janelle Klein, author of Idea Flow, talks about designing releases and best practices, measuring effort, and Agile Fluency.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@janellekz</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://ideaflow.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Idea Flow: How to Measure the Pain in Software Development</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.openmastery.org/author/admin/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Open Mastery</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Goats On Podcasts” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:19</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story</span></p>
<p><b>04:36</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – The Development of Development</span></p>
<p><b>06:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Automated Tests and Mistake Detection</span></p>
<p><b>09:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Designing Releases and Best Practices</span></p>
<p><b>20:13 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">–  “The Code is Better”</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">There is no &#8220;the code is better.&#8221;<br />
There is only &#8220;our experience is better.&#8221; (users and developers)<a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode">@greaterthancode</a> with <a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz">@janellekz</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/852207150764089345">April 12, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>15:08 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Measuring Effort, #CollaborativePain, and The Error Handling Process</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">abstraction: great when it works.<br />
when something breaks it&#8217;s like an egg cracking and all its guts spill out.<a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz">@janellekz</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/852206970945843201">April 12, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://leanpub.com/whysoftwaregetsintrouble"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Why Software Gets In Trouble by Gerald M. Weinberg</span></a></p>
<p><b>33:24 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Discovery and Documentation</span></p>
<p><b>37:44 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Agile Fluency</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.agilefluency.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Agile Fluency Project: Chart Your Agile Pathway</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_Management_Maturity_Grid"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Quality Management Maturity Grid</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Thank you </b><a href="http://twitter.com/quoll"><b>Paula Gearon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p><b>40:42 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Building a Conceptual Model of our Brains with Code</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindsight_bias"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hindsight Bias</span></a></p>
<p><b>51:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Identifying Project Pain: Slicing and Dicing</span></p>
<p><b>57:23 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Change Sizing</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Rein: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gerald M. Weinberg’s Quality Software Management Series</span></p>
<p><b>Janelle: </b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Fifth-Discipline-Practice-Learning-Organization/dp/0385517254"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Fifth Discipline: The Art &amp; Practice of The Learning Organization by Peter M. Senge</span></a></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> The pain that we experience in software development is really cognitive dissonance. </span></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Programming is like summoning a demon.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to Episode 28 of &#8216;Goats on Podcast&#8217;. I&#8217;m Jessica Kerr and I am happy to be here today with Rein Henrichs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And I am happy to be here today with my friend, Sam Livingston-Gray.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, everybody. I&#8217;m pretty sure this is Greater Than Code but let&#8217;s just go with it and we&#8217;re joined today by Janelle Klein. Janelle is a NameNoFluffJustStuff Tour Speaker and author of the book, Idea Flow, a technique for visualizing the friction and flow between a developer and the software, like an EKG that monitors your pain and creates a feedback loop that helps you improve.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> After researching Idea Flow for years, Janelle turned into a hobbyist cognitive scientist, obsessed with the challenge of building a brain and code like you do. After a 17-year career as a developer, consultant and CTO specialized in data-intensive analytics, she&#8217;s now a full time entrepreneur on a crazy mission to bring free mastery level education to every human in the world by conquering generalized AI. Welcome to the show, Janelle.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. Happy to be here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;d like to start the show with your origin story. How did you get to be a superhero?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t know about superhero but when I was growing up, my mom always told me to just follow your dreams and find your passion and to do whatever that thing is that you&#8217;re drawn to in life. When I grew up, I was really into music. I play flute and guitar all through high school. Music was my entire life. Then when I went to college, I went to college to be a professional songwriter. I got in class though and I started to realize what a career in music would be like and I was like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t think I really want to do this.&#8221; It sort of takes the passion in and fun out of it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I was talking to my boyfriend at the time and I was all upset and he was trying to make me feel better. He&#8217;s like, &#8220;Well, let&#8217;s take a class together. That would be fun.&#8221; He&#8217;s looking through the class catalog and he&#8217;s like, &#8220;Oh, assembly programming. That sounds like fun &#8212; X86 assemblies,&#8221; and you got to keep in mind that my only experience with computers at this point was playing King&#8217;s Quest in high school. Since here I am, in this assembly programming class and it&#8217;s like programming my TI-85 in math class. I&#8217;ve got a few basic calculations, I can move some registers around them and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I got this.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then I started thumbing through the textbook and then I found Interrupts and I was so excited like I could switch that computer into graphics mode and make the PC speaker beep and all these awesome things that I could do. I started just reading through the whole book and then making the game BrickOut with the color blocks, a little paddle that moves around with the mouse and completely in assembly, not knowing any other languages out there even existed.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I showed my teacher what I was working on and my teacher is like, &#8220;Why don&#8217;t you just keep showing me what you&#8217;re doing and as long as you do that, you get an A.&#8221; I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I like this class. This is pretty awesome.&#8221; But that&#8217;s when it really hit me of just I can create anything that I can dream. It was like this incredible art form where I could take ideas in my head and dreams that I&#8217;ve always had and I could bring these things to life. One of my new friends I made &#8212; I am trying to remember her last name, Denise &#8212; and she said, &#8220;Software is the closest thing in the world to magic,&#8221; and I thought that was so awesome to just think about yourself as one of the magicians in the world. How awesome is that? We bring ideas to life. It&#8217;s pretty cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of my computer science instructors like to use the metaphor of summoning a demon where he talked about writing a program as being like constructing a summoning circle and if you did not get every detail exactly right, the thing was going to break out of it and kill you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I thought of those break out and attack before. It hasn&#8217;t been good. I generally emerged victorious, though.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, this is totally why I think any story of how you got into development is a superhero origin story.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Pretty much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In your case, you have even more because you started studying the development of development.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I just got fascinated with the problems and we got all of these ideas in our industry about the stuff that&#8217;s supposed to work and following best practices. As long as we follow the right recipe, everything will end up turning out okay and I believe that for a long time. I was like super gung-ho, TDD zealot-type. Then I found myself on this project where we were doing all the right things: CI, unit testing, design reviews, code reviews. We had a religious theme by today&#8217;s standards. This was the days of rational where Agile is this cutting edge thing where we were taking all of our heavy weight processes and heavy discipline and just getting into this new XP thing and I was really into that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then when I was on this project and we ended up basically driving off the rails anyway and our project brought on production three times in a row, it went completely off the rails and it took us a couple years to be able to turn this project around after all of that. In that process of figuring out, what was actually going wrong and what was causing our pain and the data we started measuring running totally counter to a lot of the best practice ideas. It really made me start rethinking how much of what we were doing in the way that we&#8217;re thinking about our problems has to do more with just how we&#8217;ve learned to see goodness in a certain kind of design and just our own cognitive bias influencing how we see the world.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, as programmers, we are perfectly rational creatures. That&#8217;s our superpower, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I guess probably the main thing that I&#8217;ve learned is that our brains don&#8217;t actually operate on rational principles at all. Our entire wiring, powering of our brain is based on emotion. You really see that in the world going on around you, how much emotional [inaudible] affects people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Totally. Janelle, in your book you said that one of the things you learned and one of the things that was holding your team back from releasing and releasing reliably was automated tests?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s kind of funny. We had this mountain of automated tests that we had that everybody is sort of experienced the maintenance burden associated with lots of automation. But the other thing that happens is once we started getting a high degree of noise in the system, it has all these counterintuitive effects and because your brain&#8217;s kind of tune out when you&#8217;re doing stuff that it&#8217;s tedious and we can&#8217;t really help it, it&#8217;s just kind of how we&#8217;re wired. When we start doing these tedious things, we start making assumptions and just greenwashing lots of tests. It isn&#8217;t really feel like you&#8217;re doing that. It&#8217;s just stuff that you start seeing in hindsight of like, &#8220;Oh, I made that bar green and I probably shouldn&#8217;t have,&#8221; and &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>By noise you mean, test failures?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, tests that are failing and nothing&#8217;s actually broken that they just need repair. I call those quote false alarms.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Brittle tests.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But it&#8217;s not necessarily brittle tests exclusively. If you look at the testing pyramid suggestion that we ought to write lots of unit tests and if you work component test and only a few UI tests at the top and then you start looking at what kind of tests that ends up generating, what we tend to do when we think about our tests is what kind of code coverage are we getting and how do we sort of maximize that. The way I think we need to be thinking about it, as our code moves from one state into another state, what are the mistakes that I can potentially introduce during that transition and how do I build a mistake detector that&#8217;s going to help and tell me that when certain types of mistakes are made? It&#8217;s like trying to get the right information to the human being is the challenge.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> You&#8217;ve got the noise thing but you&#8217;ve also got really poor signals where we aren&#8217;t thinking about that flow from one state to another and thinking about the application as validating that works in a static state and then you change it and validate it again, as opposed to how do I detect mistakes in the context of flow. Does that make sense?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s really is fascinating. You used a beautiful phrase in your book that you started to design your releases.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. One of the things that we started doing is designing our releases in a way to reduce risk. As we looked at any particular release as what are the changes that we&#8217;re going to make in the context of that release and what types of functionality you&#8217;re going to be at risk and then we came up with a strategy for mitigating that risk, sometimes you have a particular change in your release that just drives up the risk too much. It could be even that one line of change that is going to take you a month to properly validate. One option is to change the functionality or potentially split it out into a release of its own and designing the releases around your risk profile so it&#8217;s easier to control.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Michelle Brush did a talk at O&#8217;Reilly Software Architecture last week where she mentioned the same thing where they started every release, they would make a grid of what&#8217;s changing and how likely is this to cause a problem and how big is that problem going to be, if it happens. Then building mitigation for any sort of a risk that was either likely to happen or likely to be big, if it does.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">I love your focus on change as opposed to just snapshots as if the code really has meaning in a specific state. The point is that we&#8217;re building a system and therefore, it&#8217;s constantly in flux.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, like the only constant is change, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. The entire focus of XP and Agile in general was this idea of making change easier to deal with.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Stop imagining but there is such a thing as right. No code is ever correct. It&#8217;s just on the road toward better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think the other thing that you start to see a lot is once you start seeing how the change that you write affects other people, you start to realize how biased we are just in believing our code is good because it looks good to us. Then once you see how other people suffer from the design decisions you make, it totally changes your perspective on things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You hope that it does. I&#8217;ve worked with enough people who never got to that stage.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a beautiful, little illustration in your book again, which I totally spent a couple of hours last night reading because as soon as I saw it, I was super fascinated. There&#8217;s a picture of one person with a thought bubble that says, &#8220;Better.&#8221; Next to it, another person with that thought bubble that says, &#8220;Better,&#8221; and a big &#8216;not equal to&#8217; in the middle.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I found that most of the time because our definition of better has been so fuzzy and hard to define in our industry that we&#8217;ve tended to drift toward proxies, which is where best practices come in. If you talk to people about what they believed better to be, it is often better implementing best practices as opposed to better solving the problems. We really have to get in that habit of asking, &#8220;What problem am I trying to solve?&#8221; And just making that a mantra to get out of this solution-focused anchoring. The problem is we don&#8217;t have enough test automation. It&#8217;s a really common thing I hear.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s funny because if you go back to the original introduction of this best practices idea into the software industry, which is largely due to Kent Beck, he was very clear that a best practice lives in a context and you have to apply it in the context for it to be the correct thing to do. I think somehow we&#8217;ve lost that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We grow up focusing on tools &#8212; that&#8217;s what we learn about for the first several years of our career, at least &#8212; and it&#8217;s so easy for us to get into that trap of everything is about the tool and about the solution and it&#8217;s all too easy for us to forget that what matters is what does the user of our system want to do with it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>User experience and then it turns out that we can maximize that by maximizing our experience. Janelle has a particular definition of &#8216;better,&#8217; right? The code is better if we can flow our ideas into it with less friction. Did I get that right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I think the only difference, I would say is from the very beginning of your statement of the code is &#8216;better when&#8217; and the problem I think I have is that I think we need to abandon the code is better as an object or a statement and start shifting to the experience is better and all of our experiences are better, as opposed to assuming that the code has any innate quality of betterness out of context. I think trying to define that into an absolute is so anchored in our head because it&#8217;s what we&#8217;ve done over the last history of software development, that trying to shift out of that paradigm, initially requires a deliberate awareness of those type of anchoring.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s beautiful. There is no, &#8220;The code is better.&#8221; There&#8217;s only, &#8220;Our experience is better.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s kind of like when I was in college, I would spend money on things because I didn&#8217;t have very much money so if I spent it, I wanted to have something that I got to keep. After I got out of college and start working as a developer, I accumulated too many things that I decided that what matters is actually experience and started spending my money on that and I&#8217;m much happier ever since.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s awesome. Things are fun if they give you good experience.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. My experience with things is often that I just have to manage them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, great which gets back into the code is not an asset, it&#8217;s a liability.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re talking about how we&#8217;re not very good at the subjective measurement of time. I agree but I also think that there&#8217;s a problem with the way that we measure effort and that we don&#8217;t really understand where it&#8217;s going so we&#8217;re talking about, let&#8217;s say fixing a bug. How long does it take to fix a bug? Some teams track that. They have an issue tracker. They can tell how long it took from a bug to go from open to resolve. But what does that mean? Where does that time really go? What are the actual steps involved in fixing a bug?</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">It’s more than just reading the bug report and then writing code. There&#8217;s a lot more. There is discovery. There&#8217;s a whole series of steps that go into solving a bug and which one of those are getting the time? What if the most amount of time you spend solving a bug is figuring out which person should take the bug report?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. For me the most valuable step is often that 10 seconds where I&#8217;m talking to somebody else and they say some random thing and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Wait. That&#8217;s it.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Janelle, with your idea, do you have a particular way of dividing up that time?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I&#8217;ve been focusing on creating a model of the problem solving process itself and then measuring the amount of friction in each stage of the problem solving process. With the example of debugging some bug that you have and the first part being having to go and figure out who the bug belongs to, in the Idea Flow map, that period of time would be marked as strategy and the hashtag with collaborate team because it&#8217;s an issue with having to figure out who&#8217;s knowledge and effort this belongs to.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">We’re basically got tools that integrate with IDE and standardized model that works across development because it&#8217;s measuring things that are just part of the problem solving process itself, like cognitive dissonance for example. In general, what I associate with the word pain now is I&#8217;ve done to deliberately to rewire my brain is measuring the duration of cognitive dissonance as pain. You can think of it as diagnostic difficulty. If I&#8217;ve got some unexpected thing that comes up on the screen, how long does it take me from the time that unexpected observation occurs to the time that the problem is resolved.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then one of the things you start seeing is the skyrocketing cost of diagnostic difficulty having to do with the 90% of our software that isn&#8217;t our code but everybody else&#8217;s code, in terms of third party libraries as that one line of magic code that we&#8217;ve optimized for brevity and cyclomatic complexity and whatnot is this abstraction that&#8217;s 100 levels high and it&#8217;s all well and good when that abstraction works fine. But as soon as something breaks, it&#8217;s like an egg that&#8217;s cracking and all of its guts spill out and suddenly you have to understand this conflict picture between cause and effect and that&#8217;s where we&#8217;re losing all of our time now is in diagnostic difficulty.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to unpack a little bit, specifically this error handling process because I think it might be a good example for us to talk about for a while. In a book by Gerald Weinberg called Why Software Gets In Trouble, he describes the process that goes into resolving a failure. It starts with detection &#8212; detecting that there was a failure where failure is defined as a difference between what you experience and what you expected to experience, specifically one that you don&#8217;t like then the fault of the underlying cause of that failure within the system or causes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> He breaks this down into detection, location or isolation, which is matching the failure with the underlying faults that caused it. Resolution is the process that ensures that a fault no longer exists, which could be done by making a change to the code. Classifying the bug as won&#8217;t fix. There are a variety of ways to resolve a bug. Distribution, which is the process of getting the bug report into the hands of the person that is going to eventually fix it. Looking at that as the framework for evaluating your error resolving process, how would you model that within your system?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Interesting. As you&#8217;re going through this list of things, I kept thinking of this is a set of goals to achieve as opposed to a process, by which I would arrive at the result, as sort of like the set of results. If I think about how I go about troubleshooting a particular issue, I think about it as a series of experiments I&#8217;m going to run. I imagine that my code is like a sandwich that I&#8217;ve got electricity going through. I&#8217;ve got some set of behavior that&#8217;s changing and then I&#8217;ve got things that make it difficult to observe what&#8217;s going on and things that make it difficult to kind of manipulate the inputs. I&#8217;m thinking about how do I run an experiment that&#8217;s going to give me a clue that&#8217;s going to help me narrow down the relationship between cause and effect.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think about what are the scope of possibilities and what are the potential clues that I might come up with. I realized there&#8217;s a step of isolation but I see those as a set of goals to achieve and not a process, by which I would arrive at a solution to those things. I don&#8217;t see how I could do those things step by step in that way in my actual work flow.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s fair. I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s a process so much as just a way of classifying the time spent in the process of fixing a bug.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure and maybe that&#8217;s it. It&#8217;s just different than the troubleshooting model I have in my head because the way I break out my metrics is by experimentation cycles. As I measuring haystack size in terms of from the moment you stop staring at the code and decide to start moving into doing stuff, I measure that time from initial changing things and tell the time you run your first executable thing like validating that the thing works to some degree. Then measuring the time as haystack size and then I&#8217;m looking at the characteristics of the experimentation cycles that go into isolating any bugs and problems within that haystack. Then what is the correlation between the inputs and outputs of the experiments you&#8217;re running relative to the nature of the code that you&#8217;ve changed inside this box.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then when we look at diagnostic difficulty, we can look at patterns and the characteristics of experiments and how we can improve observability of what&#8217;s going in the box or make it easier to manipulate inputs, relative to the types of things that seem like we&#8217;re slowing down that process of experimentation but it gives you visibility into things, for example ambiguous clues when you get an output on the screen and there&#8217;s multiple possibilities for how behavior can occur and you make a bad assumption and go down some rabbit hole, whether it&#8217;s non-deterministic behavior or something that&#8217;s just abstracted in a way that creates ambiguity, you start looking at the system in terms of its inputs and outputs from an experimentation perspective, as opposed to the design of the code itself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Often, when you look at the data, a lot of times we&#8217;ve had cases where we&#8217;ve refactored stuff to make the code better and then it looked all neat and modular but the experimentation characteristics ended up adding all this time to troubleshooting because sometimes having with unit test a little part but find ourselves having to integrate in order to find the majority of the mistakes anyway because they were in that integration space which increasing the scope and the difficulty of isolation. You start looking at all the set of problems under a different model.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s interesting. We agree on a larger concept here which is that you can only know what you choose to observe. If you only measure how long it takes to resolve a bug, that&#8217;s all you know. You don&#8217;t know where you spent the time. If you, in addition choose to measure, how long does it take to get a test running then you know something else, you know something more. Instead of just how long does it take to resolve the bug, if you break it down into detect, locate and resolve, then you might learn something surprising which is that it&#8217;s taking your team longer to locate the source of the bug that is to actually write the code to fix it. We both seemed to agree that depends what you measure informs your outcome in some sense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Janelle has as another point there. Janelle, tell me if I got this right. When you&#8217;re looking at breaking down a problem, you&#8217;re not looking to break it down into steps that are goals. You&#8217;re looking to break it down into smaller problems. You can&#8217;t solve a problem until you can do an experiment to find out whether it worked. Whereas, in the bug process, if you break it down into distribute, locate &#8212; these little sub-goals &#8212; you don&#8217;t know whether you succeeded at the first one until you get to the very end of all of that and see if you&#8217;re able to fix the bug.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s an excellent point like based on the problem breakdown thing, you&#8217;re right. It&#8217;s not a breakdown of the problem into smaller problems. It would violate that rule.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It seems more like a retroactive description of what you did.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And maybe if you go through the experimental process enough times, you start to recognize, &#8220;I think I might have just crossed over from this phase into that phase,&#8221; but it doesn&#8217;t necessarily guide you in the moment.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you think you could carve up those things after the fact of how much time you spent in each of those buckets?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s exactly what was done. There are studies where people were asked to track these things and they were given clear instructions as to where the boundaries are.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I see, so the use of it was retroactively looking at your experience that you had about how much time did you spend in each of these buckets estimate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. Correct, so you do the work that you would normally do solving a bug but you marked down times where you spent in these different buckets. When you&#8217;re done, you can go back and look at the breakdown of where you spent the time and it was often surprising where the time was being spent. But it is different from explicitly doing experiments in the way that you&#8217;re describing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think the thing is that I found that a lot of these things that we do in hindsight bias, we basically look at the problems after the facts and we think, &#8220;This was clearly a problem. I should do better next time,&#8221; and then we believe that because we thought about it that will mean that we automatically do better next time. In reality, when we&#8217;re in the moment of that decision, in order for the past experiences to come to mind, that situational recognition has to trigger the memories of our past experiences for those things to actually come to mind.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">If everything we&#8217;re doing is in hindsight bias, what happens is based on hypotheses, based on the predictions that we&#8217;re making in hindsight bias as opposed to reflecting on the experiences and stuff that happened in the moment and then linking those things situationally to past experience. For example, if I just categorize those things and went, &#8220;That really took us a long time to isolate those bugs.&#8221; What do I do with that information? How do I know that the things that I&#8217;m doing are going to actually make the situation any better? How do I even know if, after I go and see those metrics and make improvements to make the bugs easier to isolate that the things that I did even did any good?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That would be where this process of experimentation would come in. The thing here is knowing that there is such a thing as the time it takes to look at a bug on, which you can spend the attention to improve it. If you only measure the time it takes to resolve a bug as one thing, that process is actually composed of multiple other smaller things you do and you may actually be good at one of them and then trying to improve that thing would be a waste of time, compared to trying to improve some other thing. But then the process of improving that thing you&#8217;ve decided to spend your time on does benefit from experimentation and I think the other things that you were talking about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Like the part where you learned that we actually don&#8217;t spend much time waiting for test so optimizing for test execution speed is not nearly as useful as optimizing for what was at the clarity of the tests.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is definitely analogous to that. It actually, for a lot of organizations, takes longer to locate the source of a failure, what part of the code or what part of the infrastructure is causing the failure than it does to actually fix that thing once you find it so if you&#8217;re spending your time &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; a haystack size.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. If you&#8217;re spending your time improving the time it takes you to fix a bug in the code once you&#8217;ve found it, you&#8217;re optimizing for the wrong variable.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>From your experience, do you see people like developers not being aware that there&#8217;s these multiple aspects of things? For example that thinking time dominates troubleshooting more than fixing the bug. Seems like a thing that managers might not understand but developers, I would think would be a generally understood thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In my experience is that there&#8217;s been a poor distribution of this information throughout the organization. For example, developers might not know how long it took the bugs to land on their desk from when it was reported.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I could see that for sure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>They may have some insight into where they&#8217;re spending their time when they fix the bug, but it wouldn&#8217;t be measured. It would just be intuition.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, it sounds like if you&#8217;re doing hindsight estimates that it&#8217;s going to be intuition based, anyway.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m not sure. This is live. You do it as you&#8217;re working it. You report the time so you say, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to start doing location now,&#8221; and then you said, &#8220;Okay, I stop location and I&#8217;m moving on to resolving.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay. I&#8217;m sorry, I didn&#8217;t realize that. I was thinking &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is just time tracking but breaking it down into more discrete and sort of task oriented reporting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I apologize. I misunderstood that thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s all right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I got the same but it&#8217;s fine. Now we know.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It seems similar in that way, in terms of you need to know if you want to figure out why your testing process has a lot of friction. You need to know which part has the friction, specifically and the more specific you can get, the better you can do in targeting your improvements.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, Janelle has different accesses. You could read the book. To our listeners, the Idea Flow book is super fascinating, the way she breaks it down into smaller problem solving cycles. A lot of it, I noticed came down to building a conceptual model of how the software works like your team having a model of how the software works&#8230; Go on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was just going to say, one of the things that we noticed was how much time and how many mistakes that we&#8217;re making because people had misunderstandings of how the software worked so we spent all this time working on test automation and trying to get the test to somehow catch the bugs. Ultimately, ended up solving a lot of our quality problems by building a data dictionary and sitting around a room with a whiteboard and just hashing out vocabulary and stuff, like the effect that it had on improving the code in the conceptual models to the team which just mind-blowing and it took a day, as opposed to the year of test automation that we did to solve a lot of our quality problems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A day? Wow! That sounds so practical.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What if for hackathon day, we instead hack on it &#8212; universal language.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Understanding the domain, what use of that could possibly have?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s one of my skills that need to get taught. I think it&#8217;s largely gone out the window with the shift from heavyweight processes to, &#8220;Agile [inaudible]. We don&#8217;t need to draw architecture diagrams anymore,&#8221; and all the stuff that kind of gets thrown out. I think of all the most practical things, it&#8217;s understanding how to build an ubiquitous language, glossary, ER diagram, just those basic skills of understanding how to hash that out with your team and in the importance of it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just want to go on a real quick rant here which is that you talked about throwing away all this heavy process and going to Agile [inaudible]. But the only reason that Agile works at all is that it&#8217;s about this idea of gathering information and using it to create meaningful feedback and then acting on that feedback to change your process. So many teams adopt scrum and the idea of making your reporting visible to your upper management structure but don&#8217;t ever actually focus on this idea of using feedback and they just keep repeating the same mistakes over and over and over again.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it is worse than that because if you think about what we do in retrospectives, we sit around and we start with a question like, &#8220;What are the biggest problems that we need to solve?&#8221; And then we started brainstorming and coming up with a big lists and then once we&#8217;ve got this big list of improvements, we just start chipping away our improvements for months. What happens in this meeting, brainstorming about the most complex question ever, what are the biggest, most important problems that we ought to improve? What comes to mind, again cognitive bias is what problems do I feel the most intensely about? Then all of these different biases come to mind. There&#8217;s those unit tests that you feel like you should have written and you feel really guilty about so that stuff comes to mind. Sunk cost bias of us having all these tests and things that we&#8217;ve invested all this energy and has problems with it that once we invest in that, we want to fix it.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">There&#8217;s just so many things that make all the stuff come to mind that isn&#8217;t necessarily in correlation with the most important things and then we go and say, &#8220;We&#8217;re doing feedback and science and Agile and improving,&#8221; and we end up spending tons of time improving all of the stuff that doesn&#8217;t make any difference and we just get caught in this cycle of ritual. Like all these things that we&#8217;re doing in Agile have just lost their meaning. It just makes me miss the days of XP when the things that we&#8217;re doing about we&#8217;re about hardcore discipline and learning and discovery and these words used to have meaning.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wonder if back in the day when it was about hardcore discipline and discovery, that was the particular things we needed in that context and now, we need to discover something different.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Well, I&#8217;ve seen this happened in a lot of different areas where there&#8217;s this pendulum that swings multiple ways for a while and then every time it crosses over the middle again, it&#8217;s like, &#8220;Wait a minute. We need to have a paradigm shift and shift to a mode of principles.&#8221; There&#8217;s all these systems that seem to have that same quality as an oscillating pendulum that eventually shifts into something different, then eventually we go, &#8220;Oh, there&#8217;s principles.&#8221; I think at some level, we need some kind of concrete system to anchor around principle, as opposed to getting stuck on best practices at one end of the pendulum or the other.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We need unit tests for practices.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, the solution is more unit tests like the hammer for every problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, it&#8217;s an experiment. Anything that we choose to do in our retro that we need to fix this, how are we going to know that work? How are we going to know that help?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, but we have no feedback loop. That&#8217;s been a challenge.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right a feedback loop at its best is, &#8220;What&#8217;s our bias next week?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And the documentation is an example of the pendulum swing. We clearly had way too much internal documentation and now, we&#8217;ve swung to none and can we get back toward the middle already?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So the question isn&#8217;t, &#8220;Should we have documentation or not?&#8221; It&#8217;s, &#8220;Which documentation is useful in our context right now?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;d love that. In this moment, what does I mean right now, what is the question I need to ask so I can make the right decision this moment?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For me, it&#8217;s usually what yak do I need to shave so that right now, I don&#8217;t have to experience this pain again.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wonder if every organization can adopt these changes or if it&#8217;s more successful for a certain organizations, depending on their development in terms of incorporating other sorts of feedback into their process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So that some organizations would be more mature than others? Or &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There are organizations that don&#8217;t even incorporate feedback loops into the process at all. There are organizations that are pretty advanced in the way that they incorporate feedback loops but they haven&#8217;t gotten over these biases that you&#8217;re talking about. From my experience, there is something of a linear track that organizations get on in terms of increased levels of competence. You have to start by incorporating feedback cycles about the product you&#8217;re building and then you can incorporate feedback cycles about the process you&#8217;re using to build it. But my experience is that trying to jump ahead isn&#8217;t always very successful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It makes sense so you can only go meta one level at a time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s I think a much more succinct way of saying what I was saying. I guess my question is where does an organization have to be culturally &#8212; in terms of their progress in these other areas &#8212; to be ready to adopt to these techniques?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a really, really awesome question. I&#8217;d say probably the biggest handicap to adoption has nothing to do with the ability to use the techniques themselves so much as the vulnerability issue. There are organizations where developers are in a lot of pain from just constant, not use the word abuse but in some cases, I would definitely call it abusive. But sometimes a lot of the abusive environments when you find out what&#8217;s going on, it&#8217;s more ignorance than anything else. But that said, being vulnerable and feel like, if you collect data that is going to be used against you, is a tough challenge.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m so glad that you&#8217;re talking about this. One of the things that characterizes these sort of lower function in organizations is the way they use blame.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. I shudder whenever somebody says the phrase &#8216;root cause&#8217;, &#8216;we need to find a cause of this&#8217;.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Where root cause means, &#8220;Where were we when we decided that we had spent enough time trying to figure this out?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Rein and possibly our listeners, one interesting way of framing this organizational question that I have seen and it seems really useful is to say the idea that Jim Shore and Diana Larsen have been working on for a couple of years, which is this idea of Agile Fluency. They have this model of different phases that an organization will go through in its adoption of Agile and the characteristics of the work that they do and the way that they do it. You can look it up, just search for Agile Fluency, Jim Shore, Diana Larsen and you&#8217;ll find some of the stuff they&#8217;ve written about it. It&#8217;s quite useful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s interesting to me that this concept keeps reappearing back in, I think the 70s or maybe the early-80s, Philip B Crosby created a concept of the quality management maturity grid and he rank organizations on a maturity scale that started with these different cultural patterns that they work under, starting with one that he called &#8216;variable&#8217;, which is basically the point at which developers realized that they can&#8217;t go at it alone and that they need managers but they still hate managers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[inaudible] on that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This concept of what are the levels of maturity or the levels of capability, I&#8217;m not a fan of maturity necessarily because I think that if you were writing a shell script to manage your whatever on your machine, you don&#8217;t need this big Agile process. You can have a relatively immature process and still be fine. I think it&#8217;s more about competence or how challenging are the problems you want to solve. But anyway, this idea of these different levels has been around for a long time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;re saying is that maturity has a context just like everything else?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, maturity is sort of a loaded term but I don&#8217;t think it is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, it&#8217;s very judgmental.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Speaking of context, do we have a listener shout out today?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wait! How does that have anything to do with context?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is the context of our listener shout out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Very well. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well played.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Listeners, we are a 100% listener-supported show. If you like what we&#8217;re doing and you want to do more of it, you can donate to us at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. A donation at any level will get you into our Slack community and if you donate at the $10 a month level, you will get a shout out at least once on the show. Today&#8217;s shout out goes to Paula Gearon. She&#8217;s @Quoll on Twitter and she describes herself there as Miffy to her friends, a semantic web programmer, Clojurer, physics enthusiast, martial artist, triathlete, musician, spouse and parent but not necessarily in that order. I spoke with Paula a few times in our Slack community and she&#8217;s got some really interesting things to say. If you want somebody else cool to follow on Twitter, go check her out. Now, back to our show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. We talked about the conceptual model that we need in our brains but Janelle is building a conceptual model of our brains in code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I&#8217;ve got a long way to go on this project. We&#8217;re just getting started but I&#8217;ve been working on the architecture of how to do it for several years now of basically synthesizing a bunch of research, cross discipline and cognitive science and tangent arenas and figuring out how to model the recursive metal loop structure of consciousness.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How many levels of meta do you have to get to from that one?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One more.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s like the invention of metaprogramming for [inaudible]. Once we invent the meta, it becomes this recursive meta thing in the same way of abstraction works in code. You can keep doing it over and over again and each innovated level of abstraction, it takes some thinking to figure out how to implement in another layer but once you have the ability to go meta, you can just go meta-meta.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Now, I want to frame cognitive biases as leaky abstractions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>They totally are. We&#8217;ve got a category in our brain, we&#8217;ve got an abstraction somewhere in there and it&#8217;s not accurate as no model is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I was thinking about this morning. Some of them like the unit completion bias, this is the idea that for example, we are strongly biased to finish the food that is on our plate even if it&#8217;s more food than we actually need right now. I mean, that one has a clear evolutionary basis in that. If you are inclined to stop eating just as you get full, then you might not survive until you find your next trove of food. But there are other ones that I don&#8217;t know where the heck they come from.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Now, you mentioned hindsight bias earlier, would you define that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. It&#8217;s when something looks preventable in hindsight that in the context of the moment of the decision is actually not preventable.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Ah, yeah. We tend to judge decisions based on their outcomes as opposed to the information available at the time. The latter takes a lot more empathy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, more so when we&#8217;re talking about other people than versus ourselves, which is another bias.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How much do you hate brains after thinking about all of this? Or rather how much do you hate your own brain after thinking about all this?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How can anyone hate brain? The most fascinating thing in the world is ourselves, right? You just like to think about how cool brains are.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s true but as somebody with ADHD, there are times where I wish my brain worked a little bit differently than it does.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I found that I&#8217;ve just sort of learned to roll with it, even just in the context of this conversation, I&#8217;ve had times where I get excited on a thread that my brain goes somewhere else and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Oh, lost my thought.&#8221; That happens to me a lot. What I found is that there are some things that I&#8217;m really good at because my brain is sort of wired weird. I&#8217;m really good at connecting metaphors and being able to synthesize across totally different domains. Yet at the same time, there are some basics functioning stuff, I really, really struggle with so I&#8217;ve had to find friends and people to fill in my gaps in life for things that I&#8217;m not good at and then I kind of roll with what my brain wants to do and be good with it. We all get dealt a different hand of cards and the body we live in is a constraint so might as well enjoy yourself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s important to recognize your own constraints and they&#8217;re not the same as everybody else is. Also, let yourself be bad at the things you&#8217;re bad at. I figured I need to sort out my weaknesses exactly far enough to hand it off to someone else.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can I ask you a question?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Of course.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yay! Once you come up with a model for this system that you&#8217;re working with, you understand the pain points or friction points where you have a good model of the system, how do you decide what to change when you&#8217;re trying to improve it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In addition to the picture of pain, which I basically found wasn&#8217;t enough and when you start measuring the pain, you still have the same problem of how do I improve? This ultimately turned into a bunch of principles about what are the likely causal factors of pain in these circumstances. This is where I started talking about the thickness of the code sandwiched as the cause of diagnostic difficulty and if you can attribute something to that model like in observability problem in your code sandwich, then you&#8217;ve got a more tractable thing to do in an experiment to run then to see if improving observability in this way reduce your diagnostic cycles.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I also focus on feedback that&#8217;s risk associated. Part of it is you try stuff and learn. But a lot of it ends up, after you start to start to see the patterns of what works which are largely informed by the body of knowledge that we have in our industry around best practices but kind of getting back to first principles of those things of like continuous integration and problem breakdown and agility and usability and all these things that we&#8217;ve largely learned, you start seeing and learning the situational context and all the nuance to how all that applies and then have a feedback loop so you can tell if the things that you&#8217;re doing actually made things better or worse. Then that kind of helps you to clarify the situational context roles around that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like that you mentioned risk, for a number of reasons but one is that it&#8217;s a good example of the importance of my most basic heuristic for making changes, which is you have to do better than random chance.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;d like to do better than random chance?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You might think that would be easy but I&#8217;ll give you a good example of when it&#8217;s not. Let&#8217;s talk about deciding which risks to take on in the project in terms of some features or bugs that will be harder or more risky to solve or could have bigger downside impact. We have a natural tendency as human beings, I think most of us to tackle the easier stuff first &#8212; the low-hanging fruit &#8212; get that out of the way. But if you do that what you&#8217;re actually doing is making the project more risky over time, where if you were just to allot those decisions randomly and randomly picked a thing to do, you would spread that risk out over time. A literal example, where doing something randomly would be a better choice than the actual choice that you&#8217;re making. Not you, obviously but the general.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is a property of complex systems. There&#8217;s simple systems that you can see very clearly the cause and effect and then there&#8217;s complicated systems that are so random like molecules in a room that don&#8217;t affect each other. Then there&#8217;s something about complex organized systems &#8212; someone on Twitter, please remind me of this phrase &#8212; that there&#8217;s a zillion parts and they affect each other. Like Rein said, you&#8217;re not going to get complex adaptive. I don&#8217;t now but you&#8217;re not going to get random chance. You&#8217;re likely to get something a lot less predictable than that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, you&#8217;re sort of talking about our chaotic systems, I think maybe, where actions have unexpected effects.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, chaotic path dependent ones as opposed to actual random ones like the molecules.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Anyway, when I&#8217;m deciding what do I want to do to change the system to improve it, one of the questions I ask is what if I made a random decision? Could that work? Sometimes it actually can and the next question is if I&#8217;m going to make an intentional decision, it has to do better than that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting that you chose that example of sorting for low risk versus randomly selecting risk. One of the things that I&#8217;ve slowly been learning over the past 20 years or so is this idea of that I will be better off if I try to identify the highest risk part of the system first and try to work on that so I can mitigate that risk, and only then will I know if it&#8217;s worth pursuing the rest of the thing. I don&#8217;t always remember to apply it. Sometimes, I just have habits or I have too much fear and I go back and I work on the little things that I feel like I&#8217;m safe dealing with. But more and more, I&#8217;m starting to recognize that I have to start with the greatest risk.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s interesting, front loading risk is actually a good strategy for a number of reasons. One is that the overall risk goes down because the most risky things are no longer there so the remaining things are less risky. The other is that if things do go bad, you have more time to correct them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or you can abort more quickly without spending as much money and resources on it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, so it turns out that the strategy we choose intuitively is actually the pessimal strategy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Did you said, &#8220;The pessimal?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As opposed to optimal.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Pessimal.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As like optimist / pessimist.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As opposed to whack-a-mole?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. That will do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Which is also how we usually work. Janelle, you said something about, going back to the first principles of best practices which there&#8217;s a lot of buzz words in there, does that mean getting back to why the best practices are good in the first place?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I was going to say yes but it&#8217;s the why behind why we came up with the best practices. In the context of when these things were applied, why did they work and how do we replicate the why? Even if we don&#8217;t replicate the best practices.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I again, have to bring up Kent Beck because what he described patterns was as a resolution to a specific set of tensions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and it&#8217;s interesting. Many years ago, I was listening to a really interesting interview with Kent about his writing the book Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns and he said that the way he wrote the book was essentially he would sit down and he would write a line of code. Then he would think about why he wrote that line of code that way and sometimes spend three or four hours teasing out all of the various factors that went into that and the result, essentially was this book.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There is a certain level of&#8230; I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;ve used the right word there but think that whatever decision I happen to make in the moment is the best way to do something is interesting. I think in the book, I love the patterns. I just love that was his concept which was whatever I did was the best thing to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or if it wasn&#8217;t, what would be better, right? but I think it would take a lot of humility and honesty with oneself to go through that process, to have that sort of level of meta awareness of first off why did they do that and then yes to address the question that you raise, Rein of was that the right thing to do, and if not, why not?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t think that Kent Beck has a problem with &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. Yes, that&#8217;s true.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like, maybe we could drill down a bit deeper into &#8212; maybe the answer here is to read the book &#8212; what is this process of identifying the pain in a project like? What do you do? What are the actual steps?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The tooling integrates with your IDE environment and measures your pain in the context of an experience. Then process-wise, before the test starts, spend 15 minutes going for a walk, one of the people on the team is doing the task, the other person is the inquisitor that ask questions and helps to dig into risk and help thinks through the risks. Then come up with kind of a rough initial strategy: what you&#8217;re planning to do and a plan to mitigate the risk and then do the task and measure your experience.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">Then after the task, do the same thing going on a 15-minute reflection walk and look at the initial risk that you set out to mitigate versus what actually happened and where the pain points were coming from in that context. Then tagging the particular incidences with hashtags and note that describe like what the causes were, what could be better, what suggested refactorings might help with improving the development experience for that, question that you want to ask yourself next time to try and think of things that you didn&#8217;t think of this time. It&#8217;s trying to get out of that kind of hindsight bias by putting actual actionable things forward.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then if you have for example, an improvement idea, say for example you want to refactor the code because you believe it&#8217;s going to have this sort of effect on usability for an upcoming story, how can we run a what I call, prefactoring experiment where you basically has front load the little refactoring part to be able to see what that experience is going to be like in the context of that actual change so you can learn a bit about it. After you start tagging all these things, you can add up the different problems by tag type and get a feel for where your problems are and then use that as guidance for driving improvement. You kind of slice and dice and aggregate things in different ways.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s definitely situational context involved with things but the nice thing is since all of the metrics are measuring a deviation from a norm, from how much risk you&#8217;re accumulating in terms of frequency and magnitude, it&#8217;s really easy to aggregate the data and then slice and dice by primary dimensions, which all written up in the book about what&#8217;s slice and dice-able model-wise but we&#8217;ve got it boiled down so that you can actually make statistical models and do statistical process control on developer experience data, which is what we&#8217;re building the tools around to be able to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is super fascinating. When you slice and dice, do you compare it to more data from your own team or developers in general?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s interesting because it&#8217;s definitely in general within your own team, to an extent but there&#8217;s a lot of things that are fairly generalizable that we&#8217;re looking at aggregating data in much larger scale for. For example, we share a whole lot of the same infrastructure and libraries and cross what is the learning curve of Angular 2. I&#8217;m learning that right now. It would be nice to have, for example as opposed to having a problem and your only option out there being trying to find something on Stack Overflow, you&#8217;re trying to evaluate learning curves or the problems that people have run into in the past and having all of the experiences and problems and bugs that people ran to, all cataloged in a big database so you can just search for Angular 2 and get an overview of learning curve and amount of friction involved.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s really fascinating.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or we could have a heat map of API documentation where people were like, &#8220;This is annoying. This doesn&#8217;t make sense,&#8221; and then I could look at, it&#8217;ll just show up in red where the bad documentation is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m sorry, I know you said &#8216;heat map&#8217; but it kind of sounded like &#8216;hate map&#8217; but I like that too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, let&#8217;s go with that. That&#8217;s good. Maybe I could trademark that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting that we could compare developer experience across libraries, across tools. You can also do it across changing techniques within your team or try to retro.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. There&#8217;s definitely some statistical significance questions in there on how you kind of slice and dice and break up the data but it seems like with the type of things that you need scale for, you be able to get statistical significance in scale without having so much noise in there that you can&#8217;t interpret the results.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">For example, if you were looking at learning curves, you have to factor in a lot of other kinds of contextual things to be able to, for example how long have you been working with this framework already. How significant impact on what your experiences with it at that moment. You&#8217;re working on something unfamiliar or familiar, you&#8217;re going to see something totally different.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, there&#8217;s those different definitions of better again.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you have anything on change sizing? What I mean by that is how big of a change or how many things should you change at once?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Haystacks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Haystacks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sounds like haystacks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s one of those things that is a gray-relative to the kind of thing that you&#8217;re doing. In general, we want to keep haystack small. I think it&#8217;s a pretty good principle. That said, I think there&#8217;s a matter of practicality to that and that batch size creates efficiency to some degree. If I&#8217;m changing something and there&#8217;s a whole bunch of other effects that I&#8217;m not going to lose that ability to see cause and effect, I&#8217;d say that&#8217;s probably the best guidance I could give on haystack sizes: how it&#8217;s going to affect your ability to experiment and track down isolate &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m always looking for better mental models for this because one of the things that I&#8217;ve noticed is that the teams that need the most help, you often have to make the smallest changes because their systems are so chaotic that it&#8217;s hard to predict or evaluate a change. That&#8217;s all I had about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As a temporary reflections?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Okay, I&#8217;m going to do my reflection. I mentioned earlier in the show a book by Gerald Weinberg and what originally happened was he wrote this giant tome on what he called Quality Software Management and his publisher was like, &#8220;That&#8217;s 1500 pages or something. We can&#8217;t publish that,&#8221; so he ended up splitting it up into, I think six or seven books, all under the heading of Quality Software Management and there were about systems thinking, understanding feedback mechanisms, the topic of resulting bugs that I mentioned it&#8217;s just one part of a book on understanding why software fails.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">All the books are great but what they mostly point out for me is that this problem has been around as long as there has been software and it keeps showing up. People write these books and I don&#8217;t know what the problem is. Maybe we need to actually read the books, maybe that&#8217;s the problem. But this problem has been around for a long time. I&#8217;m really excited to see new work in this area. I think that the concepts in your book are fascinating and are quite different.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In some ways, they&#8217;re very complimentary but in some ways quite different from the concepts in this book. I think you could read your book and then also read these books and get a good, broad overview of how we&#8217;ve been thinking about these problems for a long time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>On that theme of plugging other people&#8217;s books, there was one book that, again was written 25 years ago by Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline: The Art &amp; Practice of The Learning Organization. It&#8217;s another whole area that is so rich with incredible knowledge that is very applicable to software development of the discipline itself of learning and codifying knowledge and sharing it with others and being able to think together as a team. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s one of those books that fundamentally got me obsessed with this whole learning discipline dynamic of figuring out how to pull off what sounds like organizational utopia. Yet, when I talk to developers at conferences, almost nobody has read this book. The Fifth Discipline needs to be in the realm of software stuff on everybody&#8217;s reading list.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s exactly what Gerald Weinberg books were for me when I discovered them 20 years after they had been written.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s so funny, I was actually just about to jump in with a recommendation for The Fifth Discipline. I should probably go re-read it. It&#8217;s been long enough that I&#8217;ve lost a fair bit of it but for our listeners who may not have heard of it, this was described to me as the Systems Thinking 101 textbook. What I remember getting out of it, the first time I read it was it has this really interesting visual language for describing complex systems with multiple different feedback loops so that you can get a handle on what&#8217;s happening and maybe use that understanding to figure out what might be the most effective thing to change next.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">But going back to the conversation, I think my takeaway is I&#8217;m going to have to listen to it about three or four more times to make sure I get everything. But one thing that really struck me as we were going through was this idea that the pain that we experience in software developments is really cognitive dissonance. That really rings true to me and it&#8217;s really useful reminder for me to, maybe stop and think the next time I&#8217;m going, &#8220;God damn it,&#8221; and stop and try to unpack exactly what it is that I&#8217;m feeling because as humans, we have this tendency to resolve cognitive dissonance in the fastest way possible, which is almost never the most effective way but that&#8217;s just what we do. That was a really good reminder to me. Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One thing that came out today and was important in Janelle&#8217;s book was about how important it is to have an accurate model of the system we&#8217;re building in your head. I&#8217;d like Sam&#8217;s description of programming as like summoning a demon, &#8220;If you don&#8217;t get the incantation just right, it&#8217;s going to jump out the circle and eat you like a goat,&#8221; and that conceptual model is like in order to summon it even correctly, you have to hold it in your mind just right. Yet, to summon a really big demon like a system that is big and complicated and does all the stuff that we want our software to do these days, you have to have a whole team of people holding that demon in our minds and it has to be sufficiently accurate in all of them and that&#8217;s really hard to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The only way we can know whether we are all holding the same demon in our mind before we activate the summoning and it eats all of us is to do this little experiments. We have to devise ways of knowing, whether what we&#8217;re doing is actually having the effect we want. One fascinating thing about Janelle&#8217;s book is that we can ask those questions, we can do those experiments on ourselves, not just on the code. As we get better at it, well as we do more these experiments, then we get the demon more cohesive in all of our minds and then we really get faster without the scary danger.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m glad that Sam and I were both muted earlier when we were talking because we&#8217;re laughing because you should now be awarded for your goat-shenanigans.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Baaa &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, fine. That&#8217;s funny.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The goat thing, it wasn&#8217;t expected today but there it is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s really important that we give our listeners a way to find out more about your work, Janelle.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JANELLE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>All right. My book is available on Leanpub.com/IdeaFlow, website: OpenMastery.org, Twitter: @JanelleKZ. I think all of those will provide links to more stuff that people can read if their interested in finding out more.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Fantastic. Thank you to all of our listeners and we will see you on the next episode of Greater Than Code. Maybe also on Patreon and on our Patreon-only Slack.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@janellekz</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://ideaflow.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Idea Flow: How to Measure the Pain in Software Development</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.openmastery.org/author/admin/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Open Mastery</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Goats On Podcasts” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:19</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story</span></p>
<p><b>04:36</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – The Development of Development</span></p>
<p><b>06:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Automated Tests and Mistake Detection</span></p>
<p><b>09:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Designing Releases and Best Practices</span></p>
<p><b>20:13 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">–  “The Code is Better”</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">There is no &#8220;the code is better.&#8221;<br />
There is only &#8220;our experience is better.&#8221; (users and developers)<a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode">@greaterthancode</a> with <a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz">@janellekz</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/852207150764089345">April 12, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>15:08 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Measuring Effort, #CollaborativePain, and The Error Handling Process</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">abstraction: great when it works.<br />
when something breaks it&#8217;s like an egg cracking and all its guts spill out.<a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz">@janellekz</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/852206970945843201">April 12, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://leanpub.com/whysoftwaregetsintrouble"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Why Software Gets In Trouble by Gerald M. Weinberg</span></a></p>
<p><b>33:24 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Discovery and Documentation</span></p>
<p><b>37:44 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Agile Fluency</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.agilefluency.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Agile Fluency Project: Chart Your Agile Pathway</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_Management_Maturity_Grid"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Quality Management Maturity Grid</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Thank you </b><a href="http://twitter.com/quoll"><b>Paula Gearon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p><b>40:42 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Building a Conceptual Model of our Brains with Code</span></p>
]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Janelle Klein: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@janellekz</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://ideaflow.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Idea Flow: How to Measure the Pain in Software Development</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.openmastery.org/author/admin/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Open Mastery</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Goats On Podcasts” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:19</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story</span></p>
<p><b>04:36</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – The Development of Development</span></p>
<p><b>06:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Automated Tests and Mistake Detection</span></p>
<p><b>09:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Designing Releases and Best Practices</span></p>
<p><b>20:13 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">–  “The Code is Better”</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">There is no &#8220;the code is better.&#8221;<br />
There is only &#8220;our experience is better.&#8221; (users and developers)<a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode">@greaterthancode</a> with <a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz">@janellekz</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/852207150764089345">April 12, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>15:08 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Measuring Effort, #CollaborativePain, and The Error Handling Process</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">abstraction: great when it works.<br />
when something breaks it&#8217;s like an egg cracking and all its guts spill out.<a href="https://twitter.com/janellekz">@janellekz</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/852206970945843201">April 12, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://leanpub.com/whysoftwaregetsintrouble"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Why Software Gets In Trouble by Gerald M. Weinberg</span></a></p>
<p><b>33:24 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Discovery and Documentation</span></p>
<p><b>37:44 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Agile Fluency</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.agilefluency.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Agile Fluency Project: Chart Your Agile Pathway</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_Management_Maturity_Grid"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Quality Management Maturity Grid</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Thank you </b><a href="http://twitter.com/quoll"><b>Paula Gearon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p><b>40:42 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Building a Conceptual Model of our Brains with Code</span></p>
]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Jenelle.jpg"></itunes:image>
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					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>01:05:28</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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					<title>Episode 027: Hackathons and Flirting with Failure with Rachel Katz</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-27-hackathons-and-flirting-with-failure-with-rachel-katz/</link>
					<pubDate>Fri, 07 Apr 2017 20:57:04 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=475</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Rachel Katz, of AngelHack, talks about hackathons and the value of celebrating glorious failure and responding stress and pressure.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Rachel Katz, of AngelHack, talks about hackathons and the value of celebrating glorious failure and responding stress and pressure.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rachel Katz: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/hazeltrack"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@hazeltrack</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://angelhack.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">AngelHack</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Plotting the Rebellion” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:39</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story and Superpowers</span></p>
<p><b>03:05</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Getting Hooked on Hackathons</span></p>
<p><b>04:42 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Corporate Hackathons; Making Hackathons Accessible and Inclusive</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/2017/01/11/episode-015-zuri-hunter/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greater Than Code Episode 015: Zuri Hunter as Queen of Hackathons</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://datahack4fi.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">DataHack4FI</span></a></p>
<p><b>09:38 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Organizing Hackathons</span></p>
<p><b>12:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Non-programmers and Hackathons; Bringing in Diverse Perspectives</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I&#8217;ll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.” ~Jamie Zawinski</span></i></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.codedoc.co/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Code: Debugging the Gender Gap</span></a></p>
<p><b>22:46 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Building Things for Others, Leadership Roles, Group Dynamics, and Men vs Women</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://info.thoughtworks.com/ctrl-alt-delete.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ctrl Alt Delete Hate Hackathon</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://ladyproblemshackathon.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lady Problems Hackathon</span></a></p>
<p><b>35:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Overnight Hackathons vs Non-Overnight Hackathons</span></p>
<p><b>36:38 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Value of Celebrating Glorious Failure and Responding to Stress and Pressure</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passion"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Benjamin Zander: The transformative power of classical music</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> [TED Talk] </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Talking about hackathons is talking about all kinds of other issues.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Make room and seek out non-developers.</span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bJNw91QyyM"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Benjamen Zander: Leadership on Display</span></a></p>
<p><b>Rachel:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Show up, contribute, and listen.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Welcome everyone to Episode 27 of &#8216;Plotting the Rebellion&#8217;. My name is Astrid Countee and I&#8217;m here today with my guest and friend, Sam Livingston-Gray.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, I&#8217;m just a guest now, but at least I&#8217;m a friend too. So, thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want everyone to feel special, Sam.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Why, thank you. I do feel special. Also here to be special is Rein Henricks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And super special thanks for asking and our special guest &#8212; see what I did there &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I do indeed.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; is Rachel Katz. Rachel works for AngelHack, the world&#8217;s largest developer ecosystem where she oversee social impact and diversity initiatives through their hackathons and HACKcelerators. This is included the Lady Problems Hackathon, the Ctrl Alt Delete Hate Hackathon and the Global Code for Impact Challenge in 63 countries last year. She lives in San Francisco where you can find her complaining regularly that the bagels just won&#8217;t ever be as good as New York City, which I think is fair.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s why I had avocado toast this morning, like a true Californian.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What was it, sourdough toast?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>At my house, we&#8217;ve been experimenting with fermentation so it was kind of a sourdough but it was more of like a whole wheat with a bunch of different types of flour and yeast.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, hipster toast. Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Fancy pants toast. Awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, it&#8217;s not fancy because it&#8217;s [inaudible] and didn&#8217;t arise so it&#8217;s more like hipster-I-don&#8217;t-know-what. Anyway, I&#8217;m not here to talk about bread but very serious about bread.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Rachel, why don&#8217;t you tell us your origin story and how you got your superpowers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m not sure how far back to go&#8230;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Beginning of time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Let&#8217;s see. my first experience with interacting with people as it relates to computers was &#8212; and this is probably going to date how old I am &#8212; doing stuff on AIM like doing various types of chat rooms on AIM. I don&#8217;t know what that means but anyway, that&#8217;s where it started: AIM, Geocities, Myspace stuff. Then thought I wanted to become an art therapist, studied that for a little bit then decided to become a real adult, study communications, got into philanthropy and was working in philanthropy for five years on big projects where people put a lot of money into things and then really see that much impact. Then got to do a couple of hackathons in the social impact and philanthropy space, got totally hooked on it and addicted to it and then sought out the hackathon space specifically, got sucked in and worked out about 100 hackathons last year.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In terms of my superpowers &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Let&#8217;s see, if it was 100 hackathons last year, I&#8217;m going to go with super endurance.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, super endurance being able to go without sleep for a long period of time if I was excited about something, which is probably true for a lot of people. I would say that&#8217;s probably my superpower.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How did you get hooked on hackathons?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was going to joke with my teen like I always cry at the end of each hackathon, which sounds a little bit terrifying. But there&#8217;s just something about it that is really moving to me personally. I guess it&#8217;s about people creating things and coming together around a specific issue or topic and working tirelessly to create something. I wish I could say I only cry at the social impact hackathons but honestly, I&#8217;ve been known to cry even at boring, like [inaudible] hackathon.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s something about it that resonates with me and I think it&#8217;s the amount of impact you can achieve in 24 hours. But the one that hooked me was this hackathon called Chimehack with Gucci, which is a fashion company, not a technology company. We had somehow convinced them to do a hackathon at Twitter and it was for a bunch of non-profits like UNICEF and Vital Voices and UN Women and a really cool organization called Writers for Health and this mobile health services delivery. There was just something about it. We had high school girls hacking, we had experienced developers hacking, we had the CTO of Twitter there and hacking and they built the stuff for these nonprofits that some of them can actually use. It was just really cool. I had no idea what I was doing. In my mind I was like, &#8220;We&#8217;re going to do hackathon,&#8221; and then just literally figured it out. I had no idea and the outcomes are pretty cool. That&#8217;s the original one that hooked me but I get hooked pretty much every time I do it again and again. It&#8217;s just my thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Rein, I understand that you have thoughts about hackathons.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have thoughts about hackathons. I don&#8217;t hate hackathons in general but I think that there are some bad hackathons especially the corporate-sponsored ones. They tend to be bad and I think that it&#8217;s a challenge to make them fair and available for everyone.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s definitely true about certain hackathons. That episode with Zuri Hunter was the first time I found out about Greater Than Code because Zuri has come to quite a few of our hackathons and she was talking about her experience in those hackathons and that&#8217;s how I found out about your show actually. I mean, not all corporate hackathons are good. We do a lot of corporate hacks. As much as I love doing the social impact hackathons, corporate hackathons are kind of worth at in terms of running a business, I&#8217;ll say and they&#8217;re not all made equal. I agree with that statement and we can dig into it more if you like.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We try to make it as uncorporate-y as we can. We don&#8217;t always succeed at that but trying to make it fun and inclusive and it&#8217;s hard. We&#8217;ve been working a lot on trying to make them more inclusive and diverse, in terms of skill sets and backgrounds but it&#8217;s always something we have to keep trying to do better and better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I could describe more specifically what my issues are. My general issue is that hackathons are available to people with the free time to spend working on the stuff that people tend to work on. My specific issue with corporate hackathons are sometimes you do things that benefit this company and we&#8217;ll pay you with pizza for your labor.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. Now, the free time point, that&#8217;s an interesting one and something we&#8217;re trying to figure out is how do we shift this model around. I mentioned a topic that I was thinking about discussing with you guys was this concept of there are projects that need help and need to be worked on but the kind of people who might be able to help us on this project don&#8217;t necessarily have a weekend to devote to hacking. We&#8217;ve started doing a lot more virtual hackathons. We just had a global block chain one as block chain for public sector with the government of the UAE. That one, we have people from all over the world hacking.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then we&#8217;re doing one right now called DataHack4FI which is a financial inclusion hackathon across seven countries in Africa and that one is virtual. We&#8217;re trying to figure out new models where, say you are not a student or someone who&#8217;s in their early 20s, no obligations besides a weekend to spend hacking and doing it overnight. We&#8217;re trying to figure out new models for that. I think that&#8217;s a valid criticism.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Although, we&#8217;ll probably keep going with that Saturday and Sunday hackathon model for a while because that is fun for a lot of people. Then the free labor question, I think what we always try to do and I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;ll fully solves that question is making sure that people own the IP that they create out of the hackathon. Then the majority of our hackathon, we run this global series, we accelerate the teams coming out of those hackathons and they own their IP so the idea is that they can continue building that project and make it into business they would like. We&#8217;re trying to course correct for some of those criticisms which I think are valid. That how I would address that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s impossible to have a hackathon be a good thing but I do think that there are a lot of traps you can fall into where it&#8217;s easily for it to end up being bad. What I mostly care about is what do you do to avoid those problems and to promote healthier ways of organizing and things like that. I&#8217;m glad that you&#8217;re thinking about that stuff, which doesn&#8217;t also doesn&#8217;t surprise me. You seemed to care about this a lot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We always talk about the typical hackathon that looks like a roomful of dudes in hoodies who are in their early to mid-20s and we want to expand that to more people. One of the things we&#8217;ve been talking about a lot is bringing more women into our hackathons. We&#8217;ve done a lot for that but for me, it&#8217;s never going to be enough. It&#8217;s still not enough. We were able to increase our diversity attendance to 60% female for our last hackathon series, which is awesome because it&#8217;s usually around 20%. But still, it&#8217;s younger women and it&#8217;s younger women that have a certain level of privilege where they can spend an entire weekend at a hackathon. We&#8217;d love to look at doing things like childcare and stuff like that but it&#8217;s step by step. Sometimes it feels like two steps forward, one step back but definitely a fight that we&#8217;re trying to fight.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m just glad that you&#8217;re aware of these issues. So many hackathons I see were just [inaudible]. They don&#8217;t even consider these things and then it doesn&#8217;t go as well as you would think. Do you any suggestions for companies that wants their employees to hack on stuff or people who want to organize their own public hackathons to make sure that they&#8217;re addressing those issues?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There are a lot of things you can do and in some ways, part of it is just blindingly simple. Unfortunately, people just don&#8217;t even think of these things but very basic stuff like your judging panel needs to represent the community that you want to come to the hack. People talk about this a lot but making sure that the folks who are in the judging panel and your mentors aren&#8217;t all of one category. If you want to be inclusive of women, if you want to be inclusive of different races and backgrounds, the judging panel represent that, the staffing should represent that, the mentors at hack should represent that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think also it&#8217;s in the marketing of the event and making sure you have an inclusivity statement that is very clear. Making sure you have a code of conduct. There&#8217;s an international hackathon code of conduct that covers harassment in hackathons, which has been an issue in the past and we&#8217;ve had to kick out or ban people for life for misbehavior and it&#8217;s something we&#8217;re very serious about, instead of being you must stay overnight &#8212; staying overnight is optional &#8212; being flexible about when people can come and go. I&#8217;ve had a lot of people e-mailed me before the hackathons and say, &#8220;I have a childcare issue. Can I still show up at 4PM?&#8221; And I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Yeah, sure. Come and we&#8217;ll figure out how to fit you in.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Those are some examples that come to mind but I think a big part of it is in the pre-hackathon: marketing, being inclusive, reaching out to groups of different types and diversities. Then on the venue being closed from 11PM to 7AM so you all can get some sleep, we do that from time to time. We did a Tech for Good Hackathon at the University of San Francisco a couple weeks ago and we closed down the venue and people went home.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We had to force some people out and they were like, &#8220;Wait. This is not an overnight hack?&#8221; And I was like, &#8220;Nope. It&#8217;s not,&#8221; and I was like turning off the lights and telling them to go home. It&#8217;s always that balance of I want to support the enthusiasm of the people want to come overnight. We have some hackathons where we have high school students and their mom literally pulls up in their minivan and drops them off their sleeping bags and pillows and they love doing the overnight. I just realized that potentially it&#8217;s free babysitting &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But they love it too but we&#8217;ve experimented with the no-overnight. We&#8217;ve also experimented with the one-day event but then the question is around the impact of those outcomes like what can people build in a certain amount of time and how much do they want to dedicate to building that and how functional do they want it to be so that&#8217;s another thing to add to the mix and figure out the right blend of the hackathon model.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Rachel, do you have any advice for people who are not programmers but who want to be involved in hackathons because a lot of times, the biggest, I guess hesitation that I encounter is people saying, &#8220;I would love to go to this hackathon but I don&#8217;t know how to program so I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;m supposed to go.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You should just go, I guess would be my advice. Do you all identified as software developers?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ALL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. Sure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, well &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s okay. You can talk shit about us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, no, no. Obviously, I don&#8217;t want to insult basically what is probably 80% to 90% of our entire community but something that&#8217;s built by a software engineer in a vacuum is not going to have the same impact that something that has input from someone who&#8217;s not a developer will have. For example, at this Ctrl Alt Delete Hate Hackathon we just did, it was a mix of developers and designers and just marketing folks and then activists in political and nonprofit space.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They were able to talk a little bit more about the user experience and what this would mean for the nonprofit that they were building tech for and they definitely it&#8217;s something to contribute. I think, specifically at our hackathons, when we do team formation at the beginning, we advise teams to make sure you have someone who does UX or UI design, someone who has business or market experience or experience with the users you&#8217;re trying to reach on your team because you&#8217;re going to be more likely to win.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We actually appeal to the competitive spirit of the developers at our events by saying, &#8220;You&#8217;re more likely to win or build a better killer app if you have more diverse perspectives on your team.&#8221; That gives us the concept that we have like the whole developer, meaning someone who&#8217;s not just a developer, a software engineer or not just a team of software engineers but holistically looks at a problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s really long answer to that question. I would just say, if I would give advice to people, I would say just come and if you feel uncomfortable or you feel like you don&#8217;t fit in, you should address that directly with the organizers and have them help you find a team. I always do that at the beginning like everybody comes up, introduces themselves as what are their skills, what is their background. A lot of times people come and say, &#8220;I&#8217;m new to hackathons,&#8221; and then we always give a round of applause for anyone who&#8217;s the first time hackathoner because that takes a lot of courage to show at hackathon, let alone introduce yourself to a group of 100 strangers. Then we make sure that everyone finds a place on a team.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I guess that goes back to the question about how to make hackathons more inclusive. I think that burden definitely relies on the organizers and then what I would say to the developers that come to hackathons is be open to not engineers being on your team because you&#8217;re going to get better perspective. You can have a super awesome functional app that is useless to the person it&#8217;s meant to serve so thinking about that is really important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You touched on something really interesting there, which is there&#8217;s an aspect of the developer psyche that leads us to value our own skills above everything else. It sort of captured in this idea, in that Jamie Zawinski quote, &#8220;I had a problem and I tried to solve it with regular expressions and now I have two problems.&#8221; But you can replace regular expressions with software, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> My first tool of choice, when presented with almost any problem is I wonder what code I could write to fix that. I&#8217;m old enough now to recognize that maybe that&#8217;s not the best first reaction but I can&#8217;t always stop myself from having it or following up on it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that you&#8217;re trying to say that you&#8217;re going there because that&#8217;s what you do all the time but it may not be the best way for the problem to solve but then how do you find the space to be open in the right place so that somebody else different way of problem solving can be a part of the solution.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. It&#8217;s like you&#8217;re inside my head.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I kind of am because since I wasn&#8217;t always a developer, I actually don&#8217;t start out thinking what kind of code could I write so I have a little bit more empathy I think for people who are trying to be a part of the group but they don&#8217;t have coding skills.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Rachel, I think you said something really important earlier, which is that if you have a diverse group of people building something with the different ideas and experiences and backgrounds, the thing is better because of that and that&#8217;s a good reason to do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Have you guys talked about the movie Code: Debugging the Gender Gap on this podcast, yet?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t think so.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, I haven&#8217;t even watched it yet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You might have a guest and I&#8217;m about to refer to you, Astrid which they talk about this specific issue of when you&#8217;re building things in a vacuum, how terrible that can turn out if you don&#8217;t bring in diverse perspectives. There&#8217;s one very serious example that they get and one very funny example that they get. I guess I&#8217;ll go with a very serious one first which is they talk about the design of airbags and how &#8212; is it airbags or seat belts? It&#8217;s probably &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it was airbags.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s airbags, and how the folks who originally designed the airbags were men and they were designing airbags for men and then airbags ended up killing lots of women and children. That was an engineering problem. If they have had women as part of the process, probably they could have mitigated that issue. Then the second one is a funny one which is they talk about Clippy, the Microsoft little AI assistant and how women in a focus group found Clippy to be creepy and weird. But the men who designed it were like, &#8220;That&#8217;s not a valid criticism.&#8221; Then they ended up rolling out Clippy and we all know what happened.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s like the software avatar of mansplaining.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly. I love talking about this two examples. I think one shows just how dangerous that can be and also how important design is in the airbags scenario. Then for Clippy, I just want to be hilarious but also becoming more relevant because pretty much every hackathon on app now, people are building chat bots and virtual assistants. They&#8217;re doing that right now and my concern is making sure they&#8217;re thinking about that. At the Lady Problems Hackathon, there&#8217;s actually people building a lot of chat bots around tracking gender bias communication and then there&#8217;s a chat bot for impostor syndrome that someone built called Pepper the Pet Bot. I do think people are using these things for good but they should use Clippy, I guess. I mean, I don&#8217;t know how many people Clippy hurt or harmed but &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was weird. I remember as a kid and I was like, &#8220;Why won&#8217;t this thing go away. Is it watching me?&#8221; It&#8217;s weird.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Remember it&#8217;s used to wink at you &#8212; I&#8217;m doing it and you guys can&#8217;t see my face but I&#8217;m doing like the hard blink like Clippy&#8217;s.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yes. I may or may not have given a presentation talk in which I mentioned Clippy and then used the fire animation on it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that that airbag example is actually a really good one because in the documentary, they talked about how the engineers were not trying to be assholes basically. They weren’t thinking like, &#8220;We don&#8217;t need women.&#8221; They were trying to save lives and they were so focused on what they were doing that they forgot that everybody is not going to be somewhere between 5&#8217;10&#8221; and 6&#8217;2&#8243; and at least 180 pounds. When people started dying, they were shocked because they didn&#8217;t think about it. It wasn&#8217;t something that was on their radar so they were really upset by what happened. I feel like that&#8217;s what you&#8217;re trying to do when you&#8217;re saying make your teams more diverse, try to get other people&#8217;s opinions because you may not have this intention of being an asshole but you don&#8217;t always know what you don&#8217;t know.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yep.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s also the example of the facial recognition software that couldn&#8217;t recognize black people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But that was more intentional.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Was it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, because that had to do with Kodak and they were basically trying to sell their cameras and they were focused exclusively on white audience and they were not trying to be inclusive. It evolved from there, whereas with the airbags, they weren&#8217;t actually trying to assume that women never drive cars. They just forgot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For our listeners who may not be familiar with the thing that Astrid just very compactly referred to, film that was calibrated in the 50s and 60s with color film, rather was calibrated with reference shots of white people which is why film did a really poor job of representing the full range of human skin, thus made black people look terrible on camera for decades. Then that cultural legacy is part of what fed into this incident with, I think it was a webcam software developed by HP that would do facial recognition and tracking. They had a little camera that supposedly would follow your face around but it did not recognize black people because all of the subjects that they trained it on were white.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Is that a fair summary?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And on the one hand with things like that, I think I wonder how many black people they had on that team. On the other hand, I think we build websites that are accessible to deaf [inaudible] people, blind people. I don&#8217;t have any blind people on teams that I worked on which is something I&#8217;d like to do. I know some, but I haven&#8217;t work with them. But my point is that you don&#8217;t have to have a black person on the team to have it recognized black people. You just have to care about the [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You do but I think also what tends to happen is, at least in tech you have a lot of people who are trying to change the world with whatever it is that they&#8217;re building but they&#8217;re not going out and talking to people who are a part of the world, who are not like them and they&#8217;re not having those people on their teams so you end up having something that goes out into the world that can do harm because you totally left out all kinds of scenarios that you just don&#8217;t know about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, absolutely. I guess my point is that one way to make sure that your team is putting its attention there is to have someone on the team to represent that viewpoint and the other way is to just make sure that you yourself are representing that viewpoint. In the case of the facial recognition software, you don&#8217;t need a black person on the team. You can just think about the problem and make sure that you&#8217;re testing it with a diverse group of test subjects and things like that. It looks like they did neither of which is possibly intentional but definitely pretty awful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things I wonder how you do is how you do this in practice because when you&#8217;re in a hackathon, for instance and you are in a team, a lot of the team they may be software developers, how do you steer the group towards these questions because it is easy for you to just start working on who&#8217;s going to do the UI, who&#8217;s going to the backend and what are we going to make as our data story. Those conversations start really quickly so I&#8217;m wondering Rachel, if you have some idea or some tips of how to keep that conversation about who you&#8217;re actually building it for before you start working on building things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess, I could talk about from the hackathon perspective which we always include UX as a criteria for judging for hackathons. When we&#8217;re talking to our teams about thinking about what we&#8217;re going to demo on Sunday and this is about how do you build the structure of a hackathon to make sure that the outcomes that are created are the outcomes that you want to get. I think that brings on having user experience as a criteria for hacks so letting people know one of the things that it is going to be based on is have you thought about the end user experience of your product. Some people listen to that and some people don&#8217;t. I think the best you can do is try to instill that question in yourself and then instill it in others around you. My hope is eventually is it becomes a viral thing and I think it is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Everybody loves to talk about design and thinking these days. We get more and more UX and UI folks come into our hack. They&#8217;re super in-demand. We had a UX person in our hackathon and he was floating around to every single team because everybody just wanted his input. That was cool to see all the developers be like, &#8220;Where&#8217;s the UX guy?&#8221; That was cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things that I&#8217;m really interested in is how people organize into relationships and power structures and sometimes that&#8217;s hierarchical and top down in the company and sometimes it&#8217;s self-organizing and my question is you&#8217;ve done a bunch of hackathons and you&#8217;ve seen people, I&#8217;m guessing come together and sort of self-organizing into teams. Is that the thing that they do? Who ends up taking on leadership roles in those team, is it more men? Is it more women? Is it more engineers? Is it more entrepreneurs? Who ends up in those leadership roles and what does that power dynamic looked like?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It really depends on the hackathon. There&#8217;s no standard. It depends on the topic of the challenge. For the Ctrl Alt Delete Hate Hackathon, a lot of people just came in like, &#8220;I want to use my skills for good. I don&#8217;t necessarily know what I want to build.&#8221; In some scenarios, we had people who actually have the issues expertise leading the team versus an engineer or developer, they were just helping build the vision for the team.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If it&#8217;s a hackathon about machine learning, probably a lot of people are there just to learn about machine learning and flex their skills around that but somebody who actually has experience with that will end up being the team lead. I guess it&#8217;s sort of skills and knowledge base, depending on what the challenge is. Then I guess there are scenarios where nobody knows what they&#8217;re doing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In terms of the power structure there, I&#8217;m not sure. I guess it&#8217;s just who yells the loudest, which probably isn&#8217;t a great answer. Now, that&#8217;s got me thinking about how do we think more about those dynamics within the teams as well. But if I had to give a short answer, it would be skills and knowledge based is where the lead is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can you extrapolate it all from all the teams that you&#8217;ve seen as far as what make a self-organizing team, more or less, successful if I&#8217;m going to define success in terms of doing well in the competition, in terms of the morale of the team, how people feel about each other and how nice everyone is?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You can always tell people go up on stage on what that dynamic is. At a hackathon, if one person goes up and the rest of the team doesn&#8217;t go up, that means something. We advise against more than two people talking because that can usually turn into chaos but if there&#8217;s more than one person doing everything at a time, that means they&#8217;ve all communicated with each other about who&#8217;s doing what and what role each person has to play. You can see that at the end and often when judges are judging projects at hackathon, don&#8217;t notice those team dynamics and the execution is typically much better on the project if everyone is listening to everyone else and they map out who&#8217;s doing what from the start and what role each person has in the build. The quality of the project is almost always higher if everyone on the team has had a say or an input.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Some people are better than others. We have some people who typically hack solo or in teams of two because they&#8217;re not good at group dynamics and we try to be inclusive of that as well. If you&#8217;re someone who just wants to be on your own, we are open to that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Rachel, I know that recently you had this Lady Problems Hack and I&#8217;m interested to know if there was a different mix of people who came to this hackathon and if you did see any difference in the way the teams interacted.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, totally. It was a lot more women. Our goal was a 50/50 ratio. Typically, hackathons are 80/20 &#8212; 80% male and 20% female and it was very different. A lot more collaboration across teams so less competing with each other directly, even though there was a prize to win. We&#8217;re accelerating the winning team from each city. We did 17 cities but more collaboration across the teams.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Something else we noticed was &#8212; I don&#8217;t know how relevant this is to the question but I just thought it was an interesting observation that&#8217;s related to team dynamics and the quality of projects &#8212; women are a lot less likely to pitch at the end of the hack if their solution is not perfectly built or functional. Whereas, men will go up there and demo and pitch even if it&#8217;s not working and just do Slideware or show some of the code and talk through it. That was interesting even if the project quality was higher or good enough to demo or pitch, we had some women who were like, &#8220;I&#8217;m not going up there unless my project is perfect,&#8221; so that was sort of an unexpected roadblock that we ran into because a big part of hackathons is getting up there and showing what you build and knowing that there&#8217;s no way it&#8217;s going to be perfect in a 36-hour span.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Another thing we observed is people will much more collaborative, we didn&#8217;t have that issue with the confidence of going up there, even if your project wasn&#8217;t perfect. It&#8217;s a totally different dynamic. What people were building was totally different. We had four challenges around health, safety, economic, empowerment and culture and we didn&#8217;t know which way people were going to go and it varied in the different cities we were in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In the Middle East and Africa, people focused a lot more on health and safety but in the US and Australia and Europe, people were much more focused on cultural bias. I guess that made it different from a typical hackathon and not the solutions people were focused on we&#8217;re very much designed for the group that was in the room. Those are some of the differences there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting, that phenomenon of women pitching versus men pitching tracks really well with this phenomenon of people applying for jobs where men will apply if they meet some portion of the requirements. I don&#8217;t know what the actual number is &#8212; 40%, 50%, 60% or something like that but women will not apply for the job unless they meet all or nearly all of the requirements.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. It&#8217;s crazy. I&#8217;ve seen people go up and pitch things that are completely not even relevant to the hackathon and still the confidence and they goes up there. There is this one group of people who were coming &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When you say people, I&#8217;m assuming you mean, men?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Men, yes. Young men. I don&#8217;t want to call them specifically because they come to a lot of our hackathon and they&#8217;re great but somebody must have dared somebody else at some point to pitch Tinder for Music at all of our hackathons, regardless of what the challenge was or what the API platform was they were supposed to using. They just pitched Tinder for Music for all hackathons.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Honestly, it&#8217;s probably just like a fun griefing strategy but to have a confidence to go out there and do that in front of a hundred people and kind of my job would be like not relevant, don&#8217;t even care versus of I&#8217;m thinking at Lady Problems London, we had a woman who&#8217;s building an app and she was doing really well and then her code just fell apart at the end of the day on Saturday. We did everything we could to try to convince her to come back and get people to help her and jump in. She was just like, &#8220;No, this is a piece of crap. I&#8217;m not demoing this at the hackathon.&#8221; It&#8217;s just typically, overall it&#8217;s hackathon we see, that&#8217;s the case. Some people will just go up there, regardless of how good or relevant their project is and pitch. At Lady Problems, we&#8217;re often have to encourage people to get up there and pitch, &#8220;Even if it&#8217;s not perfect, just get up there and show your stuff.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, pranks. Yay!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. There are probably less pranks at Lady Problem so maybe that&#8217;s another observation. It was definitely a much more safe, inclusive space.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What if pranks are actually bad?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, pranks can be bad.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to, at least briefly touch on this idea that what we&#8217;re talking about is not just some observed phenomenon with no possible cause. This is a learned behavior where men get praised for a lot of things and they have their confidence built from the time they&#8217;re boys and girls do not. When they grow up into women, they are afraid to pitch something that isn&#8217;t perfect because they know they&#8217;re going to get a lot more crap for it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But what I find interesting is that, Rachel had said that the majority of people of this hackathon were also women. Efforts are usually made to try to create environments where women feel safe. Even in this environment where you actively tried to make sure that it was going to have more representation of women, a lot of women still didn&#8217;t feel confident enough to pitch their own project.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wouldn&#8217;t say it was a lot. I don&#8217;t want to discredit like we had women all over the world pitching badass stuff so it wasn&#8217;t totally systemic issue. It was just an unexpected observation that we ran into at quite a few of the hackathons: encouraging people to get up there and pitch. I had that with men too with hackathons like everyone has done their work, everything falls apart and shit hits the fan, usually at two in the morning on Sunday and encouraging them to still go do it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But specifically, it was much more of an issue at Lady Problems. We talked about it too like is the pitching format right, like making someone go up on stage and demo versus doing a science fair type feedback. It does relate to the structure. It certainly is an issue and it&#8217;s systemic.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We did a Lady Problems in Delhi, India and the last time we did hackathon in Delhi, the female turnout was 3%. The idea that you need to go to an event with a bunch of men and stay there overnight and travel to it and come home, it&#8217;s not a very safe concept in certain regions. When we did Lady Problems, just for the fact that we have set up as inclusive space, we had a 20% female turnout for that event so that was an increase of 17% and part of it was just letting them know there was a safe space and the challenges were related specifically to women&#8217;s issues made a difference.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I don&#8217;t know, it&#8217;s also different in different regions in the world and how that&#8217;s been ingrained or not. I don&#8217;t know where I&#8217;m going with that but it&#8217;s a tough question because we&#8217;re talking about how women and men are raised from birth and then on top of that, we&#8217;re trying to do this in Gaza, India, Nairobi. There are certain things that are true across the board and then certain things are more or less true in the different regions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m sure, it&#8217;s just a coincidence that a lot of failures happened at 2AM.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. Some of the Lady Problems, we didn&#8217;t do an overnight because it wasn&#8217;t safe. The hackathon we did in Gaza for Lady Problems, there was not an overnight.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, here&#8217;s a question. Have you noticed a difference in success rates for hackathons that have overnight participation versus those that don&#8217;t?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Not really but what happens is a lot of people go home and keep hacking, anyway.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So they get all of the negative effect of working overnight, whether they&#8217;re not supposed to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah but &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But they do it to themselves, Rein.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, they sort of do it to themselves. I think it&#8217;s a good point but some people like that. For some people, the reason they do hackathons is they&#8217;re like, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to dedicate 48 hours to learning this new topic and then I levelled up, one or two levels in that skill,&#8221; and they like that intense crunch versus running something out like a virtual hackathon which is one to three months and you&#8217;ve got plenty of time to learn.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But some people don&#8217;t have that self-discipline, including myself. If I had to work on a project that doesn&#8217;t have a strict deadline, that project is not getting done until 24 hours before. I think it&#8217;s also about people&#8217;s work styles. For some people, they don&#8217;t have three months to work on a project. Maybe they only have one weekend to learn a new skill so that&#8217;s the flip side of that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Have you tried to do anything as part of the framing and set up for these hackathons that would help encourage people to fail and fail spectacularly and be proud of it? It occurred to me as you were talking that you could give a prize for the most glorious implosion of a project or talk about epic fails from previous ones. Have you tried anything like that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No but I love that idea. It depends on the hackathon too. If it&#8217;s a super high stakes hackathons like we do this big hackathon called Money 20/20 in Vegas. It&#8217;s tons of massive cash prizes and things like that. We have to be more careful about celebrating the epic failures because it&#8217;s so competitive. But at Ctrl Alt Delete Hate &#8212; sorry I am super obsessed with hackathons because it was just last weekend and I didn&#8217;t sleep the entire weekend and it was awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That one, we had people come up and demo then their laptop died in the middle of the demo and they haven&#8217;t gotten their simulator set up yet on their laptop and I was just like, &#8220;Fine. We&#8217;re just going to put you at the end and you can start over,&#8221; and it was kind of funny. It was very safe space and I was like, &#8220;Oh, you screwed up. You&#8217;ll get another try,&#8221; and I love that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But when you&#8217;re doing like a 600-person hackathon, there just literally isn&#8217;t time because people would be there forever demoing for that. It depends on the type of event you want to create and different people like different types of events but I like the idea of celebrating failure. As a company, we celebrate failure like whenever someone screws up at our company, it&#8217;s almost there&#8217;s a little internal celebration about it like, &#8220;We f&#8217;ed that up. Oops.&#8221; I like to try and fit that and structured into the hackathon a little bit more and be interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it just seems like an interesting way to sort of help set the tone at the beginning.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yep. I&#8217;m writing that down. ‘Failure.’</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Glorious failure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Glorious failure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I learned so much from those.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In the hackathon, in itself, the majority of the teams don&#8217;t build like a fully functioning solution that&#8217;s ready to go to market. It&#8217;s almost to see how good you can fail, sort of, at a hackathon, like in 24 hours, to build something and learning a totally new topic and I figured that out all in a weekend so in some ways, everybody kind of fails, just seeing who failed the best. Or can you fail in an interesting way? I&#8217;m not 100% committed to that concept but I do love the idea of celebrating failure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Benjamin Zander is a conductor for the Boston Philharmonic and gave a TED Talk about leadership, which was very good. He tells his students when they make a mistake, he tells them to throw their hands up in the air and say, &#8220;How fascinating?&#8221; Rather than getting really upset and hunch over and get angry with themselves. It&#8217;s interesting because actually changing your posture and not letting yourself, put your body in a position to put yourself in when you&#8217;re sad, it makes a difference. I&#8217;m really interested in ways that we can get around or rewrite people to not look at failure as some sort of [inaudible] that they have to avoid at all costs because it turns out that failure is actually one of the best things you can do if you&#8217;re trying to learn.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Then there&#8217;s the flip side of that which I thought there&#8217;s this issue in Silicon Valley around moving fast and breaking things like celebrating failure so much so that you don&#8217;t think about the collateral damage with that mentality.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s a really good point. Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, like how do we celebrate and have failure be not something that&#8217;s scary but also not have it be so ingrained that people are like, &#8220;I&#8217;ll fail at any cost.&#8221; I don&#8217;t know&#8230;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Celebrate learning from failure?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, celebrate learning from failure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You have to put in the work to make it safe to fail so mitigating the downside risks of failure and things like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You mean like a safety net kind of thing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, that makes sense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Safety net mitigate the downside risk of falling out of the trapeze or whatever.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that [inaudible] the user experience question, right? Like if we fail, what&#8217;s the fallout? Who does that impact? It&#8217;s like if we fail to design this properly, what&#8217;s the collateral damage and you think about that in advance. Often the reason people fail is what they haven&#8217;t thought of all the right things so it&#8217;s like Catch-22.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, this is like what I brought up in our last show which was that computer scientists don&#8217;t have to learn about ethics and that seems to be reflecting in a lot of what&#8217;s going on. I do think that this is an opportunity for somebody else who has that background or understands those questions to try to join this hackathon teams because they do have this perspective of, &#8220;We should be thinking about what happens when this fails. We should be thinking about the consequences of picking this particular route to take with whatever it is we&#8217;re building.&#8221; Since oftentimes, if somebody did study computer science, they&#8217;re not going to have that in their background and a lot of people are also self-taught so they may not have it there either.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As somebody with a computer science degree, I believe there was a course offered. It may even have been like a one-credit requirement. In which case, I had it waived because I was looking at my transcript and I did not take it. Yay, me! Rather, yay my school.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s an interesting question. A lot of people that come the hackathons are coming out of coder schools like Hack Reactor and General Assembly and Hack Right and things like that. I do think a lot of them are doing a good job at focusing more on inclusivity and diversity but I&#8217;m curious if they offer ethics as part of their overall bootcamp or program. I&#8217;m not sure, specifically but I think that&#8217;d be interesting because in certain parts of the world, that is a significant makeup of our hackathon attendants. Now I&#8217;m going to go back to my team and be like, &#8220;Guys we have to build an ethics workshop at every hackathon,&#8221; and they&#8217;re going to be like, &#8220;Oh, God.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that sounds like a really great idea.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I do think, it&#8217;s an interesting concept. I&#8217;m writing that down too. I&#8217;ve written down &#8216;failure&#8217; and put a big circle around it and then I&#8217;ve written down &#8216;ethics&#8217; and put a big circle around it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Circles mean special things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Circles mean special things. A circle as inclusive. It should be an open circle actually. I need a close circle.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wish we could have an entire show just on how we approach failure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Why can&#8217;t we?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t know. But we do the context of hackathons, I think failure is especially interesting because there are high pressure situation. There are unusual downside risks to failure. You&#8217;re not just losing an hour or two of work. You&#8217;re potentially losing money, prestige and a number of things that are normally on the table when it&#8217;s not your day job. I don&#8217;t know if I have a question there. I just think it&#8217;s interesting to think about what might some of the factors be that make people more afraid of failure in that situations.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I mean it&#8217;s more or less afraid because for most people, it&#8217;s not your day job. In some ways, it is an opportunity to fail spectacularly because you may not win the prize but you learned the limits of your own abilities and knowledge. As long as you can find meaning in it and learn from that, that has value in and of itself. Sometimes having those constraints or, I guess lack of constraints does have with personal growth. I&#8217;m not sure everyone has that experience but I think why a lot of people come to the hackathons is it&#8217;s not your day job so if the code breaks and it crashed the entire thing, yes that sucks but you&#8217;re not taking down the entire company.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is also a good example of a form of diversity that we don&#8217;t often consider which is how do people respond to stress. I think that people that run teams of developers should think about that on their teams.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And what causes them stress.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, because you&#8217;ll have some people that will respond to the same stressors in very different ways. That&#8217;s sort of what you&#8217;re talking bad at the hackathon as some people look at it as an opportunity to try things. &#8220;Well, if it doesn&#8217;t work, no big deal. It was just a hackathon.&#8221; Then other people are really that triers or really need to, &#8220;Show my work,&#8221; and have it be accepted and then they have a very different response.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that was something to think about. We just get all types like whenever someone asks me, give me the Person X at hackathon, honestly everyone is so different in the way they reacted and engage and approach the hackathon. Honestly, what we like about it and we wouldn&#8217;t change like we can put as much structure in place as possible to make it a positive experience for people but people will always react differently in those situations.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">There are always people who are like I give a [inaudible] and someone who goes up a pitch is something totally not relevant, solves a great time versus somebody who build something amazing and it doesn&#8217;t have the confidence to pitch. It&#8217;s such a mix.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When you look at the different ways that people respond to the pressure, some of them look at it as an opportunity, some of them end up quitting the hackathon, do you think that there&#8217;s a stigma associated with certain ways of responding to stress? The people that maybe don&#8217;t want to share their work when it&#8217;s not done, do you think there&#8217;s a stigma that other people associate with failure that prevents them? I&#8217;m just trying to get a handle on the dynamic there at the hackathon.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, I don&#8217;t think so. We always try to encourage people to pitch and share what they&#8217;ve created because I find that when people go up there and do it, they always get something out of it. It may just be getting feedback from the judges or it may just be having the experience of doing public speaking and you don&#8217;t always have the opportunity to do that. A lot of developers don&#8217;t have opportunities to do public speaking. In doing that or just the experience of having completed something, even if it&#8217;s not totally done, I do try to encourage people to pitch but we never shame people if they don&#8217;t.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I didn&#8217;t think you did. I guess I meant more of other participants.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Not really. People are so focused on their own thing. They get so in the zone on their own project, typically by the end but they&#8217;re not really thinking about other people or guiltiness in those people in anyway. Because everyone comes to get a different experience out of it, and I feel like everyone commonly accepts about everyone else at the hackathon is we&#8217;re all here to get something different out of this. There are new coders who just want to learn and build. There are the professional hackathon hackers who are coming to win the prizes and everyone respect everybody else&#8217;s space around what they want to create. If they don&#8217;t respect that space, we kick them out. I haven&#8217;t seen that. Yes, professional hackathon hackers is a thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;re blowing my mind here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There are people who actually make their living like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and people are going on winning streaks too. Like I mentioned, we have a team of high schoolers and they&#8217;re actually not professional hackers by any means but they&#8217;re on a winning streak right now. It&#8217;s awesome. One of them is like 14 years old and winning hackathons but there are people who go to the big ones with the big prizes. I don&#8217;t know if I would recommend it as a career but you certainly can do it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a random question for you Rachel.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In your origin story, you were talking about how you wanted to be an art therapist. Do you see threads of that in what you&#8217;re doing now?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think, if I dig into that, I feel like that&#8217;s a question that therapist might ask me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, let me dig into my own psyche. I think I see tremendous value in how different types of media can create a therapeutic experience for people. I think ultimately, when I look at hackathons, that&#8217;s why it moves me so much because different people are getting different personal benefits out of experimenting with the media that they&#8217;re working within. Like they&#8217;re coding and they&#8217;re putting something together and for a lot of people that is therapeutic and be like, &#8220;I&#8217;m in this range of time and I&#8217;m going to try to solve this problem using this medium and even if the outcome isn&#8217;t a Monet, you still have that effort into creating something and creating meaning out of the medium that you&#8217;re working within.&#8221; Does that make any sense?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s why it gets to me because like this person just came for this weekend to create something for a prize and to learn but for the sake of creating something. We have accelerated quite a few businesses out of our hackathons but not everyone&#8217;s there to start his mess. I have honestly not thought about that until you asked me that question so I&#8217;m a little bit like, &#8220;Oh&#8230;&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, your answer make sense. I thought about it because of how you said you often cry at hackathons and it made me think, she must be really proud of how far they come in a weekend.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I am. I don&#8217;t know, there are just something about it like when someone gives their all and does something in a short amount of time. I honestly still need to unpack why hackathons make me cry. I don&#8217;t know&#8230;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We don&#8217;t have to do a therapy session. It&#8217;s okay.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But the same thing happens to me at marathons like I can&#8217;t watch a marathon because I just always cry. There&#8217;s something about that concept of people coming together to achieve things that don&#8217;t necessarily always have an immediate outcome. I guess when you run a marathon and you&#8217;re like, &#8220;I ran a marathon.&#8221; But if you run and going up like this, there&#8217;s something about that bringing people together around a specific topic in a finite period of time and they all show up and they all come out and they all contribute. Then they might go back to their normal lives. To me, there&#8217;s some power about that and I am, by no means, a religious person and I never practice religion but I think for me, it sort of ties to that like we are agreeing to share this collective experience and get some benefit out of it. It&#8217;s something like that. I&#8217;m not exactly sure where I&#8217;m going with that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We come to the time in the show where we try to reflect on something that came up during the discussion that stuck out or made impression on us. One of the things that stuck out to me about this discussion is how much talking about hackathons is really talking about all kinds of other issues. Because it&#8217;s an opportunity for a lot of people to come together who are different, it brings up things that we often describe around these tech adjacent problems of how do you make diverse teams, how do you encourage people to put themselves out there and to present their work, how do you make sure that you&#8217;re being inclusive. I didn&#8217;t really think about hackathons like that before. I just thought about it like a cool activity to do but now, it makes me think that when I participate, I&#8217;ll be looking around a little bit more to see how is this affecting everybody else too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would like my reflection to be, that your reflection was awesome &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; I guess hackathons are sort of a little microcosm of development overall but I hadn&#8217;t really thought that through to the cultural implications and that&#8217;s great.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Also I really appreciated, Rachel your criticism of developers because I don&#8217;t think that it&#8217;s bad to voice how a lot of people who are not developers feel at the hackathons. I think also a lot of developers don&#8217;t even know that they may be making an environment that&#8217;s not as open because they&#8217;re just doing what they do so it&#8217;s good to have some sort of feedback.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Before you said your awesome thing, I was thinking back to the conversation about developers having a very sort of, defaulting perhaps to a very egocentric mindset and I was really struck by that reminder to me to not only just to make room for non-developers but to actively seek out people with those different perspectives that make everybody do better so thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;ve been talking about that atmosphere at the hackathons and to feel the atmosphere, the pressure people that are under, how we deal with failure. There&#8217;s an aspect of coaching going under motivation. I mentioned Benjamin Zander earlier and I wanted to specifically highlight one of his talks that you can find on YouTube. It&#8217;s called Leadership on Display and it does something fascinating which is he takes a local kid who plays the cello. He put him on stage and he hasn&#8217;t rehearse a piece. As he&#8217;s going through the piece, he makes a variety of mistakes, they discuss the interpretation and that process sort of mutually creating that piece together onstage was fascinating to me &#8212; the way that he encouraged and made sure that the student was motivated. It&#8217;s really great. If you&#8217;re in a position of leadership and you&#8217;re looking at how to motivate people to do their best work and deal with failure in positive ways, I think you could take a lot of lessons from him.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RACHEL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess if we&#8217;re talking to developers and software engineers, just having this concept of the hackathon being a microcosm for a broader ecosystem, I guess, developers and engineers are building the future that we&#8217;re going to live within. It&#8217;s this concept of we already have our [inaudible] computers and eventually, we&#8217;re all going to be living within some sort of coded system, depending on how global warming goes. Understanding your responsibility within this world and I think there&#8217;s something about responsibility and accountability within hackathons.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> My initial key takeaway is going to be show up and contribute and listen. I think that fits within the broader context. I guess my key takeaway for engineers and developers is you are the stewards of the future systems that people are going to live within. Therefore, thinking about those people that are going to live within those systems and the ethics of that is extremely important and you&#8217;re not just writing code. You&#8217;re building this future system that people live within. Show up, contribute and listen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you so much for being our guest today, Rachel. We had such a great conversation and we&#8217;ll see you all next week.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rachel Katz: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/hazeltrack"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@hazeltrack</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://angelhack.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">AngelHack</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Plotting the Rebellion” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:39</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story and Superpowers</span></p>
<p><b>03:05</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Getting Hooked on Hackathons</span></p>
<p><b>04:42 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Corporate Hackathons; Making Hackathons Accessible and Inclusive</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/2017/01/11/episode-015-zuri-hunter/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greater Than Code Episode 015: Zuri Hunter as Queen of Hackathons</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://datahack4fi.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">DataHack4FI</span></a></p>
<p><b>09:38 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Organizing Hackathons</span></p>
<p><b>12:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Non-programmers and Hackathons; Bringing in Diverse Perspectives</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I&#8217;ll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.” ~Jamie Zawinski</span></i></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.codedoc.co/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Code: Debugging the Gender Gap</span></a></p>
<p><b>22:46 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Building Things for Others, Leadership Roles, Group Dynamics, and Men vs Women</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://info.thoughtworks.com/ctrl-alt-delete.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ctrl Alt Delete Hate Hackathon</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://ladyproblemshackathon.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lady Problems Hackathon</span></a></p>
<p><b>35:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Overnight Hackathons vs Non-Overnight Hackathons</span></p>
<p><b>36:38 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Value of Celebrating Glorious Failure and Responding to Stress and Pressure</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passion"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Benjamin Zander: The transformative power of classical music</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> [TED Talk] </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Talking about hackathons is talking about all kinds of other issues.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Make room and seek out non-developers.</span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bJNw91QyyM"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Benjamen Zander: Leadership on Display</span></a></p>
<p><b>Rachel:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Show up, contribute, and listen.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Welcome everyone to Episode]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rachel Katz: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/hazeltrack"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@hazeltrack</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://angelhack.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">AngelHack</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Plotting the Rebellion” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:39</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story and Superpowers</span></p>
<p><b>03:05</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Getting Hooked on Hackathons</span></p>
<p><b>04:42 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Corporate Hackathons; Making Hackathons Accessible and Inclusive</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/2017/01/11/episode-015-zuri-hunter/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greater Than Code Episode 015: Zuri Hunter as Queen of Hackathons</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://datahack4fi.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">DataHack4FI</span></a></p>
<p><b>09:38 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Organizing Hackathons</span></p>
<p><b>12:21 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Non-programmers and Hackathons; Bringing in Diverse Perspectives</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">“Some people, when confronted with a problem, think ‘I know, I&#8217;ll use regular expressions.’ Now they have two problems.” ~Jamie Zawinski</span></i></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.codedoc.co/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Code: Debugging the Gender Gap</span></a></p>
<p><b>22:46 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Building Things for Others, Leadership Roles, Group Dynamics, and Men vs Women</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://info.thoughtworks.com/ctrl-alt-delete.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ctrl Alt Delete Hate Hackathon</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://ladyproblemshackathon.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lady Problems Hackathon</span></a></p>
<p><b>35:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Overnight Hackathons vs Non-Overnight Hackathons</span></p>
<p><b>36:38 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Value of Celebrating Glorious Failure and Responding to Stress and Pressure</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.ted.com/talks/benjamin_zander_on_music_and_passion"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Benjamin Zander: The transformative power of classical music</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> [TED Talk] </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Talking about hackathons is talking about all kinds of other issues.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Make room and seek out non-developers.</span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bJNw91QyyM"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Benjamen Zander: Leadership on Display</span></a></p>
<p><b>Rachel:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Show up, contribute, and listen.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Welcome everyone to Episode]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Rachel.jpg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Rachel.jpg"></googleplay:image>
										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/475/episode-27-hackathons-and-flirting-with-failure-with-rachel-katz.mp3" length="53880580" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>56:07</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>Episode 026: Codeland, Capitalism, and Creating Inclusive Spaces with Saron Yitbarek</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-26-codeland-capitalism-and-creating-inclusive-spaces-with-saron-yitbarek/</link>
					<pubDate>Tue, 04 Apr 2017 19:10:10 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=462</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Panelists: Sam Livingston-Gray &#124; Astrid Countee &#124; Rein Henrichs Guest Starring: Saron Yitbarek: @saronyitbarek &#124; bloggytoons.com &#124; CodeNewbie &#124; Codeland Conference Show Notes: 00:16 – Welcome to “Unrepentant Cyborgs” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!” 01:28 – Codeland Conference: April 21st &#38; 22nd in New York City 02:02 – Making Conferences Accessible, Affordable, and Unintimidating for... <div class="link-more"><a href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-26-codeland-capitalism-and-creating-inclusive-spaces-with-saron-yitbarek/">Read More</a></div>]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Panelists: Sam Livingston-Gray &#124; Astrid Countee &#124; Rein Henrichs Guest Starring: Saron Yitbarek: @saronyitbarek &#124; bloggytoons.com &#124; CodeNewbie &#124; Codeland Conference Show Notes: 00:16 – Welcome to “Unrepentant Cyborgs” …we mean, “G]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Saron Yitbarek: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/saronyitbarek"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@saronyitbarek</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://bloggytoons.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">bloggytoons.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.codenewbie.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">CodeNewbie</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://codelandconf.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Codeland Conference</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Unrepentant Cyborgs” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:28</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="http://codelandconf.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Codeland Conference</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">: April 21st &amp; 22nd in New York City</span></p>
<p><b>02:02</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Making Conferences Accessible, Affordable, and Unintimidating for People</span></p>
<p><b>13:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Ticket Prices and Structure</span></p>
<p><b>15:01 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Creating an Immersive Experience and Community With and For People You Care About</span></p>
<p><b>25:11 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Leading by Example and Maintaining a Positive Persona</span></p>
<p><b>29:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Importance of Money and Financial Freedom</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.techdoneright.io/002-career-development-with-brandon-hays"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tech Done Right Episode 002: Career Development with Brandon Hays and Pete Brooks</span></a></p>
<p><b>39:52 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Ethics as Automatic Technology Scales and Capitalism</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Give-Take-Helping-Others-Success/dp/0143124986"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success by Adam M. Grant</span></a></p>
<p><b>49:45 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– In summary: </span><a href="http://codelandconf.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Codeland Conference</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Thank you for the book recommendation for </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Give-Take-Helping-Others-Success/dp/0143124986"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Give and Take</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">People first.</span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Support worker-owned cooperative organizations. Leadership is doing things, not being given a title.</span></p>
<p><b>Saron:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> The principles and values that led to what people will experience as a really great conference.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>CodeNewbie References:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/codenewbies"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@CodeNewbies<br />
</span></a><a href="http://www.codenewbie.org/chat"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Twitter Chat<br />
</span></a><a href="https://codenewbie.typeform.com/to/uwsWlZ"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Slack Community<br />
</span></a><a href="http://www.codenewbie.org/podcast"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Podcast<br />
</span></a><a href="http://www.codenewbie.org/podcast/truck-driver"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Episode 118: Truck Driver with George Moore<br />
</span></a><a href="http://codelandconf.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Codeland</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Welcome to our show today, &#8220;Unrepentant Cyborgs.&#8221; I’m Astrid Countee and I&#8217;m here today with my co-host, Rein &#8216;Heinrichs&#8217;.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s actually Henrichs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I said, Henrichs. Heinrichs, Henrichs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You said Heinrichs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Heinrichs sounds so much cooler but we&#8217;ll go on anyway.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>On the other hand, it&#8217;s not my name.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Picky, picky, picky.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And I&#8217;m in here with my co-host and I guess also technically your co-host, Sam Livingston-Gray.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning everybody and our guest today should be familiar to those of you who may know some of us from other older podcasts. Her name is Saron Yitbarek and we had hoped that she might join us to found Greater Than Code but apparently she had cooler things to do. We’re here to talk to her about, at least one of those and not to be bitter in any way. Got it everybody? Saron, welcome to the show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you so much for having me. You know, it&#8217;s so much great to hear you read that than it was to see it. I felt all the love and the excitement. I felt all of it so thank you so much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And also the shade.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The shade was spot on. It was very shady.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;ve missed you, Saron.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I missed you too. It&#8217;s been a very long time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What do we here to talk about?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Today, we&#8217;re here to talk about Codeland, which I&#8217;m super, super excited about. I think it was three years ago when I went to my very first conference and since then, I soaked all over the world and I&#8217;m on a bunch of conferences, tech conferences specifically and I&#8217;ve been keeping a running list of everything I hate about conferences and everything I love about conferences. This is my chance to really put all that to the test and see if I have any idea what I&#8217;m talking about. It’s Codeland Conference. It&#8217;s two days, it&#8217;s April 21 and 22 in New York City and it&#8217;s geared for people who have less than two years of professional experience.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like that love-hate could be the whole show. Was there anything particularly you wanted to talk about or do you want to skip past the negativity and maybe talk about the people that you&#8217;re actually aiming this at?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We can do any and all of the above. It&#8217;s so funny that every time I mentioned the negative list, people like to skip the best parts of conferences. I&#8217;m like, &#8220;No, let&#8217;s take into some of the stuff that sucks because I feel like we don&#8217;t really talk about that a lot.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah. I love a good rant.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Rant away please.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay. I totally didn&#8217;t realized this and I feel like I was very blind to this until I start organizing my own conference but one thing that we don&#8217;t often appreciate is how expensive it is to attend a conference, especially for people in our community who don&#8217;t yet have tech jobs, who are still learning, who are really self-funding their trip, it&#8217;s really expensive. New York City is not a cheap place and we&#8217;re able to get a relatively good deal with the hotel with $189 a night which is great for New York City. But if it&#8217;s three nights, travel, take a day off of work plus the ticket price, that&#8217;s $1000, at least to go attend and spend time with other people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That’s something that if you are a working developer, if your company is paying for you, if you have an education stipend, a lot of that you just completely forget how much it costs. That&#8217;s one thing that I&#8217;ve been really thinking about is how do you make a conference like this very accessible and very doable for folks. The one thing that we&#8217;re doing to I&#8217;m really, really excited about is we have an opportunity scholarship. I know other conferences have something similar to that as well but we had 93 people raised over $12,000 which allowed us to bring 33 people, not just bring them to Codeland, to also cover their flight and cover hotel and child care and really alleviate some of those other financial burdens that, again people kind of forget about when they think about attending a conference. That&#8217;s number one on my list. It&#8217;s just the inaccessibility of something as awesome as a conference.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s really great. I really love the opportunity scholarship program that they do at RubyConf and RailsConf. I&#8217;ve been a guide at several times and I actually ran a program at Cascadia Ruby. One of the things that I really enjoyed personally as an attendee of RubyConf and RailsConf was the ability to be a guide and to have a conference buddy that I could show around and talk to. I was wondering if you&#8217;re going to do that or if you&#8217;re going to add other cool stuff to the program? How&#8217;s that working?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a really good point. I think the big difference is instead of having an opportunity scholarship that involves like a peer buddy mentoring system, which I think you need at places like RubyConf and RailsConf because a lot of people who go aren&#8217;t necessarily beginners and not necessarily new. The people who&#8217;ve been doing it for a while. For us, everyone is new. The whole thing is one big opportunity scholarship in terms of that buddy system and that mentorship.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> What we have done is I&#8217;ve tried to think really hard about what are the pieces of a conference that tend to become intimidating or that can be difficult for someone who&#8217;s new to the industry so we&#8217;ve done a few things to modify that. One thing is we have lots and lots of breaks, we have food and snacks almost at every part, we have an exhibit, we have lots of tables, we have lots of opportunities for people to engage in the hallway track. I think that&#8217;s one of the benefits of just having a smaller conference too. I think RailsConf is several thousand people. It is huge. It has to take place at a convention center. It has to take place at a really big space, which it&#8217;s really easy to feel isolated in that. I think by virtue of the space we chose then the way we thought about programming, we have lots of opportunities to interact and bump heads in a good way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The other thing is we are creating a conference booklet. I know a lot of conference do programs but what we&#8217;re doing is for each talk, we have a cheat sheet. If you&#8217;re doing a talk on Ruby on Rails side project, you turn into a multimillion dollar company, ask someone in the audience who maybe has never done Ruby, never done Rails, doesn&#8217;t know what a gem is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m over in Pythonland, I&#8217;m not familiar with these words. What we have is a little cheat sheet that says here are some of the buzzwords that might trip you up. Here are some of the terms that you may not be familiar with. It&#8217;s just one-liner just to go, &#8220;Oh, wait. What is that gem thing again? Oh, it&#8217;s just a library. Okay, cool got it,&#8221; so it&#8217;s really thinking through these different ways to make people feel like they belong and that they can follow the conversation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really like the idea of a cheat sheet because I feel like you spend so much time just trying to figure out what people are talking about before you can even know if you can be [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, exactly. One thing that I&#8217;m also doing that I&#8217;m really excited about, which is super time consuming that absolutely worth it is I personally work with each of the speakers to make sure that the content is not just good because the speakers are chosen because they&#8217;re already awesome but to make sure that it really fits in with our mission, with our touchy-feely welcoming vibes and also to make sure that our community, our attendees can follow along.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I have had a minimum of three meetings with each speaker. We work through the talk outline together. We do slide reviews, which is probably one the most important parts. Once you organize things in actual size, you get to see, &#8220;Oh, man. I didn&#8217;t really spend enough time on this point. I don&#8217;t really have a transition. I didn&#8217;t introduce this topic. I didn&#8217;t have a place to have the audience feel pain and tension.&#8221; I think having those emotional component is super, super important for a live talk. Then we do a final rehearsal where we make sure that the tone and picture and the pacing is right and those kind of thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> By being super, super hands on with speakers and making sure that the talks are really tailored to our community, I&#8217;m helping to hopefully prevent some of the intimidation, some of the, &#8220;Oh, man. It was totally over my head.&#8221; A lot of those things that can happen for newbies attending conferences.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s really great. One of the things that I remember really liking about some of my favorite podcasts were when one of the hosts would interrupt another one and say, &#8220;Hey, that thing you just said might not be familiar to everybody and could you pause and unpack that for a minute.&#8221; It&#8217;s really great to have that on a sheet of paper.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. That&#8217;s what I&#8217;ve been doing a lot but behind the scenes like, &#8220;No, no, no, you can&#8217;t talk about HIPAA-compliant, yet. There&#8217;s three things we have to talk about before we talk about HIPAA-compliant,&#8221; so yes, that&#8217;s exactly my job.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That sounds like it could be a great program for speaker newbies.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Totally. One other thing that I&#8217;ve learned is because our speakers are both new &#8211;we have a bunch of first time speakers &#8212; we also we have season speakers who have been doing this a long time. One of the big benefits of having the system is that it&#8217;s just really hard to get outside of your zone. It&#8217;s really hard to see the talk from outside of yourself. Especially, for more seasoned speakers, they&#8217;re generally used talking at more advanced conferences, at lingo-specific conferences, at places where people already come in with a ton of context so it&#8217;s really helpful to have someone and go, &#8220;No, no, no. you can assume that we know what spinning up servers means,&#8221; and we have to modify a lot of that so it&#8217;s not so much about, &#8220;I&#8217;m new to speaking and I haven&#8217;t done this enough to know how it works.&#8221; It&#8217;s really just about feedback and knowing that this is a new talk for a new audience. That alone makes the process really helpful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is what good communication is &#8212; it&#8217;s meeting the person you&#8217;re trying to reach at their level.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yep, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Before we leave the topic of the conferences and the prices, I wanted to ask, now that you&#8217;ve put one together, can you better explain why conferences are so expensive? I think when you first getting started, it&#8217;s kind of a surprise that a conference can be as expensive as it is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. I&#8217;m going to preface this by saying that I have not yet paid all of the bills for the conference. Anything I say, it may totally change after the conference has happened. Honestly, that&#8217;s kind of the part that I was a little confused about too because the conference didn&#8217;t end up being as expensive as I expected but I think there&#8217;s a couple things that made it a little bit easier for me. One is I&#8217;m doing this 100% full time and I&#8217;m the primary person on this. I&#8217;ve been able to, fortunately pull people from the community to help with very specific tasks. We&#8217;ve had a programming committee of 10 people who review the talks. We&#8217;ve had a review committee of eight people who review the scholarship submissions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I have what I call my conference advisory board, which is basically, I think is six other conference organizers who I really appreciate and I think the conferences are awesome and if any time I have a budgetary or a logistical question, I ping them and go like, &#8220;I about to spend money on this. Is this stupid? Don’t let me be stupid.&#8221; Then they kind of course correct, which is awesome. Also, I have dragged my husband into this and he&#8217;s taking care of some really boring tasks that I don&#8217;t want to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But for the most part, I&#8217;m doing this full time. I spend, at least 40 hours a week just on the conference. Because of that, I don&#8217;t have a whole team of employees like for a company conference that I need to pay salaries to take them off of a product to work on this. I don&#8217;t have a lot of those human resources related expenses. It&#8217;s just me trying to pay for my own time so that really helps.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think the fact that we got the venue donated. We&#8217;re doing it at Microsoft and they&#8217;re [inaudible] the space to us for free. That takes a huge line item off of the budget. Other than that, it&#8217;s mostly been about making sure the food is good, making sure &#8212; and that&#8217;s one thing too &#8212; we pay for our speakers to travel. We cover their hotel and all of that. It generally hasn&#8217;t been as expensive.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The advice that I got from the conference advisory board that I really taken to heart is making sure that the ticket sales can, for the most part, cover the cost of the conference and then anything that you get from sponsors will essentially be the money for the six months of full time work that I spend on this. Assuming you get enough sponsors, it should work out. For now, we&#8217;ll see if it actually works out that way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That makes sense because I would imagine that those fixed costs are the ones who have to plan for the most in advance anyway, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly and the one thing though that I am noticing now and I&#8217;m very happy that I&#8217;ve been very, very conservative with my budget is even though we have 250 tickets to sell for the conference, you don&#8217;t really have 250 tickets to sell because you have, for example the programming committee and the review committee, I want to give free tickets to them, for them to come. The way we&#8217;ve done the ticketing is there&#8217;s a student ticket, which is the cheapest ticket and there&#8217;s the individual ticket. If you can afford it, pick that one and if you are able to, there&#8217;s the supporter ticket which is the most expensive one that kind of subsidizes the student ticket.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The assumption in the pricing is that the average ticket price would be pretty close to that individual ticket, that is totally not happen. Most people don&#8217;t pick the supporter ticket, even my general budget, even if I were to sell out all 250 tickets, it&#8217;s going to end up being a little bit lower than I anticipated. I think a lot of the potential budget issues for me anyway isn&#8217;t going to be so much from the conference being expensive. It&#8217;s going to be more likely from the revenue being less for a number of different reasons that I anticipate when I first crafted the budget.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s really interesting about the average ticket price and my first reaction when I heard about Codeland which was, &#8220;That sounds really cool but I probably shouldn&#8217;t go because I would be taking a seat away from somebody who the conference is more directly aimed at.&#8221; I&#8217;m the sort of person who would definitely buy a supporter ticket and probably throw in some extra on top of that. Is your marketing playing into that, do you think or what else is going on there?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly what you said. I think that was me, the initial tickets that undertaking best practices from tech companies that are not specifically for newbies and assuming that it would still apply and you&#8217;re totally right. If you are a supporter, if you can afford that ticket, chances are you probably don&#8217;t need to go to the conference. Chances are you probably already have a secure dev job, you&#8217;re doing well, you know all this stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We designed the tech conference so that if you are a more experienced developer, you will still love the crap out of this conference. It&#8217;s so good and the topics are so on point because they&#8217;re so awesome and I made sure to not make it too like, &#8220;This is only Junior 101 things.&#8221; That&#8217;s not really what it&#8217;s about but at the same time, it&#8217;s not designed, it&#8217;s not catered to someone with more experience. That is something that I just didn&#8217;t appreciate until it was too late, until I&#8217;d already put it out there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The other side of it is if you&#8217;re going for people who are still learning, who don&#8217;t quite have the career that they want, you can&#8217;t really raise the ticket prices. Our ticket prices for a two-day conference are pretty good and they&#8217;re pretty affordable compared to other tech conferences. We did it on a Friday and a Saturday so that people wouldn&#8217;t be forced to take two days off of work. They can use up one of their weekends but not the full weekend. We try to think about ways to make it accessible and affordable to folks but at the end of day, we can&#8217;t really go much lower than that, to cover costs but we can&#8217;t really go higher because of the demographics. These are all the things that I&#8217;ve really started to appreciate now that it&#8217;s kind of played out and I&#8217;m seeing things. Those are all part of lessons learned.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Saron, you mentioned something that you don&#8217;t like about conferences but what is something that you do like that you did continue on with this Codeland Conference?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things I love about conferences is the ability to create an immersive experience with and for people that you really care about. I remember talking to a friend of mine, Duane O&#8217;Brien at PayPal and when I first told him over a year ago, &#8220;I&#8217;m planning this thing for new developers and I have a rough idea of what I want to do with it,&#8221; and he gave me the best advice and he said, &#8220;You need to really, really think about what the user experience is going to be. What is the story? What is the journey?&#8221; I took that very, very seriously and I spent many hours, just sitting on a plane, sitting at restaurants or just thinking like, &#8220;How do I want people to feel from the moment they walk in, to them picking up their badge, to them picking up their swag bag, sitting in the audience, going to the bathroom? What should people feel? What should they experience at every single moment?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Once I had a really, really clear picture of that, everything else really fell into place. It made the talks in the way the talk should feel so much clear. The idea of the conference booklet came out of that like how do I want them to feel? I never want them to feel lost. I want them to feel excited and energized and we had to remove some of those negative feelings to accomplish that. That&#8217;s when that came in. I think the conferences that are really, for me stood out and really made an impact are the ones where it was super, super clear that the organizers thought through the full experience.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One conference that I&#8217;m going to shout out is DjangoCon, which I was lucky enough to keynote last year and those people are actually on my conference advisory board. That was one of the conferences that was so impactful to me on a very emotional human level. It was also my first time really in the Python Django world. That was different but they just so clearly thought about making sure every element of it. There were bathrooms signs that said what to do if someone is in the bathroom that you don&#8217;t feel like should be because of the trans-bathroom conversation and it was like, step one, mind your business, basically.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It was awesome and it made me so happy. I was like, &#8220;Wow, you thought about that.&#8221; They had sanitary napkins and tampons stuff in both the men and the woman gendered bathrooms. They thought about that and that was one of the conferences that really set to me as being not flashy. It wasn&#8217;t a flashy conference that are like, &#8220;We have a concert and live band.&#8221; It was like, &#8220;We&#8217;re here to be a community. We&#8217;re here to talk about Django but we&#8217;re going to make sure that every moment you spend with us, you&#8217;re going to feel loved and included and heard.&#8221; Pulling from those elements and really making sure every aspect of this conference echoes, that is something I&#8217;ve taken from other conferences.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know that example of bathroom signage and having sanitary pads in all of the bathrooms, the fact that that&#8217;s not a big flashy thing is actually even more important. I feel like it&#8217;s such a simple, basic thing that you can do that I&#8217;m astonished that all conferences don&#8217;t just do it because it makes it that much better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. I&#8217;ve been a conferences and those have been great too that have done a lot of really cool type things. They&#8217;re awesome but when you experience them, you&#8217;re thinking, &#8220;Obviously, this isn&#8217;t going to happen at every conference.&#8221; This conference happened to have the budget or the sponsorship. It stands out because you&#8217;re probably never going to see it again but when you integrate that experience into the really small things that people use bathroom anyway so why not make it an inclusive and explicitly welcoming place. It really raises the bar. I think that it changes our expectations of how conferences should be and really how all spaces should be.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think there&#8217;s a big difference between &#8212; not to name any names &#8212; conferences that incorporate diversity because it&#8217;s a marketing stunt, because it improves their PR and what you do if you actually want to make people feel included and welcome and the way that those bathrooms were set up is an example of the latter, where you actually ask yourself, &#8220;What do these people need?&#8221; And then you do that thing. You don&#8217;t ask yourself, &#8220;What would have look good if we set?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. I&#8217;m so glad you brought that up. That&#8217;s one of the things that I was very relieved about. Our community has always been a very diverse and inclusive community. That&#8217;s the whole point of starting it. We&#8217;re not a diversity community. It&#8217;s so funny because when people look at me, they&#8217;re like, &#8220;CodeNewbie must be for women, or must be for black people.&#8221; And I&#8217;m like, &#8220;No, we&#8217;re for everyone. I just happen to be a black woman,&#8221; like that&#8217;s just kind of how that worked out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For many reasons, I really wanted to make sure CodeNewbie, whether it was the podcast lined up and the guest that we choose or the chat that we have, the topics we cover, the meetups that we do, I wanted to make sure that it really reflected the world and I wanted to make sure that it was diverse from race and gender but also socioeconomic status and age and coding journey.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When we did the CFP for the conference and I think about two-thirds of the speaker lineup are from the CFP and the 30% are invited speakers. When we did the CFP for it and I had my review committee take a run through first and then I made the final cut, I was so relieved to find out that we had such a great pool and it wasn&#8217;t me going like, &#8220;Hey, diverse people. You should totally apply to my stuff.&#8221; It was because we had already set up this expectation, we already had this brand of being inclusive and welcoming, that was reflected already in the pool that we have. I was really happy to be able to look at our lineup and go, &#8220;Oh, thank God.&#8221; Like we did it and we didn&#8217;t have to push it as a branding or marketing strategy to get it done.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I believe that we tell stories even when we don&#8217;t mean to. I really believe that there are all these unintentional narratives that happen whenever we make decisions on who we hire, who we give the mike to, who we give a stage to so when I think about the people that I champion and every time you select a speaker, you&#8217;re championing that person. Every time you reach with someone, you&#8217;re championing that person. Every time you pick someone as your guest, you&#8217;re championing that person. You are cosigning on, at the very least, their work. Every time I do that, I always think what is the unintentional story that goes along with that cosign.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When I think about, for example our CodeNewbie Podcast, one huge bias that I had and an unintentional story that I was telling that I didn&#8217;t mean to, was that if you are a new programmer, you should be Rubyist because all of my guests were Ruby developers. Someone called me out and someone e-mailed me and that&#8217;s because I&#8217;m Rubyist and my network is heavily biased towards Ruby developers and I go to mostly, Ruby conferences and that was an unintentional story that I was telling that I totally didn&#8217;t mean to. Now, every time I&#8217;m tempted to invite Rubyist and I’m like, &#8220;Wait a minute. How many Rubyist do I have? What&#8217;s story am I telling? What message am I sending?&#8221; I&#8217;m very, very hyper aware of that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I really wish more people did that. I wish that more people recognize that because I hear the argument a lot of I don&#8217;t care about diversity. I&#8217;m not trying to say that people of color can&#8217;t code. I just care about the tech. That is so irrelevant. It doesn&#8217;t matter what your intentions are. What matters is what people pick up on and what people see in the decisions that you make and people will do pattern recognition. They will make assumptions about what you&#8217;re saying, even if you don&#8217;t mean. I feel like if you are in a position of power where you can pick who you select, who your champion, you should take that responsibility seriously.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Saron, you mentioned that when you did the call for the conference that it was a comfortable diversity of speakers because you&#8217;d already developed an inclusive community. What do you think you did different with developing CodeNewbie so that your community was inclusive, especially now that we&#8217;re hearing about a lot of issues within certain communities of there being a lot of exclusivity?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. I&#8217;ve been thinking about this a lot and I think that there are a few things that have worked out toward at the end and in terms of that. I think number one is I really, really wanted everyone to be nice and I only want you to hang out in our community if you also want to be nice. If you don&#8217;t want to be nice, I don&#8217;t want you here. My goal is not to have the world&#8217;s biggest community of new developers. It&#8217;s not what it&#8217;s about. I want to have the biggest community of the nicest, warmest, kindest, most supportive people who are learning to code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One thing that I&#8217;ve done is we start every single chat with the three rules: Be nice, be supportive, be honest and we say that at the beginning of every single chat. The idea there is really to just be very explicit about the expectations. When you walk into our space &#8212; it is not a public space, it is not for anyone and everyone &#8212; it is here for you to leverage if you agree to conduct yourself accordingly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We’ve had a few incidents, I remember early on as we had our discourse page but early on, there was one particular comment where the guy said something about not wanting to be friends with women. It wasn&#8217;t explicitly sexist. It was just weird like, &#8220;What do you mean by that?&#8221; and the community jumped on it immediately and very nicely like, &#8220;We&#8217;re not sure what you mean by this but we don&#8217;t think that this is really the appropriate comment.&#8221; Before it even got to me, there already like three or four people who basically told this person that that is not okay and the person never came back, which is totally fine.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> You know, really being explicit about those expectations and I think that a lot of times they think about code of conduct and those types of things, a lot of times in cases this happens, this is what we should do. But instead, we are pushing best behavior to the forefront and that&#8217;s almost like the first barrier to entry before you can even talk to us. I think that really has helped some degree of self-policing in the community but also really helped attract people who also want to be really nice and helpful. That&#8217;s been really, really huge.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For me this is a great example of the importance of leadership in creating the kind of culture that you want to have. It&#8217;s not just a matter of telling people how they ought to behave. It&#8217;s paving that way and leading by example.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. To that point, I&#8217;m the world&#8217;s biggest cheerleader. It&#8217;s really funny, I always wonder if people who follow both CodeNewbie and of all my personal account, how big the difference in personality is because I&#8217;m much snarkier in my personal account. I definitely drop [inaudible] than I do in CodeNewbie account and when I switch to that account, I am all butterflies and rainbows and unicorns.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I will turn any negative tweet into the most positive accomplishment in your coding career and that&#8217;s very intentional. We&#8217;ll re-tweet everything, we&#8217;ll reply with lots of, &#8220;Go Sam!&#8221; and, &#8220;We&#8217;re so proud of you,&#8221; and, &#8220;You didn&#8217;t finish the project. That&#8217;s okay. You’re moving forward. Progress is everything.&#8221; We we&#8217;re really intentionally, super, over the top happy in lots of mission points.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It was really funny because I think it was a year ago, I had inflammation of my right shoulder cap or something which meant that I couldn&#8217;t type and it became really, really painful two minutes before the chat started. My husband is there is like, &#8220;What do you want me to do?&#8221; I&#8217;m like, &#8220;We&#8217;ve never not done a Twitter chat. We are doing the Twitter chat,&#8221; and he&#8217;s like, &#8220;But you can&#8217;t type,&#8221; and I said, &#8220;All right. You’re going to have to type for me, I would dictate the tweets.&#8221; It was the funniest thing because he would tweet and I would go, &#8220;No, you need a minimum of three exclamation points. You need at least two smiley faces,&#8221; and that&#8217;s when I realized how over the top it really was dictating like there aren&#8217;t enough sunglasses, smiley faces and an exclamation point and make sure to add a heart in there just for good measure. I take that very, very seriously. I&#8217;m very serious in my positivity.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Stay on [inaudible] and honey.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, that brings up a little bit how awkward I feel sometimes dictating text messages to Siri. It&#8217;s like, &#8220;This number for now, period. I&#8217;m very excited, exclamation point.&#8221; And forget emoji. That&#8217;s not going to happen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly and because I&#8217;m in pain, none of these sounds happy like, &#8220;Good job. Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point.&#8221; It sounds very aggressive but it looks very happy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, if I could just teach Siri that bang means exclamation point, my text would get a lot nicer, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to just highlight a thing you said in passing there, which is that you were in pain and not feeling very good but you still made it to a point to appear positive in the tweets. I think we can all learn a lot from that, myself included. A lot of people think that congruence means saying what you feel, wearing your heart in your sleeve. For me, it&#8217;s about coming across the way you want to come across. While being true to yourself, it doesn&#8217;t just mean if you&#8217;re angry, people know you&#8217;re angry.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and I think that&#8217;s one of the harder parts, probably the hardest part about making a community your full time job. A lot of times, I don&#8217;t feel that way. A lot of times, I&#8217;m not happy. I&#8217;m really stressed out or I&#8217;m just not in a good mood and it can be really hard to shield the community from that. Someone recently said to me it kind of stuck to me for a long time and he said, &#8220;Do you have a community?&#8221; I was like, &#8220;I like to start a community and I have friends. Does that count?&#8221; He&#8217;s like, &#8220;No, no, no. Do you have a community? Do you have people that you can go to when you&#8217;re the one that needs support and you need that push?&#8221; I have friends who can do that but it&#8217;s not exactly the same thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When he posed that question to me, it made me realized that I created CodeNewbie because it was a thing that I wish had existed and I thought it could help people. But almost the cost of that is when I&#8217;m dealing with more meta community things, when I&#8217;m not sure about a decision I need to make, when I&#8217;m just not in a good mood, I still have to push that aside and I still have to add a little smiley faces and I still have to keep on that persona and I&#8217;m much better at that on some days than I am on others.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> You can tell from Twitter the days that I&#8217;m super happy. There&#8217;s 20 times more tweets than the other day is, when I&#8217;m not having a very good day so I&#8217;m like maintaining that level of energy when you&#8217;re personally just not in that same headspace. That&#8217;s one of the hardest parts of doing this.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As you&#8217;re talking about being the community cheerleader, even when you don&#8217;t feel the cheer, it occurred to me that that is very similar to what I hear from a lot of women, especially in tech, which is that we ask women to do a lot of additional, unpaid, emotional labor. I wonder if that parallels rings true to you and maybe if the difference is that you&#8217;re doing this community voluntarily. What do you think about all that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a good question. I think I have a few advantages that shields me from a lot of that labor. One is that I work for myself so I don&#8217;t really have to put up with your [inaudible] if I don&#8217;t want to. I can choose who I work with. If I don&#8217;t like you, if we don&#8217;t get along, if we don&#8217;t share the same values, then we&#8217;re just not going to work together. I have a lot of agency in that sense. I can always walk away from a situation that I don&#8217;t really have to put up with a lot of stuff the way that if you&#8217;re at a big company. Maybe you like your boss, maybe you like most of your team because that one person that doesn&#8217;t get it or something like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think I&#8217;m very fortunate to be in a position where I can work for myself. I could see myself and I don&#8217;t have that. I think that kind of speaks to and I&#8217;m hoping to write a blog post about this someday but I think that kind of speaks to this larger issue of being paid period and the importance of financial freedom. Because four years ago, where I had a job working for someone who was super sexist. Even if not a sexist, just like a bad manager, a very bad leader and just not somewhere I wanted to be and I felt very stuck. I couldn&#8217;t afford to leave, I was basically living paycheck to paycheck at that point and I was in the position where I thought, &#8220;I hate going to work every day. This is the worst ever.&#8221; No matter how many times I try to explain to my boss that his comments are inappropriate and kind of try to train him on how to behave as a manager, it&#8217;s totally not working or it works for a day and then he goes back to saying some really uncool stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I thought to myself, &#8220;I can&#8217;t leave because I can&#8217;t afford to leave,&#8221; and that was the first time that I really made the connection between money and freedom. I think that a lot of it has got to talk about freedom when in the financial context it is like, &#8220;I&#8217;m free to not work,&#8221; and just hang out all day. That&#8217;s really what it is. For me, it&#8217;s freedom to always be able to walk away from a bad situation and to never be put in a situation where I have to take on that unpaid, emotional labor, I have to deal with this person saying racist, sexist things to me, I have to work terrible long hours and take a toll on my mental physical health because I can&#8217;t afford to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> After that job and I&#8217;ve eventually ended up finding another job and living then learning how to code. But after that position, I started really, really taking my finances much more seriously. I don&#8217;t want that to sound like the solution to misogyny is like everyone make more money because that&#8217;s so stupid but I do think that it&#8217;s important to advocate for your paycheck, whenever you&#8217;re given the opportunity. I feel like I spend way too much time trying to convince brilliant people that they should be paid more and it drives me nuts like I&#8217;m thinking, &#8220;Do you know people of your level get paid $20,000 to $30,000 more than you?&#8221; and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;But I don&#8217;t really need it. I&#8217;m fine.&#8221; Then they&#8217;re in situations where they can&#8217;t leave because they don&#8217;t have that financial freedom. For me, while I&#8217;m shielded from a lot of that labor, I think there&#8217;s a big connection between that choice and making sure that people don&#8217;t mess with my money because that&#8217;s how I&#8217;m able to create a situation where I don&#8217;t have to deal with your crap.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just want to jump in real quick with a shout out to podcast episode I was listening to on my road trip this last week. It&#8217;s from Tech Done Right which is a great podcast: TechDoneRight.io and their Episode #2 about career development with Brandon Hays, touched a lot on some of the factors that go into the logarithmic curve of salary in our field and talked about salary stuff a little bit in general. If you want to go into that a little bit more, go checkout Tech Done Right #2.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to jump back into talking about financial freedom. There was an article that came a little while ago that talked about of these professionals that we polled, lots of them said that things other than money were more important to them than money. My response to that is once you reach a level of financial freedom, a little extra money doesn&#8217;t really change your outlook as much as getting more freedom in other areas. But if you&#8217;re not making enough money to go to a different state or move to a different job, that is severely constricting. They were talking about, &#8220;You should focus on finding happiness in your job and things like that.&#8221; Well, you need money to do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. That&#8217;s also one of my biggest pet peeves and that&#8217;s also kind of the thing that irritates me when people say, &#8220;I don&#8217;t really care about my salary. I really want to focus on other things.&#8221; I think what people don&#8217;t understand is that when you have more money, you can do things like quit your job to do your side project into a full time gig. You can take a year off and learn a whole new programming language, if that&#8217;s your thing before deciding to take on a job. You can really be super, super selective about what job you take on even that will takes six months and that&#8217;s fine because you can afford.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that this idea that finding happiness and finding passion is totally independent of how much money you have is the biggest lie ever told. That&#8217;s told by super-privileged rich people who just have so much money, they just forgot that there&#8217;s a link but &#8212; I&#8217;m going to make a terrible analogy right now &#8212; it was almost like saying if I want to build a desk, do I want a lot of nails? Nobody wants nails, obviously. Who cares about nails? But you need the nails to make a desk. I don&#8217;t know if the analogy made sense. But money is the tool that allows you to find happiness and find passion and do hobbies and do all these things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The function where you use to place a value on money is nonlinear. What I mean by that is if you have zero dollars, $10,000 is a lot of money. If you have a million dollars, $10,000 might be your latte budget. It&#8217;s not very much money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a research that actually talks about that and it was discussing exactly what you were bringing up, Rein about how much money you&#8217;re making and its impact on your happiness. Basically, the research said, once you reach about $75,000 in your salary, then whatever you&#8217;re making past that is not going to be a huge increase in your ability to be happy. But if you&#8217;re making $30,000, if it can go from $30,000 to $40,000 or $50,000, it&#8217;s a huge jump. When you&#8217;re making maybe $70,000 or $90,000 or $100,000 or more, then an additional $10,000 or $20,000 is not going to change your lifestyle. It&#8217;s going to take you getting to about $350,000 and up for your lifestyle to significantly change at that point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that on your point, Saron, a lot of people who have reached a higher level of satisfaction in their job and their salary have forgotten what it&#8217;s like to have a lot of potential but not have the income to be able to support, even living in a place you want to live or be able to put your kids in school that you want them to be in or to be able to buy the food that&#8217;s you want to have to eat. Those little things that people take for granted, when they already have it, they become huge obstacles to your ability to be happy or passionate or feel like you have choices because they become like little jail cells that you feel like, if I have to struggle this much, to try to leave my job to find a better environment to work in, that seems impossible, that seems like fairy tale, magical stuff that only some certain people get to do. I just can&#8217;t take that kind of risk when I know that if I don&#8217;t get the same or, at least get somewhere close to where I am, my whole world can fall apart.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. I think that for people who are past that threshold &#8212; that $75,000 threshold &#8212; before that, it&#8217;s very clear that the amount of money you make, makes a direct impact on your lifestyle like you can move into a better neighborhood, a better apartment, better home like those kinds of big life decisions. But after a certain point, as a developer, if you&#8217;re making $100,000 to $130,000, your lifestyle may not change as much but what I&#8217;ve seen from friends and people I talked to is they feel the pain of not making as much as they could when they come to certain decision points. Those points might be, &#8220;I really wish I could turn this idea into a real project.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> At that point, you need &#8212; relatively at times &#8212; an infusion of cash where you need a nice nest egg in order to justify, maybe not working for a couple of months. It might be them saying, &#8220;I have this really big emergency that I wasn&#8217;t anticipating. Now, I have all these bills and I think I was going to pay.&#8221; I think what makes it really easy to forget is it&#8217;s not the difference between living in different apartments or homes when you&#8217;re past that threshold. It&#8217;s more about when you run into trouble or when you have a really cool idea or you have this thing that you want to do that&#8217;s out of the ordinary, you realize that I can&#8217;t do it, I can&#8217;t leave, I can&#8217;t try this because I didn&#8217;t push and I didn&#8217;t advocate as much as I could have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wish this was another podcast so that I could talk about how our dependence on a salary to survive is inherently coercive.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Why can&#8217;t make this the podcast you want?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;ve changed our name every episode. It&#8217;s fine.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It also means that the employer-employee relationship is inherently coercive and fraud.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But I think we&#8217;re seeing a lot of that now because there&#8217;s a lot of, I guess the question of ethics coming up as some of the technologies that have scaled are starting to get to a point where if you automate them, you don&#8217;t have to employ people. What does that mean for all those people to lose their jobs? Is this a good thing? Should we be doing this? But it&#8217;s already happening so it&#8217;s not even a question of should we do it. It&#8217;s happening.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s a lot of concern about what are you actually going to have an option to pick from as an employee, like are you going to get a salary or are you going to get benefits? Are they going to be living wages? Are you really just going to have to go out on your own and make your own path and be pretty much self-employed in order to ensure that you have what you need? Especially in tech, there&#8217;s a lot of people who are training their replacements who are going to be cheaper and those people are going to eventually be replaced by something that&#8217;s automated.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, this is a structural thing that we&#8217;ve touched on a few times on this podcast before but just this basic idea that, Rein I think where you are going with the standard anti-capitalism right #2, which are is the story of the entire sectors of the workforce being automated out of existence. That is capitalism doing its job. It&#8217;s maximizing value under that system.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can mix it up a bit. I could pull a little bit of #4.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. We also have to talk about how we balance that with other aspects of our society. Do we have a social safety net? Well you know, we&#8217;re working on dismantling that too. Yay!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the ways that this manifests itself is you&#8217;ll see that when people, especially newer developers, try to market themselves, they get put down pretty hard a lot of times and this is people with higher status within the community policing other people in the community for trying to make enough money to survive. It&#8217;s disgusting. Any time I see someone marketing themselves their ability of trying to make more money within this screwed up system, I am all for that and you should absolutely do that. Anyone who wants to stop that, you just take a seat.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow. Mike drop.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Pretty much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You especially see it when the people who are trying to market themselves are underrepresented because now there&#8217;s a stereotype that are involved and there&#8217;s extra reasons for them to get crap on and it&#8217;s so disgusting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. When I hear a talk about this one thing that I&#8217;ve been struggling with as a fulltime entrepreneur now is kind of realizing that the way that I understood businesses is not the way it should be. It’s the way it is because a lot of people decided that&#8217;s the way it should be. Thanks to Twitter&#8217;s general cynicism, I feel like every week I&#8217;m coming up with this new thing where I&#8217;m like, &#8220;This thing that I took for granted, this system, this belief, this understanding that I thought it was, it doesn&#8217;t need to be that way.&#8221; One thing that I really appreciate, specifically with the conference and because I control the money, I&#8217;m my only employee, I get to tell how we spend, I can splurge on something like a conference booklet, which I think it&#8217;s going to cost a couple of thousand dollars, which according to capitalism is like not the most efficient use of money and time and it&#8217;s not the most profitable way to do things and blah-blah-blah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When I think about the way I want to use money and resources, my default and what the world &#8216;has taught me&#8217; is stretch every dollar as far as it can go, make as much money as you can, be super profitable. I think part of that mentality is also me worried that I&#8217;m going to be taken advantage of. I don&#8217;t want to be the fool in the situation and that goes actually like being an immigrant and all kinds of personal childhood baggers that we don&#8217;t really need to unpack. But I have this constant feeling of being an outsider and feeling that I don&#8217;t know how the system works. Therefore, I&#8217;m very vulnerable to being taken advantage of so I tend to lean very heavily into the capitalist idea of how do I make sure I make the most money and nobody beats me in all of that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Now that I have that agency and I can make a lot of these business decisions, I have to check myself. I have to go, &#8220;Wait a minute. Just because that&#8217;s what the system has taught you, it doesn&#8217;t mean that&#8217;s how you have to be.&#8221; You can just not do that. You can prioritize people&#8217;s happiness or you can prioritize the things you want to do over making the most money that you can. I feel like a lot of it, even for those of us who might be better intentioned is on-learning a lot of that and figuring out it&#8217;s not the way it is. It&#8217;s the way we decide it and we, as individual people, can make different decisions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I feel like one of the other things that people don&#8217;t really think about much is the idea that there&#8217;s a trope that you see pretty often that the US and the West is a capitalist society. That framing just says that capitalism is the dominant structural force in our society but really what it is, is capitalism is one of the many systems that we have to live in and navigate and blend together and make tradeoffs between as we live our whole lives. I really hate that framing of capitalism over our lives, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and it really creates this &#8216;us versus them&#8217; and it&#8217;s funny because I feel like a big part of marketing and branding and PR is to convince people that it&#8217;s not &#8216;us versus them&#8217; but really it is. It&#8217;s really behind the scene, it&#8217;s like how do we make the most money and get all the glory and extract all the value. That&#8217;s really what it is. It&#8217;s just marketers try to convince us that it&#8217;s not that way. For me, it just been like reminding myself that you don&#8217;t have to operate on that. You can create your own rules and that&#8217;s been really important for me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Also, one of the best things that they can do is take &#8216;us versus us&#8217; and then frame it as &#8216;us versus them&#8217; so that we fight each other.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, that was deep. I like that. One of the resources that has really helped me get out of that mindset that I think you might be interested in if you don&#8217;t know it. It&#8217;s called Give and Take. It&#8217;s a book, I think by Adam Grant who I believe is a professor, either MIT or Harvard. It is an awesome book and it just made me feel so much better about myself. Those are the best books, the ones that make you feel better about yourself. The book is all about this idea of givers and takers and matters. Givers are the people who tend to give, give, give. Takers, don&#8217;t give. They are very selfish and take, take, take. Then most people are matters meaning that they kind of keep score, like I&#8217;ll give you something but I&#8217;m going to call in the favor later on. First of all, have any of you read the book yet?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ALL:</b> Nope.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Just heard of it now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Great. Awesome. In terms of who of those three groups is most likely to succeed in the world, in terms of business and career success and those types of things, which of those three do you feel like is most likely to succeed?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The matter.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay. Which one do you think is the most likely to fail, like to be the lowest of the three groups?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The taker.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Any other &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would agree with both of those.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay. Givers are both to people who are most likely to succeed and most likely to lose because what happens is in the beginning of their career, their endeavor, the thing that they&#8217;re working on, because they&#8217;re the ones that are giving, giving, giving, giving, they actually don&#8217;t have anything. They&#8217;ve given it all away. But what they do over time &#8212; and what really is fascinating to me &#8212; is they end up basically building a personal network of people who are either also givers or also are matters. They ended up building a community of people who are really interested in giving back to them and who really buy into their giving philosophy so they&#8217;re able to get a lot of that back later on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also by giving, they&#8217;re able to create more value for the entire groups. They&#8217;re able to make the pie bigger, which means when it&#8217;s their turn to take their slice, they have a bigger slice. To me, this was awesome because I had always thought of business as a zero-sum game. I always thought of it as like, &#8220;If I don&#8217;t get this dollar, you get this dollar. We can&#8217;t both get a dollar. That is just ridiculous.&#8221; When I read this book, I am definitely a giver and that&#8217;s my instinct and I&#8217;m constantly trying to suppress it because I&#8217;m trying to make sure I&#8217;m not taking advantage off.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But when I read that I thought, &#8220;Oh, my goodness. This is actually an advantage,&#8221; as long as I&#8217;m aware when people actually do take advantage of me, this idea of being the person that offers up stuff is not inherently anti-capitalist or anti-profitability or anti-success. We can all win by giving and helping each other and that just really, really helped change my mindset.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well now, I have another book to read. Thanks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is where I&#8217;m obligated to point out that this is a win of socialism within a capitalist system by people self-organizing the socialist in a socialist-known hierarchy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t know if it&#8217;s all socialism because I think part of what we forget is that part of capitalism is supposed to be this free market and the market is dictated by value and the supply and demand. Value is not only profit. Value can be a lot of different things and we only talk about money as the only exchange for whatever you&#8217;re doing but you can make something of value and that doesn&#8217;t have to be an actual product. As long as there is demand for it, then you have created a market economy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Then that&#8217;s when I point out that capitalism and markets are orthogonal.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But money is so easy to quantify.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Of course but you can&#8217;t have a lot of the things you want without creating some sort of value, which is what marketing supposed to be doing. But a lot of the value has to do with what people are drawn to it. It&#8217;s more than just money. It has to do with how you make them feel and if they feel like this is something meant for them, then that requires that you have to do more than just make a cheaper, faster product.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like we&#8217;ve gotten a little bit far afield here &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; Because we&#8217;re now discussing the overthrow of capitalism, which I am here for, by the way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But no, we haven&#8217;t got that far because &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;re not repenting are you, Mr Cyborg?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s the purpose of Codeland, right Saron? That you&#8217;re trying to create a conference has a huge amount of value, not necessarily a conference where you going to make the most money?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes and I appreciate that full circle. It&#8217;s a very, very smart full circle. It allows me to touch on different things, which we talked about too much which is the actual program for it. We have 27 speakers and I think four or five panels. One thing that I&#8217;m really excited about and one thing that I was very aware of when making the different talks is to make sure to have a selection of talks that helps, almost reshape the way we think about technology and expand the application of tech.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that a lot of times when we talk about code and even just like in our daily job as coders, a lot of times it&#8217;s very capitalist-driven. It&#8217;s a lot about making a ton of money for our employer, for a company and making sure we&#8217;re as efficient as we possibly can, extracting as much value as we possibly can. A lot of the examples that we have, don&#8217;t necessarily value money and efficiency in their projects. They value things like overthrowing an oppressive regime. That is a topic that we&#8217;re going to discuss. We have topics that talk about taking vacant land that&#8217;s either been abandoned or isn&#8217;t going to be used for many years and turning it into gathering places for the community and making community gardens and playgrounds and places for free for people to engage in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We were talking about the New York Public Library and how do you take lessons learned from the start of a community from the &#8216;traditional tech world&#8217; or &#8216;tech companies&#8217; and use that to create products and solutions that are free for the millions of people who use the services and resources at the public library. I really tried very hard to pick topics that are a little bit out of the norm, when we think about tech, when we think about companies that make you go, &#8220;I didn&#8217;t think about using code in that way to solve that problem, in that space for these people.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One thing that I&#8217;m really excited about is to have an opportunity to say that Codeland in a lot of ways is a reflection of my own worldview. I think that code, like many things is just a tool and whatever we want with that tool, we can assign whatever value we want to that tool. The values that I&#8217;m assigning at Codeland is community and collaboration and really serving people who might tend to be ignored or might not be valued by a more capitalist society. A lot of the themes resonate with that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know what? If you&#8217;re building community-focus cooperative spaces in the real world, what you are doing weigh more than 100 Twitter socialists like me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. There&#8217;s one woman who is amazing. I heard her speak at, it wasn&#8217;t a tech conferences, it&#8217;s more of like a politics, social change conference about a year ago. I don&#8217;t know where or how I&#8217;m going to get in contact with her but if I do anything in the future, I&#8217;m making sure that she&#8217;s part of it and she&#8217;s someone who is coming in from Bahrain. She does a lot of speaking but she doesn&#8217;t record any of her talks. She doesn&#8217;t have photography taken of her because her life is constantly in danger. This is the person that is coming to tell you how you can use Ruby on Rails to create social change and push back on oppressive government. When I heard her story, I was like, &#8220;Holy crap. I never applied my coding skills and what I know about code to something so important.&#8221; I think the more voices we can share like that, the more stories we can share, I think the better off we all be.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was listening to, I want to say it was a talk with Anil Dash and he brought up something that I didn&#8217;t even think about until he said it, which was when you get a computer science degree, it&#8217;s one of the only professional degrees that you can attain without having to take an ethics course. He thinks that&#8217;s an issue because you can&#8217;t become a doctor without taking an ethics course. You can&#8217;t even get an MBA without taking an ethics course but you can learn how to make technology which you can argue is one of the biggest catalysts of change, at least right now in culture.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Also technology that literally keeps people alive and/or kills them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes but you can do that without ever having to even consider ethical questions, which I think is a problem. That&#8217;s probably why there&#8217;s a lot of efforts to try to do something around organizing something around social justice because it&#8217;s like this little thing that we didn&#8217;t pay attention to, that has now grown into this gigantic little shop of horrors kind of plant-monster. Its tentacles are in everything and now we&#8217;re just asking the questions like, &#8220;Is that good? Should would do that? Whose decision is that?&#8221; There&#8217;s this answer of like tech is neutral, which is not true.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We would like to end the show with either a reflection or a call-to-action or something that we feel like we&#8217;ve learned from this episode. I really want to thank you, Saron for the book recommendation for Give and Take. I definitely have to repeat that. I have a talk proposal out to talk about some of the psychological research into luck, which is fascinating. But as I was working on the proposal, I realized that it lacked a satisfactory conclusion and I think that idea of give and take might be what I want to do with that. Regardless of using it for a talk or not, it sounds like something that everybody should know about too. I will definitely have that to [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things I think kept coming up, Saron was that a lot of the way that you have grown the CodeNewbie community and thought about things for the community is people first. I think that&#8217;s unfortunately kind of unique because usually when you have conversations about tech, the first thing people talk about is what you&#8217;re going to learn, how you&#8217;re going to learn it and they give you advice like go to meet ups and meet people. But they don&#8217;t really tell you things like consider how it&#8217;s going to make a person feel if you have them in this environment, which I think is something that you have talked about specifically with Codeland.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> What I take from that is maybe there is a lot more opportunity to bring in some of these like &#8216;touchy-feely things&#8217; to make the tech community in general just a better community overall, not just about diversity and inclusivity but also to be better at what you do, to be better at building better tech because when you start having these conversations, it introduces things into the concept of what you&#8217;re building, which will ultimately make better technology for everybody.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One thing I want to say about that is the prioritization of people&#8217;s feelings specifically is something that I got to from listening to the community, which is a different type of prioritization of the people. When I would ask people, &#8220;Why do you join the Twitter chat? Why are you part of the podcast or listen to the podcast? Why are you part of our Slack community?&#8221; The most consistent answer I got is, &#8220;You make me feel like I&#8217;m less alone. You make me feel like there are other people out there who understand me and that helps me feel like I can do it.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That&#8217;s not the answer I thought it was going to have. I thought it was going to be like, &#8220;Because you have cool content.&#8221; Hearing that and just hearing how important that aspect is, the intimidation factor, the feeling of not belonging, the feeling like you shouldn&#8217;t do it, you can&#8217;t do it is so high that all these different resources lowers it to the point where it helps you move forward, was a huge insight that I arrived at simply because I listened and I asked and I responded. I think another thing that&#8217;s really important is making sure you&#8217;re listening to your users and figuring out not just what are they doing but also why are they doing it, how are they feeling in optimizing for that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I hope a lot of people are wondering what they can do in their own workplace or in their own community to move towards that kind of cooperative organization of their coworkers, of their teammates, of the people within their local tech community. There are some things that you can do. You can look for and support and work for own cooperative organization, if those exist locally and if they don&#8217;t, maybe think about what it would take to start one.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Even in your own team, you can work on thinking about how the emotional labor that goes into building your product or whatever it is that you do is shared and whether that&#8217;s equitable. There are things that you can do where you work to make it less exploitative for yourself and for your teammates. You don&#8217;t have to be in a position of leadership to do those things. One of the things about leadership is that leadership is doing things. It&#8217;s not being given a title so you just got to go do those things to make things more fair for yourself and your coworkers and that&#8217;s leadership, whether you&#8217;re a team lead or a manager or not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This conversation for me has been hugely valuable because a lot of times, I was in my own space, I&#8217;m in my own world, I&#8217;m thinking my own thoughts and there&#8217;s not a lot of feedback, there&#8217;s not a lot of validation of like, &#8220;Is this really what&#8217;s important? Is this really matter?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I guess my reflection is more like a thank you to you all for giving me this opportunity, not just to talk about the conference or to talk about CodeNewbie but really just talk about the principles and the values that lead to what people hopefully will experience is a really great conference because it&#8217;s all of those things that I personally think about the most. When I sleep over and I think about it in the shower and all that so being able to say all those thoughts and feelings out loud and to get feedback on it and to kind of know that I&#8217;m not totally off, that other people see the value in the things I see value in, is super valuable. Thank you all for that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re happy to have you and like we&#8217;ve said before, Greater Than Code is cheaper than therapy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;d love that so much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Saron, this has been a wonderful conversation. I would specifically like to encourage our listeners to refer new people that they may run into to your CodeNewbies community. Can you tell us where they can find that and then maybe point people at your conference as well before we go?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SARON:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. You can find us everywhere. You can find us on Twitter. We actually added a new chapter of schedule so we have our normal Wednesday night at 9PM, Eastern Time with our Twitter chat that we&#8217;ve been doing for years. We also added a coding check-in that we do on Sundays at 2 PM, Eastern Time. That&#8217;s basically a half-hour of saying, &#8220;What have you done this week? What are you excited about? What are your plans?&#8221; It is like an extra opportunity for me to cheerlead the crap out of you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then we have our Slack community, which has I think over 9,000 members at this point. That&#8217;s a bunch of people who are just super excited to help out and be supportive and debug with you. If you want some live coding support, definitely check that out. We also do our own podcast. We&#8217;ve done 134 episodes. It&#8217;s called CodeNewbie Podcast and we interview folks at different process of their coding journey on how they got started, why they&#8217;re coding, their origin story and usually, we have a particular focus each week.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think our most popular episode was one called Truck Driver, the story of George Moore who was a truck driver for many, many years. I think it was nine years and then slowly over many different attempts and shifts and little decisions here and there, was able to get to a point where he is now a developer. He’s actually a senior developer so his story is super inspirational.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Finally, I would love for you all to check out Codeland. We have tickets that are very close to selling out but if you go to CodelandConf.com, you should see the speakers, the line-up, all the good stuff. Hopefully, I will see you in New York City soon.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you again, Saron. This has been a wonderful conversation and listeners, we&#8217;ll be back at you very shortly with another episode. Thanks, everybody.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Saron Yitbarek: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/saronyitbarek"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@saronyitbarek</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://bloggytoons.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">bloggytoons.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.codenewbie.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">CodeNewbie</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://codelandconf.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Codeland Conference</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Unrepentant Cyborgs” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:28</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="http://codelandconf.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Codeland Conference</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">: April 21st &amp; 22nd in New York City</span></p>
<p><b>02:02</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Making Conferences Accessible, Affordable, and Unintimidating for People</span></p>
<p><b>13:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Ticket Prices and Structure</span></p>
<p><b>15:01 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Creating an Immersive Experience and Community With and For People You Care About</span></p>
<p><b>25:11 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Leading by Example and Maintaining a Positive Persona</span></p>
<p><b>29:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Importance of Money and Financial Freedom</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.techdoneright.io/002-career-development-with-brandon-hays"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tech Done Right Episode 002: Career Development with Brandon Hays and Pete Brooks</span></a></p>
<p><b>39:52 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Ethics as Automatic Technology Scales and Capitalism</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Give-Take-Helping-Others-Success/dp/0143124986"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success by Adam M. Grant</span></a></p>
<p><b>49:45 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– In summary: </span><a href="http://codelandconf.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Codeland Conference</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Thank you for the book recommendation for </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Give-Take-Helping-Others-Success/dp/0143124986"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Give and Take</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">People first.</span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Support worker-owned cooperative organizations. Leadership is doing things, not being given a title.</span></p>
<p><b>Saron:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> The principles and values that led to what people will experience as a really great conference.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>CodeNewbie References:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/codenewbies"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@CodeNewbies<br />
</span></a><a href="http://www.codenewbie.org/chat"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Twitter Chat<br />
</span></a><a href="https://codenewbie.typeform.com/to/uwsWlZ"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Slack Community<]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Saron Yitbarek: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/saronyitbarek"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@saronyitbarek</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://bloggytoons.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">bloggytoons.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.codenewbie.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">CodeNewbie</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://codelandconf.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Codeland Conference</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Unrepentant Cyborgs” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:28</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="http://codelandconf.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Codeland Conference</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">: April 21st &amp; 22nd in New York City</span></p>
<p><b>02:02</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Making Conferences Accessible, Affordable, and Unintimidating for People</span></p>
<p><b>13:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Ticket Prices and Structure</span></p>
<p><b>15:01 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Creating an Immersive Experience and Community With and For People You Care About</span></p>
<p><b>25:11 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Leading by Example and Maintaining a Positive Persona</span></p>
<p><b>29:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The Importance of Money and Financial Freedom</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.techdoneright.io/002-career-development-with-brandon-hays"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tech Done Right Episode 002: Career Development with Brandon Hays and Pete Brooks</span></a></p>
<p><b>39:52 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Ethics as Automatic Technology Scales and Capitalism</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Give-Take-Helping-Others-Success/dp/0143124986"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success by Adam M. Grant</span></a></p>
<p><b>49:45 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– In summary: </span><a href="http://codelandconf.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Codeland Conference</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Thank you for the book recommendation for </span><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Give-Take-Helping-Others-Success/dp/0143124986"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Give and Take</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">People first.</span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Support worker-owned cooperative organizations. Leadership is doing things, not being given a title.</span></p>
<p><b>Saron:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> The principles and values that led to what people will experience as a really great conference.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>CodeNewbie References:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/codenewbies"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@CodeNewbies<br />
</span></a><a href="http://www.codenewbie.org/chat"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Twitter Chat<br />
</span></a><a href="https://codenewbie.typeform.com/to/uwsWlZ"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Slack Community<]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/saron.jpg"></itunes:image>
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					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>01:02:02</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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							<item>
					<title>Episode 025: MotherCoders with Tina Lee</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-025-mothercoders-with-tina-lee/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 29 Mar 2017 21:54:31 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=456</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[We talk to Tina Lee, CEO of MotherCoders, about changing the culture around gender roles and caregiving, as well as challenging Silicon Valley elitism, sexism, and defining cultural norms.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[We talk to Tina Lee, CEO of MotherCoders, about changing the culture around gender roles and caregiving, as well as challenging Silicon Valley elitism, sexism, and defining cultural norms.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/coralineada"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mandy Moore</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tina Lee: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/mstinalee"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@mstinalee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.mothercoders.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">MotherCoders</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Not Your Mother’s Podcast!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>00:55</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story and Getting Involved in Coding</span></p>
<p><b>03:17</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Programming Perspectives From People of Different Backgrounds; Teaching Adults vs Children </span></p>
<p><b>08:19 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Work/Life Balance</span></p>
<p><b>11:32 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Changing Culture Around Gender Roles and Caregiving</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>“Culture is like water in that it flows from the top down.”</i></b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.mtv.com/news/2976598/nev-schulman-gender-stereotypes-parenting-catfish-laura-perlongo-cleo/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nev Schulman Wants to Erase Gender Stereotypes for Parents</span></a></p>
<p><b>18:18 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The </span><a href="http://www.mothercoders.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">MotherCoders</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Organization</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://medium.com/@halhen/what-to-expect-when-youre-done-expecting-25fb0c00393"><span style="font-weight: 400;">What to expect when you’re done expecting</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">(Medium Article)  </span></p>
<p><b>24:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Teaching Frontend Development and The Stereotype that Women are Better at Frontend than Backend Work</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/14/tech-women-code-workshops-developer-jobs"><span style="font-weight: 400;">We can teach women to code, but that just creates another problem</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (Guardian Article) </span></p>
<p><b>30:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Silicon Valley Elitism, Sexism, and Defining Cultural Norms; “The Ideal Worker”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6ASw9OpvMg"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Motherhood Penalty</span></a></p>
<p><b>35:38 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Why do we not have many of women CEOs?</span></p>
<p><b>37:42 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Tactical Help for Cultural Changes</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.diigo.com/r?from=library&amp;u=mstinalee"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Stats on Millennial Women Becoming Moms</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Thank you </b><a href="https://twitter.com/nkantar"><b>Nik Kantar</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Mandy: </b><a href="http://www.mothercoders.org/give"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Donate to MotherCoders</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and/or support them via </span><a href="https://smile.amazon.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">AmazonSmile</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p>
<p><b>Rein: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The empowerment of women and the challenges they face are a global problem.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/manwhohasitall"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@manwhohasitall</span></a></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Fostering entrepreneurship and empowering women worldwide. Also, thinking about role models and how to amplify voices. </span></p>
<p><b>Tina:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Including moms as a kind of marginalized group as well. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://ctt.ec/SDfE_"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tweet to Tina that we want “Code Like a Mother” merch!</span></a></p>
<div id="Transcript" style="display: none;">
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to &#8216;Not Your Mother’s Podcast&#8217;. I am Mandy Moore and wait, yes, I am technically the show manager and producer but because I am particularly interested in today&#8217;s topic and being a mother coder in general, I am crashing the party. With me today, I am pleased to welcome, Coraline Ada Ehmke.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Mandy. As the producer of the show, though I would have expected you to remember that we&#8217;re actually called Greater Than Code and that&#8217;s something I&#8217;ve been corrected on a lot of times and I guess you just don&#8217;t listen to that part of the audio when you&#8217;re doing the editing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nope.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Also, I&#8217;m happy to be joined by Rein today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am very excited to welcome our guest this week, Tina Lee. Tina is the founder and CEO of MotherCoders, a non-profit social enterprise, dedicated to unwrapping women with kids to careers and technology so they can thrive in digital economy. Prior to founding MotherCoders, Tina worked in government and the non-profit private sector. She holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Political, Legal and Economic Analysis from Mills College and an MBA from the Lorry I. Lokey Graduate School of Business.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In 2010, Tina received for MA in Education from Stanford University&#8217;s Graduate School of Education where her studies in their Learning, Design and Technology Program focused on how technology can be used to foster civic engagement. Tina speaks and writes regularly on topics related to the digital economy, including diversity and inclusion, civic innovation, workforce development and the changing needs of women and families in a globalized and tech-driven world.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m happy that I can read that entire intro out because it&#8217;s very clear that you have spent a lot of time and effort understanding these issues, learning about these issues throughout your college and university career and onward. Can you talk about how these issues became so important for you and why you decide to make this, I guess your life&#8217;s work, if that&#8217;s an accurate characterization?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It is an accurate characterization. Thank you so much for having me on this show. I&#8217;m delighted to be with all of you. It&#8217;s really funny, I don&#8217;t know if you ever see that video of Steve Jobs giving a commencement speech at Stanford saying, &#8220;Don&#8217;t worry about where you&#8217;re going. Just go with your gut and your life&#8217;s work won&#8217;t make sense and you won&#8217;t be able to connect the dots until you look back.&#8221; That&#8217;s the path that I&#8217;ve taken as I&#8217;ve just tried something and if it doesn&#8217;t work, then I try something else and I&#8217;ve just moved closer and closer to my life&#8217;s work, which I will right now say is really creating a space for us to intentionally create an economy that&#8217;s more fair and inclusive.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We’re going through this huge, worldwide transition and I don&#8217;t want us to replicate all the inequities that we have in this economy and bring it into the next economy. I want to spend some time making sure that the people that are feeling marginalized now have a foothold in the new economy so that we can change that you could [inaudible] their families. I know that sounds like huge and you&#8217;re doing this by yourself but really, I have been working towards this my whole life. I was born into an immigrant family. I was raised by a grandmother who worked in a sweat shop so I am very familiar with what happens when people are marginalized.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Having the first to go to college, I always thought like, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to go and make my mark in business,&#8221; and that just became clear to me it wasn&#8217;t going to happen there so I tried all these different spaces. I tried working in governments. I&#8217;ve been in philanthropy and I started in non-profit but I think the overarching thread that ran through all of those things was that I wanted to create a more fair world.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Was there a particular moment or an event that put you on this path or was it a more gradual development?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think there were definite forks in the road but I think for the purposes of this conversation for MotherCoders, it was definitely shortly after I had my second daughter. I had a two-year old and an infant. I wanted to move back into a world that was more technical. I had been working in a government role and I was getting further and further away from the tech. I was like I&#8217;m going to spend this time during my maternity leave &#8212; because that makes perfect sense &#8212; to relearn all the stuff that I used to know how to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I was learning to code again. I was actually reviewing CSS &#8212; not super hard &#8212; and had a complete meltdown because I was exhausted. I was in between breastfeeding session in all of the night and I was lonely. Even though, I had gone to ed school at noon, that for me and a lot of other people, that online learning isn&#8217;t the best modality for me. It was kind of all I had left so I had a fairly significant breakdown and insight about how hard it is for mothers, for parents, any caregiver really to be able to do all these things and keep up with the skills that we need to be able to take care of our families.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was in a similar situation back in 2009 when I had my daughter. I was put on mandatory bed rest so I was unemployed when I had her. Once that ran out, I went on to waitressing and I had no idea what I want to do with my life. I went to college, I had a degree in professional writing, a minor in communications arts and sciences but for me, I was a single mom and I had a very, very little help.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> My mom was around back then and my sister was, I think a junior or senior in high school at the time and I was just looking for any kind of opportunity to be able to be successful without having to leave my house because daycare and other things like that are so expensive. Babysitters these days charge an arm and a leg just to go out for an evening so I started looking online and saw the opportunities in the technical space were just tremendous. Luckily, I fell into what I&#8217;m doing now, which wasn&#8217;t technically coding but now that I&#8217;ve met all these amazing people from just producing podcasts and doing a little bit of virtual assistance, I see the value that you can do it from home while the kids are taking their nap or when they go to bed at night, they spend a couple of extra hours learning new things and it&#8217;s just such a great opportunity in any situation to get involved in coding.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely and we have some single moms that have come through our classes and it&#8217;s a community that gets them through, like you said: meeting the amazing people there in the space. I think that key and just knowing that there&#8217;s a world of opportunity for me out there, I just need to do these things and makes it less scary and more accessible. What we try to do is we try to bring in mothers who know they want to go back into workforce or switching to a more technical role but don&#8217;t know where to start.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I had people ran up to me and like, &#8220;Python or Ruby or some other language?&#8221; and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know. What do you want to do?&#8221; And they&#8217;ll say, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know. My friend told me and this is so cool.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Been there [Laughs].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, like a whole world that means making that decision and figuring out that&#8217;s the right thing for you and do you even like the jobs that are open to you once you learn something? We try to kind of close that gap for moms who are standing on the sidelines and want to get in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Tina, I&#8217;m curious. I&#8217;m a mom and when my daughter was very young, at the start of my career, I&#8217;ll already had some sort of baseline knowledge but I had a lot of trouble with work-life balance and I tilted way too far in favor of work and missed a lot of really important milestones to my daughter&#8217;s life. How do you address work-life balance as you&#8217;re working with moms who are just getting started in this field?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Man, it&#8217;s tough. That question really goes back to how our society is organized around this idealized vision of a nuclear family where there is a male breadwinner &#8212; usually a male bread winner &#8212; who goes out and does all the things, 24/7, all-in, work first and he&#8217;s able to do that because the assumption is that there&#8217;s a homemaker &#8212; usually a female &#8212; who takes care of everything on the homefront so that he can do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That&#8217;s never quite been the case for a families in the US and it&#8217;s especially not the case today when almost half of families with children under 18 have working parents, both working full time just to stay afloat. It doesn&#8217;t reflect reality and we organize around it. What I mean by that is schools let out in the middle of the afternoon because they assume that there&#8217;s a female caregiver picking them up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Summers are off. Two weeks were Christmas and that&#8217;s just schools. Then there&#8217;s the tax code and then there&#8217;s a workplace policies that kind of reinforce all this. All this to say, the structures that we have in society around work and just how we&#8217;re organized, it&#8217;s not suited for working parents. As a woman, not only do you have to overcome all the barriers around sexism, you have to, on top of that, really try to navigate this compact set of social structure that are stacked against. It&#8217;s kind of depressing if you think about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But what I found is this conversation around work-life balance isn&#8217;t necessarily moving us forward because it&#8217;s hard to make this problem about moms not being able to balance our priorities and manage our time. That&#8217;s not the case. The cases are we&#8217;re expected to do all these things and put in 45 hours a week so our bosses think that we are just as competent and committed to our career. I try myself not to play that game of work-life balance. It&#8217;s just one that I&#8217;m never going to win.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I have a husband who works full time. We don&#8217;t have our family around and we have two young daughters so for me and my husband, it&#8217;s just as not so much as balancing as coming together and prioritizing and working as a team to make sure that we each get what we need to cover our bases at work and also take care of our families. I don&#8217;t have anything new or a smart to say about that, other than we are all messed up in terms of how we&#8217;re organized and we have to rethink this whole thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So it&#8217;s a society issue?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If your kid gets sick, you have to stay home. A lot of people these days don&#8217;t work eight-to-four or nine-to-fives and it&#8217;s always expected that you have to be there at a certain time to take care of the children. When you&#8217;re taking care the children, they need fed around five or six o&#8217;clock at night and then they do the bath and they have to do their homework. In all of that, you&#8217;re trying to juggle a full time job. It gets to be bananas and it&#8217;s frustrating. At the same time, I don&#8217;t know how to fix it because I want to do things. I want to be a coder and I want to learn how to program. But at the end of the day, I&#8217;m exhausted. What can society do, in short of allowing your children to come to work or like young children before they&#8217;re school-aged or something else to try and help the situation?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;re basically talking about changing culture and that takes a lot of time. I heard this great saying the other day that culture is like water and it flows from the top down. I think people and power need to have that realization that, &#8220;This isn&#8217;t working for us. We&#8217;re leaving a lot of money on the table and by the way, it&#8217;s really inhumane.&#8221; I don&#8217;t even know which argument resonate more at this point because neither seems to be working that well. Ultimately, I think we have to change the culture around gender roles and specifically what our expectations are around caregiving. But on a micro level, I think workplaces that are leading some of this change have implemented more parent-friendly workplace policies, such as paid parental leave.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I was at a talk yesterday where they were saying that Slack has a saying that&#8217;s written on the wall. That&#8217;s how important they think it is. It&#8217;s plastered across a very, very visible wall that says, &#8220;Work hard and go home.&#8221; For innovative companies who really do realize that we&#8217;re humans and we have lives outside of work and we do better when we actually unplug and do other things are kind of leading the charge and most of the time, the people that are leading it tend to be parents who get it. I think with millennials moving into the workforce based on what sociologists have found about their preferences, they don&#8217;t want to be all in that work. The men tend to want to be as involved in caregiving as the women or more so than their fathers had been.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The research says there are some hope but ultimately, this is a cultural problem and it&#8217;s going to take a really long time to work itself out. My whole goal of doing MotherCoders is because the industry right now is so in dire need of talent and they&#8217;re going to have to enlist women because we&#8217;re getting more degrees and getting more educated and we can actually do a job that women with the technical skills will have a little bit more of leverage and over time will move into positions of power where they can help change it. That&#8217;s just the best I can come up with at this point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just saw this great video by Nev Schulman &#8212; he was the host or maybe still is, I don&#8217;t really watch MTV much anymore &#8212; of catfish and him and his wife had a baby. He made this great video about ending gender stereotypes for parents and I totally recommend that everybody watch it because not only it is funny, it hits home hardcore.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s so bizarre that we&#8217;ve constructed this whole myth around how women are best-suited for that because they found that in societies where men are more involved at caregiving, they actually have lower levels of violence overall. Biology is tied up in caregiving and when men do it, everyone actually benefits. But we have a lot of myths here in America that promote the opposite, that men are incapable of making even change a diaper. We award dads for being able to take their kids for a walk without dying.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a single dad friend who he said several times that the bar is set so low for dads and you hear dads talk about like, &#8220;I&#8217;m babysitting the kids this weekend.&#8221; I was like, &#8220;No, you&#8217;re being a father.&#8221; My friend just finds it just by showing up, he gets lauded because that expectation for dad is so low.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and this is not just coming from men and this is a societal thing. Men and women both pull this up together, not all men and not all women but in general.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Majoritively.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It sounds like there are a number of interrelated problems or challenges here. There&#8217;s the economic empowerment of women. You’re getting them more access to better income, more access to credit and things like that. There&#8217;s the increased well-being of everyone, starting with women. I think if women have increased well-being, then their children will increase well-being since again, they&#8217;re the primary caregivers, etcetera. There&#8217;s also this social empowerment of women and challenging these social structures. How do we tackle all of these problems at the same time?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We are tackling it, just not in the same setting. Everyone’s working on a different piece, I want to say. There are people who are trying to change the narrative in the media. There are women who are around men who are doing it at the business front and government. Everything, the cultures in the air, you don&#8217;t even know that some things at play until someone calls it out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For what I&#8217;m trying to do with tech, tech is basically the new economy. You can&#8217;t get to this new place without talking about tech because tech just underlies everything we do now and it&#8217;s just a matter of time before it&#8217;s a literacy that everyone needs to have: knowing how to code or just understand how technology works. I, for one hope that people who are a leading change on any form recognizes that and we&#8217;re all chipping away at this elephant in our own way and that ultimately because tech is the future of work that we are all being intentional about how we want to create this new economy so that we don&#8217;t bring along all the stuff we don&#8217;t want on this one.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe we could talk for a bit about the part of the elephant that you are currently chipping away at.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What shall we name the part?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Let&#8217;s talk specifically about MotherCoders.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know that was part of the elephant specifically [inaudible]. My word &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was just trying to roll with your metaphor. I don&#8217;t have one in mind specifically.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>MotherCoders is based in San Francisco, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What is it that you do there?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I live here. That&#8217;s good at any place to start. I am born and raised in San Francisco so I am just immersed in this. I&#8217;ve seen it grow in prominence locally and I&#8217;ve also seen it now how it&#8217;s transformed industries and places and the backlash against that. You could say I&#8217;m at ground zero for this stuff. We started here because, I thought the issues here are so amplified because it&#8217;s such a small space, because everyone comes here. Capital is concentrated here. All of the issues that you might feel in places that aren&#8217;t as tech-centric here as like 10x so I was seeing all of these groups and organizations that were cropping up to address the pipeline: let&#8217;s teach girls, let&#8217;s teach youth, let&#8217;s teach kids, let&#8217;s get college students involved, let&#8217;s get the unemployed and just everybody except moms.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There are even women&#8217;s groups but they stop once the women become moms and that&#8217;s because the childcare piece is very challenging. The exhaustion piece is very real. They&#8217;re not having time. Melinda Gates calls this &#8216;time poverty&#8217;. Women have time poverty once they become mothers. There was this great post on Medium that shows based on the census survey on how Americans spend their time, the difference between parents and non-parents and men and women. Because caregiving is a very emotionally and time intensive and resource intensive enterprise, something&#8217;s got to give.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A lot of times, mothers are the ones who work full-time or even the ones that don&#8217;t, will only have a certain amount of uninterrupted time to devote to learning something and that tends to be in the evening, after the kids go to bed or on Saturdays where they might have some coverage from a partner or family members. That&#8217;s why we designed MotherCoders as it is. It&#8217;s a Saturday part-time program with on-site childcare for those who need it and then we also started experimenting with a day time class for moms whose kids are in school and they&#8217;re trying to re-enter and they have some flexibility during the day.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That’s what we do in San Francisco. We run a part-time tech training program for mothers who want to get into tech but don&#8217;t yet know how their experience might connect or they&#8217;re trying to get a refresh. What we do is we do three parts. We do a coding part. We do an industry knowledge part and then lastly, we do a community building part. I had gone to ed school and I&#8217;m a big believer in the fact that learning is social and contextual and people have evolved to learn because they need it to. I am a big Maslow&#8217;s hierarchy of needs person so people learn to do things because they want to meet their needs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I try to design a program to help moms learn but in a way that social, in a way that fits into their own life goals and fits into the context of where they live. We run this program. It&#8217;s nine weeks, eight weeks of it is in class, one day of it is a field trip to a tech company so they can see how it works and talk to a tech team. Then the rest of their time, they&#8217;re learning how to do frontend development: HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript and that really isn&#8217;t to teach them how to code and then be job-ready. It&#8217;s really to demystify it to see if they even like it and understand it. Then we bring in women from the field to teach on specific things that we think are the most topical and important to understand.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We bring in data scientists, talk about that. We bring in an information security person and talk about that. Then we let them go at it with each other because the data scientist wants all the things and the information security expert said, &#8220;Nah, I don&#8217;t know if I want to even handle all the things.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then we bring in women to talk about marketing automation and product design. We bring in founders to share their experience and through that exercise, not only are the women are getting the latest and greatest from practitioners in the field. They&#8217;re also growing their social capital. They&#8217;re growing their network capital. They&#8217;re making connections with people who actually work in roles that they might want to pursue and that opens up a world of possibility because in the media, you might only know about you&#8217;re either a programmer or you&#8217;re a designer or a web designer or whatever. Now, there&#8217;s actually a person who does product management or user experience design. It has all these other roles embedded in it like researcher and UI. It kind of opens the mom&#8217;s eyes about what the possibilities are.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Lastly, we spend time letting them connect with each other and grow relationships with each other because I&#8217;m sure the moms here will tell you, being a mother can be very isolating because you don&#8217;t have time to socialize or make new friends so these women end up going to conferences together, they end up taking other more advanced together once they leave and they just become friends who hang out and help out each other with their code and share job tips or whatever.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You talked about the training that the women received being in frontend development. Why did you pick frontend development? Do you think it&#8217;s because the on ramp is shorter and how do you think that plays into the stereotype of women being better suited to frontend work than backend work?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that is real. That stereotype. I made that decision because I found it&#8217;s the most accessible way to get someone to start. Everyone has seen a website. Everyone can click on view source code and see code. Everyone can envision themselves building something that they can see. I started learning Ruby and it took me a while. It was like so conceptual and there was no frontend to go with it and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;What is happening here?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> From working with marginalized communities, from being at ed school and knowing about how people learn, I picked frontend web developers because it&#8217;s the most accessible. people already have a mental model for what that is and what happens and it was just one of those things where I&#8217;m like, &#8220;What&#8217;s the sort of distance from A to B or even nothing to A,&#8221; and that&#8217;s why I pick that as opposed to starting with something that was more on the backend and less common that people have seen something like that. Way back in the stack, people probably will get more confusing or probably take them more time to develop a mental model for what that means.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But you talked about bringing in people who do in full stack and the people who do data science and things like that. Have you tracked to see how people who have gone through a program like if they end up staying with frontend who are taking up and inspired to do some of the other aspects of development?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. It&#8217;s like the gateway drug. Once they figure out like, &#8220;Oh, I can build this,&#8221; so it&#8217;s a confidence building exercise and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Oh, JavaScript. My head just exploded but yeah, okay, I picked up 10%,&#8221; and it does piqued their interest. We do have a group of moms right now that are learning Python with each other. One is actually using at her job now. She landed a data analyst role after graduating from our program and they saw her aptitude and now they&#8217;re helping her learn Python.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s another woman who didn&#8217;t know anything about Python and got looped into an open source project and they were very, very willing to train and now she&#8217;s learning Python. She made that leap. Then we have another one who&#8217;s learning on her own so there&#8217;s the data science Python crowd. One went through a coding boot camp so she&#8217;s full stack now, working as a developer at an ad tech company. Another went through, she&#8217;s a graphic designer marketing person and fell in love with coding and she went to CodePath and became a mobile designer. Now, she&#8217;s a visual designer on a product team of a health tech company. Then we have several that took a break and came back so they refresh their skill set and dove right back. There&#8217;s a backend Ruby person and then there are some other folks who jumped back into more technical account management, I guess I should call that. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They do get inspired to learn more and it&#8217;s just about getting them to a place where they have the confidence and the support to slog through the beginning part where there&#8217;s always a learning curve &#8212; the trough of despair. It&#8217;s one of those things where there is this gender perspective out there that women do frontend and that&#8217;s unfortunate because it&#8217;s not a function of whether or not these women can do it. That&#8217;s like a market or a cultural response to women entering the field and wanting to create a hierarchy so that the people who are in power hold on to that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, there was a recent article in The Guardian about how women entering development and specifically entering frontend development jobs is causing non-women to devalue frontend work. I think that there is definitely a lot of elitism around frontend versus backend or full stack versus frontend or what have you. I&#8217;ve been doing software development professionally for over 20 years and frontend work intimidates the hell out of me. It is not easy and I hate to see it devalue the way it is in our industry.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, privilege will try to hold on to privilege and they&#8217;ll find a way to create barriers to entry. You see this in other industries too. The teaching profession, for example for the longest time, women were doing it and then they came in with administrative class which was mostly men and suddenly now, teachers are devalued and the administrators are held to a higher level of prestige. It happens in every industry. It&#8217;s just all rooted in power and tied up with gender and race and class and ableism among these other things. I&#8217;m not surprised. It&#8217;s a moving target. Women were actually the pioneers of backend and you just think these whole thing is [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, definitely. I&#8217;m also curious, you talked about why and how you got started in San Francisco. I travelled there from time to time and I have a lot of friends who work there at startups or at larger companies and it&#8217;s definitely a microcosm of tech but their cultural values that are present in Silicon Valley, in particular in the startup world. Do you worry that those necessarily translate to other places in the country that are not so venture capital focused and they have a different kind of elitism or sexism in place than what we see in Silicon Valley?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, absolutely. I&#8217;m all about contexts. It&#8217;s just like how gardens look different as you move around the country, it can grow things here but not there. Even if you&#8217;re growing squash here, it&#8217;s going to look a little different in Florida there. Same thing with tech. You&#8217;re right. There are these cultural norms here that don&#8217;t translate well. I&#8217;m really delighted actually to see this diversification of tech being how there are these nascent tech ecosystems are growing, actively and intentionally being grown by committees. Was it Kentucky got something going on? Tennessee, Austin, Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, Pittsburgh is just doing an amazing job of growing theirs and all these other places. I&#8217;m very optimistic about other places coming up so that we are not as much the center of the universe and defining the standards and the cultural norms for how tech is supposed to be. For the most, though, until we change the dynamics at work, I think white men from a certain class will continue to dominate even in these other places.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re talking about the importance of context and I agree with you. It does seem to me that there are some generalities that you can make. We&#8217;re talking about how women are discriminated against in the workplace, specifically in high status job markets and sort of pushed toward more low status jobs. That happens, as far as I can tell, basically everywhere: every country, every industry. It seems like it&#8217;s such a systemic issue that we need a systemic fix to apply, not just in Silicon Valley, not just in Kentucky but something that would work everywhere. Is this something that we can tackle piece by piece or do we need a more systemic plan?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Media changes narratives. I think media has a pretty big role to play if we are to change culture. One big thing that&#8217;s tied to what I was saying earlier about how we organized it all wrong is that we hold on to this idea of the ideal worker. All-in work all the time, work takes precedence over everything out. They&#8217;ll always take the phone call, always make a business trip and that all-in all the time mindset automatically excludes a lot of people that you can&#8217;t hold up that standard.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For better or worse, we&#8217;re just out of place where women are still doing most of the caregiving, not just with children but with elderly and the parents. Women can&#8217;t meet that ideal a lot of times once they become moms or caregivers. If you look at the gender pay gap between women without children and with children, you will see a big gap. The pay gap between women without kids and men is not as big. That&#8217;s definitely one of those things where as long as we hold onto this idea of the ideal worker, this is going to continue to persist. What related to that is the motherhood penalty that once a woman becomes a mom, she&#8217;s automatically perceived as being less competent and less committed to her career.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Women overcompensate for that by never talking about the fact that they have kids or completely in the closet. They have no pictures of their kids on their work desk. They&#8217;ll never say, &#8220;I have to leave because I have to go to a ballet recital,&#8221; or whatever and that&#8217;s because of the motherhood penalty and they&#8217;ve done lots of research with this where you have women with the same pedigree, same credentials, same work experience, same everything except one resume that say &#8216;PTA President&#8217; and that resume will get less callbacks and be offered less money every time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s really sad but that&#8217;s culture talking and I think things like what Salesforce is doing, they&#8217;re going to actually auditing all their pay scales and their job titles to make sure that there&#8217;s a parity between men and women. That&#8217;s a huge leap forward. If every company were to do that, I think we would make a big difference in correcting some of that wage gap but outside of that, unless companies are become more accepting of people having flexible schedules and people are more forthcoming, leadership is more forthcoming about, &#8220;I&#8217;m a parent too and I get it and you should leave if you want to or need to,&#8221; or whatever and, &#8220;You&#8217;re an adult and you can measure time and just get what you need done, done,&#8221; then whatever. We&#8217;re not there yet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The example you just gave in Salesforce is an example of where change has to come from the top. That wouldn&#8217;t happen if there was no CEO who believe that there was a good idea to do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And a white male CEO. That&#8217;s a huge signal. He knows the power that he has and he has a real thing at exactly right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In that context, you chose with MotherCoders to focus on empower women at the ground level, getting in there and working with women to make them more viable in the industry. Those human conflict, how do you maybe square those? Or explain to me how it isn&#8217;t really a conflict if I&#8217;m saying it wrong.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re just fighting the same war on different fronts. The more women you have at the leadership table, the more women you have with skills that are highly, highly desirable and marketable and people are competing over having you on their team, the more leverage women will have and the more leverage leadership will have to say, &#8220;We have to do these things because look at what we need. Look at our talent gap. Look at what we need to retain women and to recruit women.&#8221; If they all work in concert together, that&#8217;s what I mean by &#8216;same war, different fronts&#8217;.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess if the question is how do we get more woman CEO is part of the answer that has to be, &#8220;We&#8217;ll have more high valued women employees.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and we have to be open to seeing more woman CEO&#8217;s because going back to something that we talked about earlier, if women are expected to be the caregiver socially, to see a woman CEO, you&#8217;re like, &#8220;Wait, who&#8217;s taking care of your kids?&#8221; That&#8217;s a huge quandary, a huge dilemma for women. If you lead, you also have to seeing nurturing, you have to be nice but yet, leaders are required to make hard choices so then you start to doubt whether a woman is capable of doing that. Whereas a man just does it and you never ask.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The term &#8216;working dad&#8217; is laughable. Have you ever heard anyone say, &#8220;Oh, he&#8217;s a working dad?&#8221; No one said that because the presumption is that he works and it&#8217;s not the same for women. It&#8217;s just all these expectations that we have and it&#8217;s hard because, I think women hold them too. It&#8217;s just one of those things where we don&#8217;t have enough female CEOs because we are not creating an environment where women can rise up to become CEO. They&#8217;re not even getting funding when they&#8217;re starting companies. I think women get like 4% of venture capital.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Tina, we&#8217;ve talked broadly about MotherCoders and the mission that you have and we&#8217;ve also talked about the fact that we need to have a difference in the value installed in our culture. I&#8217;m sure that these issues resonate really strongly with our listeners but I also imagine a lot of our listeners are asking, &#8220;What can I do tactically to make these sort of cultural changes happen?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There are lots of things you could do but just to put into context again because I love context. MotherCoders for me really is a tactic for what I&#8217;m trying to do. What I&#8217;m trying to do is create a fairer worlds. The strategy that I&#8217;m taking is I&#8217;m going to focus on women, specifically mothers because like a weird way to put what mothers bring to the world but the social ROI &#8212; the social rate of return.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When you invest a dollar in women, you actually get more than a dollar back in benefits. I focused there. MotherCoders is a tactic for that. In thinking about the impact that I want to have with MotherCoders, we are currently working on licensing model where any community that wants to bring us there can do that by organizing their own people, their own community to come together and create a space around another MotherCoders program.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One way to help us with that is to start thinking about whether or not you want to have one and reach out. We are currently fund raising to make this licensing model a reality. We want to raise 1.25 million dollars over the next three years, $500,000 this year, $500,000 next year and then to $250,000 the year after that. Our goal really is to create a model where we have this incoming revenue streams who are less dependent on fund raising over time. The reason why we are taking that strategy is because it&#8217;s been really hard to raise money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As being a non-profit, we&#8217;re going after philanthropic money and the state of our country being where it is right now, a lot of money is going towards shoring up the safety net so targeted at people living in poverty, targeted at communities that are really suffering and dealing with a chronic unemployment and violence and all those things. That&#8217;s where a lot of the money is going towards. There&#8217;s also a lot of money going towards electoral politics.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That doesn&#8217;t leave a lot of space for middle income people and that&#8217;s a large swath. With moms, with families because childcare is so expensive and housing costs are also increasing, families ended up not having a lot of disposable incomes. They might not be living in poverty but they don&#8217;t have the $10,000 or $15,000 that might be required to go to a full on boot camp.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Nor that they have the time to quit their jobs and find childcare to cover themselves while they&#8217;re in these programs. MotherCoders is really is trying to make a case for these moms who are so important to our economy, not only because they help hold up the economy but they can actually help fill these jobs at companies need, to keep innovating. We are asking philanthropist to invest in middle income families and middle income moms and that&#8217;s been a hard case to make in this climate. That&#8217;s why we&#8217;re really focused on creating a model where we&#8217;re generating revenue. Not all moms though go for free. Most of our moms pay. It cost us about right now, $7,000 for each mom to go through the program.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Right now, the moms either pay $2500 if they don&#8217;t need [inaudible] or $3,000 if they do which is only half of what? The actual cost is. But as we grow, we&#8217;re going to have economies of scale and hopefully, MotherCoders will become the self-sustaining thing over time because we&#8217;re like the weight watchers of coding school where each community that wants it, comes together and designs a program, teaching the technical skills that fit the needs of their local employers and they&#8217;re doing it in a way that meets the needs of the population of moms and families they have locally.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Different states have different childcare laws so that&#8217;s another thing so we&#8217;re just trying to design a model that is enough structure for people to get started but has enough flexibility where people can customize it to meet their needs. To get there, we have to raise all this money to do it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Number one is money. Number two is if people are involved in discussions at the workplace where they do have some power to shape, workplace policy to make things easier for moms and parents in general because whatever happens for moms, tends to benefit everyone else, please weigh in and help push the needle on that. Lastly, it all goes back to implicit biases that people have to. Learning about maybe what your implicit biases are and then how that might play into your interactions at work, how that may play into recruiting practices and hiring decisions, promotions and all of that stuff. I think that would go a long way in demystifying it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> From just a technical code perspective, a lot of moms find it very hard to make evening meetups because that&#8217;s where the high traffic, intense parenting happen. Kids have to get bathed, they have to do the homework, they have to go to bed and moms cannot regularly make meetups and not be at home for that. To make events more accessible with me, maybe having on-site childcare. It would mean hosting it maybe on a Saturday with on-site childcare, creating spaces where moms are welcome and just in general, just being mindful that there are parents and other types of people with caregiving responsibilities who right now are standing on the sidelines and want to participate but can&#8217;t.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I helped organize a Women&#8217;s Hackathon for non-profit engagement a couple years back and one of our goals was to have on-site childcare for that exact reason. We wanted to make sure that we were open and accessible to as many people as possible. That was hard, even with our budget but we ended up funding by a company that specifically was interested in sponsoring the childcare portion of our budget so we&#8217;re very fortunate in that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m also happy to say that I&#8217;m hearing about a lot more conferences and mainly, these are larger conferences that are starting to offer childcare. I think that it would be great if we see that trend continuing so that we can involve more people from the community with different needs and different expectations and different responsibilities and get them folded in the community.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. The numbers are going to push people to do this, I hope. Over the next 10 years, it&#8217;s expected that 64 million millennials will become parents. Right now, 25% of them are parents and if companies want to hold onto the people that they&#8217;ve worked so hard to recruit and train and retain, they&#8217;re going to have to do these things. If they don&#8217;t, I think women will get pushed out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to take a moment to give a shout out to one of our patrons, Nik Kantar, @nkantar on Twitter, recently joined us as a patron and if you are interested in helping to support the show financially, we hope you&#8217;ll visit Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. Donating at any level at all will get you access to our patron-only Slack community where you can make suggestions about guests that come up on the show or ask questions of prior guest and just in general, take part in a community of listeners who believe in the same values that you believe in. We hope you will join us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>At the end of each show, we like to take some time to reflect on what we&#8217;ve talked about and think about something that we can take away or make actionable after the episode. I am definitely inspired. I love the idea of MotherCoders. I would love to see it expand. I think everybody should donate to the cause and they do AmazonSmile and every time I buy from Amazon, a percentage goes to MotherCoders so that&#8217;s definitely the cause that I get behind when I&#8217;m doing that and I encourage you all to do the same. Rein, do you have anything?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Am I allowed to have two things?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You are allowed to have two things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Three is a bit too far &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Four is right out?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay. The first is that we spend a lot of time talking about Silicon Valley and tech industry in America but the empowerment of women and the challenges are a global problem. I just want to talk about the decades of research case studies and work that&#8217;s gone into, for instance exploring microfinance as a tool for the economic empowerment of women in the developing world, especially places like India.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Since the mid-80s, we’ve been giving small business loans to women to try to bring them and their communities out of poverty. There is a ton of research case studies. It&#8217;s interesting both that it&#8217;s been successful and it hasn&#8217;t often for reasons that aren&#8217;t because the women did it wrong, things like resentment from men and a variety of challenges. That&#8217;s the first one.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then the second is there&#8217;s an amazing Twitter account that is much more fun that I want to share with you. Its @manwhohasitall and it&#8217;s basically a gender reversal of all the sexist things that men say at or about women in the workplace. They are instead said by women about men and it is glorious. That&#8217;s it for me. Coraline?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I actually had a note to talk about something very similar about encouraging women worldwide, not just in the US. I had the privilege of taking part in a program, maybe five or six years ago now that was aimed at fostering entrepreneurship in women in Africa. I think it&#8217;s interesting that like we have a very male-dominated culture in America and this woman who ended up staying with us and we are supporting in this program. Her name was Jovita.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In her country, women were seen as the agents of social and economic change. There was actually a lot more respect paid toward women, expectations were very, very high but women were revising [inaudible]. I think it&#8217;s interesting that through the programs you&#8217;re talking about Rein, like micropayments or microloans and things like that, we should be looking at this as a worldwide problem and there are ways in our organization to addressing it that way too. But of course, we take care of things here as well because we have so many problems as a culture here in America.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the things that I&#8217;m taking away from this I think Tina mentioned role models and how many of the role models we have, in terms of the idealized worker, are unrealistic. I want to think about how I can personally promote role models who better reflect where we want to be as a culture not just where we currently are. That&#8217;s going to encourage me to find some new voices, maybe people that I don&#8217;t permanently follow on Twitter and amplify their voices and amplify things around their struggles and their achievements and their accomplishments. Tina, do you have any thoughts for us?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just want to say thank you. Thank you for being part of this community. I&#8217;m really happy. I was logging with this for &#8212; my little ones is almost four so &#8212; three and a half years and I&#8217;ve really seen this movement grow and this community grow, this community of people who care about diversity and inclusion in tech and are actively doing something about it. Thank you so much for being a part of this and for including moms because moms are not included in the beginning and now moms are in the conversations so thank you so much for talking to me and being interested in what we&#8217;re doing in MotherCoders and promoting us. Mandy, you for just being an example for what is possible so thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then, two because I, at the end of the day, really feel like I&#8217;m just trying to change culture, this invisible thing. I spent a lot of time thinking about like how do we make moms cool? Part of the problem is like moms aren&#8217;t cool. I don&#8217;t know why because I think I&#8217;m pretty cool. Mandy is pretty cool. I don&#8217;t know, Coraline, you probably think you&#8217;re pretty cool too, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m totally cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sometimes I feel that way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t understand why we&#8217;re perceived as not cool. Anyway, I want to help make us cool and I think about silly ways to do that. We have to come up with some cultural meme or something that make us cool and I&#8217;ve been playing around with this idea of making hats, t-shirts and sweatshirts or swag or whatever that&#8217;s say, &#8220;Code like a mother.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Love it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Would you buy?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would absolutely buy that t-shirt.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, I&#8217;m going to work on that. I&#8217;m going design that right now because I think that would be pretty awesome, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We are a representative sample of your target market and we agree so go for it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I made this MotherCoders for a reason. Everyone&#8217;s going to remember because it sounds like something else that rang with MotherCoders so we play around that all &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8216;Mother loaders?&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t get it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, mother&#8230; mother&#8230;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mother givers, mother frienders. So yeah, the sweatshirt would be like &#8216;Code like a mother&#8217; and I hope that is something that people would be into and want to buy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You just point me somewhere where I can give you money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Take my money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, it&#8217;s a great conversation today, Tina. Thank you so much for joining us and I&#8217;m also really happy, Mandy that you decided to join the panel today because I thought you had some great perspectives as a mom who was exactly in the situation that Tina&#8217;s foundation is trying to serve better so thank you both so much. Of course, Rein, you had some great questions so thank you for being here as our check in male guy. That wraps up Episode 25. Thank you all for listening and we will talk to you next week.</span></p>
</div>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to &#8216;Not Your Mother’s Podcast&#8217;. I am Mandy Moore and wait, yes, I am technically the show manager and producer but because I am particularly interested in today&#8217;s topic and being a mother coder in general, I am crashing the party. With me today, I am pleased to welcome, Coraline Ada Ehmke.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Mandy. As the producer of the show, though I would have expected you to remember that we&#8217;re actually called Greater Than Code and that&#8217;s something I&#8217;ve been corrected on a lot of times and I guess you just don&#8217;t listen to that part of the audio when you&#8217;re doing the editing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nope.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Also, I&#8217;m happy to be joined by Rein today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am very excited to welcome our guest this week, Tina Lee. Tina is the founder and CEO of MotherCoders, a non-profit social enterprise, dedicated to unwrapping women with kids to careers and technology so they can thrive in digital economy. Prior to founding MotherCoders, Tina worked in government and the non-profit private sector. She holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Political, Legal and Economic Analysis from Mills College and an MBA from the Lorry I. Lokey Graduate School of Business.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In 2010, Tina received for MA in Education from Stanford University&#8217;s Graduate School of Education where her studies in their Learning, Design and Technology Program focused on how technology can be used to foster civic engagement. Tina speaks and writes regularly on topics related to the digital economy, including diversity and inclusion, civic innovation, workforce development and the changing needs of women and families in a globalized and tech-driven world.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m happy that I can read that entire intro out because it&#8217;s very clear that you have spent a lot of time and effort understanding these issues, learning about these issues throughout your college and university career and onward. Can you talk about how these issues became so important for you and why you decide to make this, I guess your life&#8217;s work, if that&#8217;s an accurate characterization?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It is an accurate characterization. Thank you so much for having me on this show. I&#8217;m delighted to be with all of you. It&#8217;s really funny, I don&#8217;t know if you ever see that video of Steve Jobs giving a commencement speech at Stanford saying, &#8220;Don&#8217;t worry about where you&#8217;re going. Just go with your gut and your life&#8217;s work won&#8217;t make sense and you won&#8217;t be able to connect the dots until you look back.&#8221; That&#8217;s the path that I&#8217;ve taken as I&#8217;ve just tried something and if it doesn&#8217;t work, then I try something else and I&#8217;ve just moved closer and closer to my life&#8217;s work, which I will right now say is really creating a space for us to intentionally create an economy that&#8217;s more fair and inclusive.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We’re going through this huge, worldwide transition and I don&#8217;t want us to replicate all the inequities that we have in this economy and bring it into the next economy. I want to spend some time making sure that the people that are feeling marginalized now have a foothold in the new economy so that we can change that you could [inaudible] their families. I know that sounds like huge and you&#8217;re doing this by yourself but really, I have been working towards this my whole life. I was born into an immigrant family. I was raised by a grandmother who worked in a sweat shop so I am very familiar with what happens when people are marginalized.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Having the first to go to college, I always thought like, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to go and make my mark in business,&#8221; and that just became clear to me it wasn&#8217;t going to happen there so I tried all these different spaces. I tried working in governments. I&#8217;ve been in philanthropy and I started in non-profit but I think the overarching thread that ran through all of those things was that I wanted to create a more fair world.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Was there a particular moment or an event that put you on this path or was it a more gradual development?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think there were definite forks in the road but I think for the purposes of this conversation for MotherCoders, it was definitely shortly after I had my second daughter. I had a two-year old and an infant. I wanted to move back into a world that was more technical. I had been working in a government role and I was getting further and further away from the tech. I was like I&#8217;m going to spend this time during my maternity leave &#8212; because that makes perfect sense &#8212; to relearn all the stuff that I used to know how to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I was learning to code again. I was actually reviewing CSS &#8212; not super hard &#8212; and had a complete meltdown because I was exhausted. I was in between breastfeeding session in all of the night and I was lonely. Even though, I had gone to ed school at noon, that for me and a lot of other people, that online learning isn&#8217;t the best modality for me. It was kind of all I had left so I had a fairly significant breakdown and insight about how hard it is for mothers, for parents, any caregiver really to be able to do all these things and keep up with the skills that we need to be able to take care of our families.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was in a similar situation back in 2009 when I had my daughter. I was put on mandatory bed rest so I was unemployed when I had her. Once that ran out, I went on to waitressing and I had no idea what I want to do with my life. I went to college, I had a degree in professional writing, a minor in communications arts and sciences but for me, I was a single mom and I had a very, very little help.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> My mom was around back then and my sister was, I think a junior or senior in high school at the time and I was just looking for any kind of opportunity to be able to be successful without having to leave my house because daycare and other things like that are so expensive. Babysitters these days charge an arm and a leg just to go out for an evening so I started looking online and saw the opportunities in the technical space were just tremendous. Luckily, I fell into what I&#8217;m doing now, which wasn&#8217;t technically coding but now that I&#8217;ve met all these amazing people from just producing podcasts and doing a little bit of virtual assistance, I see the value that you can do it from home while the kids are taking their nap or when they go to bed at night, they spend a couple of extra hours learning new things and it&#8217;s just such a great opportunity in any situation to get involved in coding.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely and we have some single moms that have come through our classes and it&#8217;s a community that gets them through, like you said: meeting the amazing people there in the space. I think that key and just knowing that there&#8217;s a world of opportunity for me out there, I just need to do these things and makes it less scary and more accessible. What we try to do is we try to bring in mothers who know they want to go back into workforce or switching to a more technical role but don&#8217;t know where to start.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I had people ran up to me and like, &#8220;Python or Ruby or some other language?&#8221; and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know. What do you want to do?&#8221; And they&#8217;ll say, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know. My friend told me and this is so cool.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Been there [Laughs].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, like a whole world that means making that decision and figuring out that&#8217;s the right thing for you and do you even like the jobs that are open to you once you learn something? We try to kind of close that gap for moms who are standing on the sidelines and want to get in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Tina, I&#8217;m curious. I&#8217;m a mom and when my daughter was very young, at the start of my career, I&#8217;ll already had some sort of baseline knowledge but I had a lot of trouble with work-life balance and I tilted way too far in favor of work and missed a lot of really important milestones to my daughter&#8217;s life. How do you address work-life balance as you&#8217;re working with moms who are just getting started in this field?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Man, it&#8217;s tough. That question really goes back to how our society is organized around this idealized vision of a nuclear family where there is a male breadwinner &#8212; usually a male bread winner &#8212; who goes out and does all the things, 24/7, all-in, work first and he&#8217;s able to do that because the assumption is that there&#8217;s a homemaker &#8212; usually a female &#8212; who takes care of everything on the homefront so that he can do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That&#8217;s never quite been the case for a families in the US and it&#8217;s especially not the case today when almost half of families with children under 18 have working parents, both working full time just to stay afloat. It doesn&#8217;t reflect reality and we organize around it. What I mean by that is schools let out in the middle of the afternoon because they assume that there&#8217;s a female caregiver picking them up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Summers are off. Two weeks were Christmas and that&#8217;s just schools. Then there&#8217;s the tax code and then there&#8217;s a workplace policies that kind of reinforce all this. All this to say, the structures that we have in society around work and just how we&#8217;re organized, it&#8217;s not suited for working parents. As a woman, not only do you have to overcome all the barriers around sexism, you have to, on top of that, really try to navigate this compact set of social structure that are stacked against. It&#8217;s kind of depressing if you think about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But what I found is this conversation around work-life balance isn&#8217;t necessarily moving us forward because it&#8217;s hard to make this problem about moms not being able to balance our priorities and manage our time. That&#8217;s not the case. The cases are we&#8217;re expected to do all these things and put in 45 hours a week so our bosses think that we are just as competent and committed to our career. I try myself not to play that game of work-life balance. It&#8217;s just one that I&#8217;m never going to win.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I have a husband who works full time. We don&#8217;t have our family around and we have two young daughters so for me and my husband, it&#8217;s just as not so much as balancing as coming together and prioritizing and working as a team to make sure that we each get what we need to cover our bases at work and also take care of our families. I don&#8217;t have anything new or a smart to say about that, other than we are all messed up in terms of how we&#8217;re organized and we have to rethink this whole thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So it&#8217;s a society issue?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If your kid gets sick, you have to stay home. A lot of people these days don&#8217;t work eight-to-four or nine-to-fives and it&#8217;s always expected that you have to be there at a certain time to take care of the children. When you&#8217;re taking care the children, they need fed around five or six o&#8217;clock at night and then they do the bath and they have to do their homework. In all of that, you&#8217;re trying to juggle a full time job. It gets to be bananas and it&#8217;s frustrating. At the same time, I don&#8217;t know how to fix it because I want to do things. I want to be a coder and I want to learn how to program. But at the end of the day, I&#8217;m exhausted. What can society do, in short of allowing your children to come to work or like young children before they&#8217;re school-aged or something else to try and help the situation?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;re basically talking about changing culture and that takes a lot of time. I heard this great saying the other day that culture is like water and it flows from the top down. I think people and power need to have that realization that, &#8220;This isn&#8217;t working for us. We&#8217;re leaving a lot of money on the table and by the way, it&#8217;s really inhumane.&#8221; I don&#8217;t even know which argument resonate more at this point because neither seems to be working that well. Ultimately, I think we have to change the culture around gender roles and specifically what our expectations are around caregiving. But on a micro level, I think workplaces that are leading some of this change have implemented more parent-friendly workplace policies, such as paid parental leave.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I was at a talk yesterday where they were saying that Slack has a saying that&#8217;s written on the wall. That&#8217;s how important they think it is. It&#8217;s plastered across a very, very visible wall that says, &#8220;Work hard and go home.&#8221; For innovative companies who really do realize that we&#8217;re humans and we have lives outside of work and we do better when we actually unplug and do other things are kind of leading the charge and most of the time, the people that are leading it tend to be parents who get it. I think with millennials moving into the workforce based on what sociologists have found about their preferences, they don&#8217;t want to be all in that work. The men tend to want to be as involved in caregiving as the women or more so than their fathers had been.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The research says there are some hope but ultimately, this is a cultural problem and it&#8217;s going to take a really long time to work itself out. My whole goal of doing MotherCoders is because the industry right now is so in dire need of talent and they&#8217;re going to have to enlist women because we&#8217;re getting more degrees and getting more educated and we can actually do a job that women with the technical skills will have a little bit more of leverage and over time will move into positions of power where they can help change it. That&#8217;s just the best I can come up with at this point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just saw this great video by Nev Schulman &#8212; he was the host or maybe still is, I don&#8217;t really watch MTV much anymore &#8212; of catfish and him and his wife had a baby. He made this great video about ending gender stereotypes for parents and I totally recommend that everybody watch it because not only it is funny, it hits home hardcore.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s so bizarre that we&#8217;ve constructed this whole myth around how women are best-suited for that because they found that in societies where men are more involved at caregiving, they actually have lower levels of violence overall. Biology is tied up in caregiving and when men do it, everyone actually benefits. But we have a lot of myths here in America that promote the opposite, that men are incapable of making even change a diaper. We award dads for being able to take their kids for a walk without dying.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a single dad friend who he said several times that the bar is set so low for dads and you hear dads talk about like, &#8220;I&#8217;m babysitting the kids this weekend.&#8221; I was like, &#8220;No, you&#8217;re being a father.&#8221; My friend just finds it just by showing up, he gets lauded because that expectation for dad is so low.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and this is not just coming from men and this is a societal thing. Men and women both pull this up together, not all men and not all women but in general.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Majoritively.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It sounds like there are a number of interrelated problems or challenges here. There&#8217;s the economic empowerment of women. You’re getting them more access to better income, more access to credit and things like that. There&#8217;s the increased well-being of everyone, starting with women. I think if women have increased well-being, then their children will increase well-being since again, they&#8217;re the primary caregivers, etcetera. There&#8217;s also this social empowerment of women and challenging these social structures. How do we tackle all of these problems at the same time?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We are tackling it, just not in the same setting. Everyone’s working on a different piece, I want to say. There are people who are trying to change the narrative in the media. There are women who are around men who are doing it at the business front and government. Everything, the cultures in the air, you don&#8217;t even know that some things at play until someone calls it out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For what I&#8217;m trying to do with tech, tech is basically the new economy. You can&#8217;t get to this new place without talking about tech because tech just underlies everything we do now and it&#8217;s just a matter of time before it&#8217;s a literacy that everyone needs to have: knowing how to code or just understand how technology works. I, for one hope that people who are a leading change on any form recognizes that and we&#8217;re all chipping away at this elephant in our own way and that ultimately because tech is the future of work that we are all being intentional about how we want to create this new economy so that we don&#8217;t bring along all the stuff we don&#8217;t want on this one.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe we could talk for a bit about the part of the elephant that you are currently chipping away at.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What shall we name the part?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Let&#8217;s talk specifically about MotherCoders.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know that was part of the elephant specifically [inaudible]. My word &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was just trying to roll with your metaphor. I don&#8217;t have one in mind specifically.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>MotherCoders is based in San Francisco, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What is it that you do there?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I live here. That&#8217;s good at any place to start. I am born and raised in San Francisco so I am just immersed in this. I&#8217;ve seen it grow in prominence locally and I&#8217;ve also seen it now how it&#8217;s transformed industries and places and the backlash against that. You could say I&#8217;m at ground zero for this stuff. We started here because, I thought the issues here are so amplified because it&#8217;s such a small space, because everyone comes here. Capital is concentrated here. All of the issues that you might feel in places that aren&#8217;t as tech-centric here as like 10x so I was seeing all of these groups and organizations that were cropping up to address the pipeline: let&#8217;s teach girls, let&#8217;s teach youth, let&#8217;s teach kids, let&#8217;s get college students involved, let&#8217;s get the unemployed and just everybody except moms.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There are even women&#8217;s groups but they stop once the women become moms and that&#8217;s because the childcare piece is very challenging. The exhaustion piece is very real. They&#8217;re not having time. Melinda Gates calls this &#8216;time poverty&#8217;. Women have time poverty once they become mothers. There was this great post on Medium that shows based on the census survey on how Americans spend their time, the difference between parents and non-parents and men and women. Because caregiving is a very emotionally and time intensive and resource intensive enterprise, something&#8217;s got to give.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A lot of times, mothers are the ones who work full-time or even the ones that don&#8217;t, will only have a certain amount of uninterrupted time to devote to learning something and that tends to be in the evening, after the kids go to bed or on Saturdays where they might have some coverage from a partner or family members. That&#8217;s why we designed MotherCoders as it is. It&#8217;s a Saturday part-time program with on-site childcare for those who need it and then we also started experimenting with a day time class for moms whose kids are in school and they&#8217;re trying to re-enter and they have some flexibility during the day.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That’s what we do in San Francisco. We run a part-time tech training program for mothers who want to get into tech but don&#8217;t yet know how their experience might connect or they&#8217;re trying to get a refresh. What we do is we do three parts. We do a coding part. We do an industry knowledge part and then lastly, we do a community building part. I had gone to ed school and I&#8217;m a big believer in the fact that learning is social and contextual and people have evolved to learn because they need it to. I am a big Maslow&#8217;s hierarchy of needs person so people learn to do things because they want to meet their needs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I try to design a program to help moms learn but in a way that social, in a way that fits into their own life goals and fits into the context of where they live. We run this program. It&#8217;s nine weeks, eight weeks of it is in class, one day of it is a field trip to a tech company so they can see how it works and talk to a tech team. Then the rest of their time, they&#8217;re learning how to do frontend development: HTML, CSS, and some JavaScript and that really isn&#8217;t to teach them how to code and then be job-ready. It&#8217;s really to demystify it to see if they even like it and understand it. Then we bring in women from the field to teach on specific things that we think are the most topical and important to understand.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We bring in data scientists, talk about that. We bring in an information security person and talk about that. Then we let them go at it with each other because the data scientist wants all the things and the information security expert said, &#8220;Nah, I don&#8217;t know if I want to even handle all the things.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then we bring in women to talk about marketing automation and product design. We bring in founders to share their experience and through that exercise, not only are the women are getting the latest and greatest from practitioners in the field. They&#8217;re also growing their social capital. They&#8217;re growing their network capital. They&#8217;re making connections with people who actually work in roles that they might want to pursue and that opens up a world of possibility because in the media, you might only know about you&#8217;re either a programmer or you&#8217;re a designer or a web designer or whatever. Now, there&#8217;s actually a person who does product management or user experience design. It has all these other roles embedded in it like researcher and UI. It kind of opens the mom&#8217;s eyes about what the possibilities are.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Lastly, we spend time letting them connect with each other and grow relationships with each other because I&#8217;m sure the moms here will tell you, being a mother can be very isolating because you don&#8217;t have time to socialize or make new friends so these women end up going to conferences together, they end up taking other more advanced together once they leave and they just become friends who hang out and help out each other with their code and share job tips or whatever.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You talked about the training that the women received being in frontend development. Why did you pick frontend development? Do you think it&#8217;s because the on ramp is shorter and how do you think that plays into the stereotype of women being better suited to frontend work than backend work?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that is real. That stereotype. I made that decision because I found it&#8217;s the most accessible way to get someone to start. Everyone has seen a website. Everyone can click on view source code and see code. Everyone can envision themselves building something that they can see. I started learning Ruby and it took me a while. It was like so conceptual and there was no frontend to go with it and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;What is happening here?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> From working with marginalized communities, from being at ed school and knowing about how people learn, I picked frontend web developers because it&#8217;s the most accessible. people already have a mental model for what that is and what happens and it was just one of those things where I&#8217;m like, &#8220;What&#8217;s the sort of distance from A to B or even nothing to A,&#8221; and that&#8217;s why I pick that as opposed to starting with something that was more on the backend and less common that people have seen something like that. Way back in the stack, people probably will get more confusing or probably take them more time to develop a mental model for what that means.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But you talked about bringing in people who do in full stack and the people who do data science and things like that. Have you tracked to see how people who have gone through a program like if they end up staying with frontend who are taking up and inspired to do some of the other aspects of development?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. It&#8217;s like the gateway drug. Once they figure out like, &#8220;Oh, I can build this,&#8221; so it&#8217;s a confidence building exercise and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Oh, JavaScript. My head just exploded but yeah, okay, I picked up 10%,&#8221; and it does piqued their interest. We do have a group of moms right now that are learning Python with each other. One is actually using at her job now. She landed a data analyst role after graduating from our program and they saw her aptitude and now they&#8217;re helping her learn Python.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s another woman who didn&#8217;t know anything about Python and got looped into an open source project and they were very, very willing to train and now she&#8217;s learning Python. She made that leap. Then we have another one who&#8217;s learning on her own so there&#8217;s the data science Python crowd. One went through a coding boot camp so she&#8217;s full stack now, working as a developer at an ad tech company. Another went through, she&#8217;s a graphic designer marketing person and fell in love with coding and she went to CodePath and became a mobile designer. Now, she&#8217;s a visual designer on a product team of a health tech company. Then we have several that took a break and came back so they refresh their skill set and dove right back. There&#8217;s a backend Ruby person and then there are some other folks who jumped back into more technical account management, I guess I should call that. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They do get inspired to learn more and it&#8217;s just about getting them to a place where they have the confidence and the support to slog through the beginning part where there&#8217;s always a learning curve &#8212; the trough of despair. It&#8217;s one of those things where there is this gender perspective out there that women do frontend and that&#8217;s unfortunate because it&#8217;s not a function of whether or not these women can do it. That&#8217;s like a market or a cultural response to women entering the field and wanting to create a hierarchy so that the people who are in power hold on to that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, there was a recent article in The Guardian about how women entering development and specifically entering frontend development jobs is causing non-women to devalue frontend work. I think that there is definitely a lot of elitism around frontend versus backend or full stack versus frontend or what have you. I&#8217;ve been doing software development professionally for over 20 years and frontend work intimidates the hell out of me. It is not easy and I hate to see it devalue the way it is in our industry.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, privilege will try to hold on to privilege and they&#8217;ll find a way to create barriers to entry. You see this in other industries too. The teaching profession, for example for the longest time, women were doing it and then they came in with administrative class which was mostly men and suddenly now, teachers are devalued and the administrators are held to a higher level of prestige. It happens in every industry. It&#8217;s just all rooted in power and tied up with gender and race and class and ableism among these other things. I&#8217;m not surprised. It&#8217;s a moving target. Women were actually the pioneers of backend and you just think these whole thing is [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, definitely. I&#8217;m also curious, you talked about why and how you got started in San Francisco. I travelled there from time to time and I have a lot of friends who work there at startups or at larger companies and it&#8217;s definitely a microcosm of tech but their cultural values that are present in Silicon Valley, in particular in the startup world. Do you worry that those necessarily translate to other places in the country that are not so venture capital focused and they have a different kind of elitism or sexism in place than what we see in Silicon Valley?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, absolutely. I&#8217;m all about contexts. It&#8217;s just like how gardens look different as you move around the country, it can grow things here but not there. Even if you&#8217;re growing squash here, it&#8217;s going to look a little different in Florida there. Same thing with tech. You&#8217;re right. There are these cultural norms here that don&#8217;t translate well. I&#8217;m really delighted actually to see this diversification of tech being how there are these nascent tech ecosystems are growing, actively and intentionally being grown by committees. Was it Kentucky got something going on? Tennessee, Austin, Texas, Arizona, North Carolina, Pittsburgh is just doing an amazing job of growing theirs and all these other places. I&#8217;m very optimistic about other places coming up so that we are not as much the center of the universe and defining the standards and the cultural norms for how tech is supposed to be. For the most, though, until we change the dynamics at work, I think white men from a certain class will continue to dominate even in these other places.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re talking about the importance of context and I agree with you. It does seem to me that there are some generalities that you can make. We&#8217;re talking about how women are discriminated against in the workplace, specifically in high status job markets and sort of pushed toward more low status jobs. That happens, as far as I can tell, basically everywhere: every country, every industry. It seems like it&#8217;s such a systemic issue that we need a systemic fix to apply, not just in Silicon Valley, not just in Kentucky but something that would work everywhere. Is this something that we can tackle piece by piece or do we need a more systemic plan?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Media changes narratives. I think media has a pretty big role to play if we are to change culture. One big thing that&#8217;s tied to what I was saying earlier about how we organized it all wrong is that we hold on to this idea of the ideal worker. All-in work all the time, work takes precedence over everything out. They&#8217;ll always take the phone call, always make a business trip and that all-in all the time mindset automatically excludes a lot of people that you can&#8217;t hold up that standard.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For better or worse, we&#8217;re just out of place where women are still doing most of the caregiving, not just with children but with elderly and the parents. Women can&#8217;t meet that ideal a lot of times once they become moms or caregivers. If you look at the gender pay gap between women without children and with children, you will see a big gap. The pay gap between women without kids and men is not as big. That&#8217;s definitely one of those things where as long as we hold onto this idea of the ideal worker, this is going to continue to persist. What related to that is the motherhood penalty that once a woman becomes a mom, she&#8217;s automatically perceived as being less competent and less committed to her career.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Women overcompensate for that by never talking about the fact that they have kids or completely in the closet. They have no pictures of their kids on their work desk. They&#8217;ll never say, &#8220;I have to leave because I have to go to a ballet recital,&#8221; or whatever and that&#8217;s because of the motherhood penalty and they&#8217;ve done lots of research with this where you have women with the same pedigree, same credentials, same work experience, same everything except one resume that say &#8216;PTA President&#8217; and that resume will get less callbacks and be offered less money every time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s really sad but that&#8217;s culture talking and I think things like what Salesforce is doing, they&#8217;re going to actually auditing all their pay scales and their job titles to make sure that there&#8217;s a parity between men and women. That&#8217;s a huge leap forward. If every company were to do that, I think we would make a big difference in correcting some of that wage gap but outside of that, unless companies are become more accepting of people having flexible schedules and people are more forthcoming, leadership is more forthcoming about, &#8220;I&#8217;m a parent too and I get it and you should leave if you want to or need to,&#8221; or whatever and, &#8220;You&#8217;re an adult and you can measure time and just get what you need done, done,&#8221; then whatever. We&#8217;re not there yet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The example you just gave in Salesforce is an example of where change has to come from the top. That wouldn&#8217;t happen if there was no CEO who believe that there was a good idea to do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And a white male CEO. That&#8217;s a huge signal. He knows the power that he has and he has a real thing at exactly right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In that context, you chose with MotherCoders to focus on empower women at the ground level, getting in there and working with women to make them more viable in the industry. Those human conflict, how do you maybe square those? Or explain to me how it isn&#8217;t really a conflict if I&#8217;m saying it wrong.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re just fighting the same war on different fronts. The more women you have at the leadership table, the more women you have with skills that are highly, highly desirable and marketable and people are competing over having you on their team, the more leverage women will have and the more leverage leadership will have to say, &#8220;We have to do these things because look at what we need. Look at our talent gap. Look at what we need to retain women and to recruit women.&#8221; If they all work in concert together, that&#8217;s what I mean by &#8216;same war, different fronts&#8217;.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess if the question is how do we get more woman CEO is part of the answer that has to be, &#8220;We&#8217;ll have more high valued women employees.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and we have to be open to seeing more woman CEO&#8217;s because going back to something that we talked about earlier, if women are expected to be the caregiver socially, to see a woman CEO, you&#8217;re like, &#8220;Wait, who&#8217;s taking care of your kids?&#8221; That&#8217;s a huge quandary, a huge dilemma for women. If you lead, you also have to seeing nurturing, you have to be nice but yet, leaders are required to make hard choices so then you start to doubt whether a woman is capable of doing that. Whereas a man just does it and you never ask.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The term &#8216;working dad&#8217; is laughable. Have you ever heard anyone say, &#8220;Oh, he&#8217;s a working dad?&#8221; No one said that because the presumption is that he works and it&#8217;s not the same for women. It&#8217;s just all these expectations that we have and it&#8217;s hard because, I think women hold them too. It&#8217;s just one of those things where we don&#8217;t have enough female CEOs because we are not creating an environment where women can rise up to become CEO. They&#8217;re not even getting funding when they&#8217;re starting companies. I think women get like 4% of venture capital.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Tina, we&#8217;ve talked broadly about MotherCoders and the mission that you have and we&#8217;ve also talked about the fact that we need to have a difference in the value installed in our culture. I&#8217;m sure that these issues resonate really strongly with our listeners but I also imagine a lot of our listeners are asking, &#8220;What can I do tactically to make these sort of cultural changes happen?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There are lots of things you could do but just to put into context again because I love context. MotherCoders for me really is a tactic for what I&#8217;m trying to do. What I&#8217;m trying to do is create a fairer worlds. The strategy that I&#8217;m taking is I&#8217;m going to focus on women, specifically mothers because like a weird way to put what mothers bring to the world but the social ROI &#8212; the social rate of return.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When you invest a dollar in women, you actually get more than a dollar back in benefits. I focused there. MotherCoders is a tactic for that. In thinking about the impact that I want to have with MotherCoders, we are currently working on licensing model where any community that wants to bring us there can do that by organizing their own people, their own community to come together and create a space around another MotherCoders program.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One way to help us with that is to start thinking about whether or not you want to have one and reach out. We are currently fund raising to make this licensing model a reality. We want to raise 1.25 million dollars over the next three years, $500,000 this year, $500,000 next year and then to $250,000 the year after that. Our goal really is to create a model where we have this incoming revenue streams who are less dependent on fund raising over time. The reason why we are taking that strategy is because it&#8217;s been really hard to raise money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As being a non-profit, we&#8217;re going after philanthropic money and the state of our country being where it is right now, a lot of money is going towards shoring up the safety net so targeted at people living in poverty, targeted at communities that are really suffering and dealing with a chronic unemployment and violence and all those things. That&#8217;s where a lot of the money is going towards. There&#8217;s also a lot of money going towards electoral politics.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That doesn&#8217;t leave a lot of space for middle income people and that&#8217;s a large swath. With moms, with families because childcare is so expensive and housing costs are also increasing, families ended up not having a lot of disposable incomes. They might not be living in poverty but they don&#8217;t have the $10,000 or $15,000 that might be required to go to a full on boot camp.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Nor that they have the time to quit their jobs and find childcare to cover themselves while they&#8217;re in these programs. MotherCoders is really is trying to make a case for these moms who are so important to our economy, not only because they help hold up the economy but they can actually help fill these jobs at companies need, to keep innovating. We are asking philanthropist to invest in middle income families and middle income moms and that&#8217;s been a hard case to make in this climate. That&#8217;s why we&#8217;re really focused on creating a model where we&#8217;re generating revenue. Not all moms though go for free. Most of our moms pay. It cost us about right now, $7,000 for each mom to go through the program.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Right now, the moms either pay $2500 if they don&#8217;t need [inaudible] or $3,000 if they do which is only half of what? The actual cost is. But as we grow, we&#8217;re going to have economies of scale and hopefully, MotherCoders will become the self-sustaining thing over time because we&#8217;re like the weight watchers of coding school where each community that wants it, comes together and designs a program, teaching the technical skills that fit the needs of their local employers and they&#8217;re doing it in a way that meets the needs of the population of moms and families they have locally.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Different states have different childcare laws so that&#8217;s another thing so we&#8217;re just trying to design a model that is enough structure for people to get started but has enough flexibility where people can customize it to meet their needs. To get there, we have to raise all this money to do it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Number one is money. Number two is if people are involved in discussions at the workplace where they do have some power to shape, workplace policy to make things easier for moms and parents in general because whatever happens for moms, tends to benefit everyone else, please weigh in and help push the needle on that. Lastly, it all goes back to implicit biases that people have to. Learning about maybe what your implicit biases are and then how that might play into your interactions at work, how that may play into recruiting practices and hiring decisions, promotions and all of that stuff. I think that would go a long way in demystifying it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> From just a technical code perspective, a lot of moms find it very hard to make evening meetups because that&#8217;s where the high traffic, intense parenting happen. Kids have to get bathed, they have to do the homework, they have to go to bed and moms cannot regularly make meetups and not be at home for that. To make events more accessible with me, maybe having on-site childcare. It would mean hosting it maybe on a Saturday with on-site childcare, creating spaces where moms are welcome and just in general, just being mindful that there are parents and other types of people with caregiving responsibilities who right now are standing on the sidelines and want to participate but can&#8217;t.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I helped organize a Women&#8217;s Hackathon for non-profit engagement a couple years back and one of our goals was to have on-site childcare for that exact reason. We wanted to make sure that we were open and accessible to as many people as possible. That was hard, even with our budget but we ended up funding by a company that specifically was interested in sponsoring the childcare portion of our budget so we&#8217;re very fortunate in that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m also happy to say that I&#8217;m hearing about a lot more conferences and mainly, these are larger conferences that are starting to offer childcare. I think that it would be great if we see that trend continuing so that we can involve more people from the community with different needs and different expectations and different responsibilities and get them folded in the community.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. The numbers are going to push people to do this, I hope. Over the next 10 years, it&#8217;s expected that 64 million millennials will become parents. Right now, 25% of them are parents and if companies want to hold onto the people that they&#8217;ve worked so hard to recruit and train and retain, they&#8217;re going to have to do these things. If they don&#8217;t, I think women will get pushed out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to take a moment to give a shout out to one of our patrons, Nik Kantar, @nkantar on Twitter, recently joined us as a patron and if you are interested in helping to support the show financially, we hope you&#8217;ll visit Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. Donating at any level at all will get you access to our patron-only Slack community where you can make suggestions about guests that come up on the show or ask questions of prior guest and just in general, take part in a community of listeners who believe in the same values that you believe in. We hope you will join us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>At the end of each show, we like to take some time to reflect on what we&#8217;ve talked about and think about something that we can take away or make actionable after the episode. I am definitely inspired. I love the idea of MotherCoders. I would love to see it expand. I think everybody should donate to the cause and they do AmazonSmile and every time I buy from Amazon, a percentage goes to MotherCoders so that&#8217;s definitely the cause that I get behind when I&#8217;m doing that and I encourage you all to do the same. Rein, do you have anything?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Am I allowed to have two things?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You are allowed to have two things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Three is a bit too far &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Four is right out?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay. The first is that we spend a lot of time talking about Silicon Valley and tech industry in America but the empowerment of women and the challenges are a global problem. I just want to talk about the decades of research case studies and work that&#8217;s gone into, for instance exploring microfinance as a tool for the economic empowerment of women in the developing world, especially places like India.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Since the mid-80s, we’ve been giving small business loans to women to try to bring them and their communities out of poverty. There is a ton of research case studies. It&#8217;s interesting both that it&#8217;s been successful and it hasn&#8217;t often for reasons that aren&#8217;t because the women did it wrong, things like resentment from men and a variety of challenges. That&#8217;s the first one.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then the second is there&#8217;s an amazing Twitter account that is much more fun that I want to share with you. Its @manwhohasitall and it&#8217;s basically a gender reversal of all the sexist things that men say at or about women in the workplace. They are instead said by women about men and it is glorious. That&#8217;s it for me. Coraline?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I actually had a note to talk about something very similar about encouraging women worldwide, not just in the US. I had the privilege of taking part in a program, maybe five or six years ago now that was aimed at fostering entrepreneurship in women in Africa. I think it&#8217;s interesting that like we have a very male-dominated culture in America and this woman who ended up staying with us and we are supporting in this program. Her name was Jovita.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In her country, women were seen as the agents of social and economic change. There was actually a lot more respect paid toward women, expectations were very, very high but women were revising [inaudible]. I think it&#8217;s interesting that through the programs you&#8217;re talking about Rein, like micropayments or microloans and things like that, we should be looking at this as a worldwide problem and there are ways in our organization to addressing it that way too. But of course, we take care of things here as well because we have so many problems as a culture here in America.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the things that I&#8217;m taking away from this I think Tina mentioned role models and how many of the role models we have, in terms of the idealized worker, are unrealistic. I want to think about how I can personally promote role models who better reflect where we want to be as a culture not just where we currently are. That&#8217;s going to encourage me to find some new voices, maybe people that I don&#8217;t permanently follow on Twitter and amplify their voices and amplify things around their struggles and their achievements and their accomplishments. Tina, do you have any thoughts for us?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just want to say thank you. Thank you for being part of this community. I&#8217;m really happy. I was logging with this for &#8212; my little ones is almost four so &#8212; three and a half years and I&#8217;ve really seen this movement grow and this community grow, this community of people who care about diversity and inclusion in tech and are actively doing something about it. Thank you so much for being a part of this and for including moms because moms are not included in the beginning and now moms are in the conversations so thank you so much for talking to me and being interested in what we&#8217;re doing in MotherCoders and promoting us. Mandy, you for just being an example for what is possible so thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then, two because I, at the end of the day, really feel like I&#8217;m just trying to change culture, this invisible thing. I spent a lot of time thinking about like how do we make moms cool? Part of the problem is like moms aren&#8217;t cool. I don&#8217;t know why because I think I&#8217;m pretty cool. Mandy is pretty cool. I don&#8217;t know, Coraline, you probably think you&#8217;re pretty cool too, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m totally cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sometimes I feel that way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t understand why we&#8217;re perceived as not cool. Anyway, I want to help make us cool and I think about silly ways to do that. We have to come up with some cultural meme or something that make us cool and I&#8217;ve been playing around with this idea of making hats, t-shirts and sweatshirts or swag or whatever that&#8217;s say, &#8220;Code like a mother.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Love it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Would you buy?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would absolutely buy that t-shirt.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, I&#8217;m going to work on that. I&#8217;m going design that right now because I think that would be pretty awesome, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We are a representative sample of your target market and we agree so go for it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I made this MotherCoders for a reason. Everyone&#8217;s going to remember because it sounds like something else that rang with MotherCoders so we play around that all &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8216;Mother loaders?&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t get it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, mother&#8230; mother&#8230;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>TINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mother givers, mother frienders. So yeah, the sweatshirt would be like &#8216;Code like a mother&#8217; and I hope that is something that people would be into and want to buy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You just point me somewhere where I can give you money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>MANDY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Take my money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, it&#8217;s a great conversation today, Tina. Thank you so much for joining us and I&#8217;m also really happy, Mandy that you decided to join the panel today because I thought you had some great perspectives as a mom who was exactly in the situation that Tina&#8217;s foundation is trying to serve better so thank you both so much. Of course, Rein, you had some great questions so thank you for being here as our check in male guy. That wraps up Episode 25. Thank you all for listening and we will talk to you next week.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="http://devreps.com/">DevReps, LLC</a>.</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/coralineada"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mandy Moore</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tina Lee: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/mstinalee"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@mstinalee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.mothercoders.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">MotherCoders</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Not Your Mother’s Podcast!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>00:55</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story and Getting Involved in Coding</span></p>
<p><b>03:17</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Programming Perspectives From People of Different Backgrounds; Teaching Adults vs Children </span></p>
<p><b>08:19 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Work/Life Balance</span></p>
<p><b>11:32 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Changing Culture Around Gender Roles and Caregiving</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>“Culture is like water in that it flows from the top down.”</i></b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.mtv.com/news/2976598/nev-schulman-gender-stereotypes-parenting-catfish-laura-perlongo-cleo/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nev Schulman Wants to Erase Gender Stereotypes for Parents</span></a></p>
<p><b>18:18 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The </span><a href="http://www.mothercoders.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">MotherCoders</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Organization</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://medium.com/@halhen/what-to-expect-when-youre-done-expecting-25fb0c00393"><span style="font-weight: 400;">What to expect when you’re done expecting</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">(Medium Article)  </span></p>
<p><b>24:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Teaching Frontend Development and The Stereotype that Women are Better at Frontend than Backend Work</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/14/tech-women-code-workshops-developer-jobs"><span style="font-weight: 400;">We can teach women to code, but that just creates another problem</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (Guardian Article) </span></p>
<p><b>30:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Silicon Valley Elitism, Sexism, and Defining Cultural Norms; “The Ideal Worker”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6ASw9OpvMg"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Motherhood Penalty</span></a></p>
<p><b>35:38 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Why do we not have many of women CEOs?</span></p>
<p><b>37:42 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Tactical Help for Cultural Changes</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.diigo.com/r?from=library&amp;u=mstinalee"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Stats on Millennial Women Becoming Moms</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Thank you </b><a href="https://twitter.com/nkantar"><b>Nik Kantar</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Mandy: </b><a href="http://www.mothercoders.org/give"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Donate to MotherCoders</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and/or support t]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/coralineada"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Mandy Moore</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tina Lee: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/mstinalee"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@mstinalee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.mothercoders.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">MotherCoders</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Not Your Mother’s Podcast!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>00:55</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story and Getting Involved in Coding</span></p>
<p><b>03:17</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Programming Perspectives From People of Different Backgrounds; Teaching Adults vs Children </span></p>
<p><b>08:19 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Work/Life Balance</span></p>
<p><b>11:32 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Changing Culture Around Gender Roles and Caregiving</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b><i>“Culture is like water in that it flows from the top down.”</i></b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.mtv.com/news/2976598/nev-schulman-gender-stereotypes-parenting-catfish-laura-perlongo-cleo/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Nev Schulman Wants to Erase Gender Stereotypes for Parents</span></a></p>
<p><b>18:18 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– The </span><a href="http://www.mothercoders.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">MotherCoders</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Organization</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://medium.com/@halhen/what-to-expect-when-youre-done-expecting-25fb0c00393"><span style="font-weight: 400;">What to expect when you’re done expecting</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">(Medium Article)  </span></p>
<p><b>24:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Teaching Frontend Development and The Stereotype that Women are Better at Frontend than Backend Work</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/mar/14/tech-women-code-workshops-developer-jobs"><span style="font-weight: 400;">We can teach women to code, but that just creates another problem</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (Guardian Article) </span></p>
<p><b>30:00 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Silicon Valley Elitism, Sexism, and Defining Cultural Norms; “The Ideal Worker”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6ASw9OpvMg"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Motherhood Penalty</span></a></p>
<p><b>35:38 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Why do we not have many of women CEOs?</span></p>
<p><b>37:42 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Tactical Help for Cultural Changes</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.diigo.com/r?from=library&amp;u=mstinalee"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Stats on Millennial Women Becoming Moms</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
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<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Mandy: </b><a href="http://www.mothercoders.org/give"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Donate to MotherCoders</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and/or support t]]></googleplay:description>
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					<title>Episode 024: Seeing Programming Where Other People Don&#8217;t with Felienne Hermans</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-024-seeing-programming-where-other-people-dont-with-felienne-hermans/</link>
					<pubDate>Thu, 23 Mar 2017 00:11:22 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=441</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[We discuss teaching programming as a language, what constitutes “real” programming, and digital literacy with Felienne Hermans.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[We discuss teaching programming as a language, what constitutes “real” programming, and digital literacy with Felienne Hermans.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Felienne Hermans: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/Felienne"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@Felienne</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.felienne.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">felienne.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.tudelft.nl/en/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Delft University of Technology</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://joyofcoding.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Joy of Coding Conference</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.se-radio.net/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">SE Radio</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboCup_Junior"><span style="font-weight: 400;">RoboCup Junior</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “The Netherlands Invented Gay Marriage, So We Should Be Scared of Them Now!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:28</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story</span></p>
<p><b>03:17</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Programming Perspectives From People of Different Backgrounds; Teaching Adults vs Children</span></p>
<p><b>06:12 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Teaching Programming as a Language; Aha! Moments</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://scratch.mit.edu/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scratch Programming</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.goldieblox.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">GoldieBlox</span></a></p>
<p><b>12:26 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Identity and why do we so often use the phrase &#8220;not real programming&#8221;? What do we define as software? Tooling</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://products.office.com/en-us/excel"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Microsoft Excel</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.felienne.com/Expector"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Expector</span></a></p>
<p><b>20:13 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">–  Should everyone know programming? Why? What should they know/be able to do? (Digital Literacy)</span></p>
<p><b>28:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What is the programming equivalent of a library/librarian?</span></p>
<p><b>33:06 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Does STEM education make other forms of education obsolete? Why not?</span></p>
<p><b>35:15 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Things to Get Better at Programming Other Than Programming</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://codekata.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">CodeKata</span></a></p>
<p><b>48:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Fighting Against “Real” Programming and Being Hesitant to Let in Newcomers</span></p>
<p><b>50:40 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What can we do to help spread the knowledge? </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Felienne: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">If people say they are programming, they are. Limit belittling and surprise. Do not contaminate others with what your own idea of programming is.</span></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Value on reading through code and forming a model of it.</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Thinking about programming as in thinking about writing.</span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Some programming does involved math, but it is not (for the most part) the math you hated in high school.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Mathematicians-Lament-School-Fascinating-Imaginative/dp/1934137170"><span style="font-weight: 400;">A Mathematician&#8217;s Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form by Paul Lockhart</span></a></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> You can be fluent at a very low level of proficiency and still be fluent.</span></p>
<div id="Transcript" style="display: none;">
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome everybody to Episode 24 of &#8216;The Netherlands Invented Gay Marriage, So We Should Be Scared of Them Now!&#8217; My name is Astrid.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, I&#8217;m scared now too. Hi, everybody this is Sam and I&#8217;m pretty sure that last time I was here it was Greater Than Code but let&#8217;s just go with it. Joining us again on the show is Rein.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello, everyone and welcome to the show, Jess.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you Rein and I&#8217;m Jessica and I&#8217;m super excited that today we have a special guest, Felienne.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, everyone. I&#8217;m Felienne.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Felienne is assistant professor at Delft University of Technology where she researches programming for everyone. She strongly believes that everyone can be a programmer but currently, not everyone has access to the right tools and educational materials. She has therefore developed tools to help people program in Excel and Scratch lessons for kids.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Today, 10,000 kids follow her [inaudible] on Scratch. Felienne also spread for love of programming outside of work hours. She teaches a bunch of kids programming each Saturday, organizes the Joy of Coding Conference in Rotterdam and speaking this year. She&#8217;s a host on SE Radio and Friends of RoboCup Junior Competition for Kids in the Netherlands. She loves running, knitting and card games. Felienne, welcome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks. I&#8217;m super excited to be on the show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Felienne, one of the ways that we like to get started is with your origin stories so tell us all about you and what your superpowers are.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My superpower is seeing programming where older people don&#8217;t see programming. My entire PhD dissertation was about programming in spreadsheets and usually, people don&#8217;t see programming as also including spreadsheets but I did and I thought people in spreadsheet, they put in secret codes and then some calculation happens. That&#8217;s totally [inaudible] of programming but where we programmers are used to having IDE with features like testing and debugging and analyzing, I saw people in spreadsheets lacking those type of IDE support like features.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> My entire PhD dissertation was about the summary it would be building an IDE for spreadsheets. Then after that, I moved along to working on programming education and also I want to expand the horizon of what programming could mean to children.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is a wonderful superpower. During the week, do you teach programming to supposed adults?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. As my university job as a professor, we have half of our time, we teach university students and the other half of the time we do scientific research. At the university, I teach they call themselves grownups and also I teach programming course for the non-computer science students. All of the students in my school can pick my course as an elective and these are architecture students, civil engineering students, aerospace engineering students so not people that necessarily want to be programmers but they will be programming, of course in their job. They will do some modelings, simulation or analysis and I teach them programming in my elective.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That sounds really fascinating. Do you find that people from those other backgrounds bring different perspectives that help them in their programming?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a really good question. At least they bring very interesting datasets and problems. For my course, as an end assignment, the assignment is just show me you learn something which the students, they love and hate it, of course. I encourage them to find dataset or problem from their own domain and apply programming to that so they will do, for example on data analysis, they sampled from &#8212; literally what happened to one of my students &#8212; a river in Africa and used his data analysis skills in Python to make a stronger analysis of that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m not sure if they bring a different perspective but they definitely bring really interesting problems and datasets to my course. Looking at these end report, for me is super interesting because I learned about a broadness of them and the piece is fresh for me as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Have you noticed differences between teaching kids how to program and teaching adults how to program?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It depends on the type of adults. I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s a real big difference between kids and university-age students because they&#8217;re still quite open-minded and eager to learn and they&#8217;re not scared of learning. But today, I gave a programming course to elementary school teachers &#8212; those are also adults of course &#8212; and that is different because these adults have already settled in their brain the idea that they cannot do programming. They&#8217;re like, &#8220;I went to teacher&#8217;s school. I will never learn programming. I&#8217;m unable to do this,&#8221; and I give them lecture material that I use on eight, nine, ten-year olds. It&#8217;s really not hard in an abstract sense. If you could measure it, it&#8217;s not hard. But they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Oh, my God. It&#8217;s programming.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Some type of adults, it&#8217;s not that they&#8217;re not smart. I&#8217;m sure they&#8217;re super smart people and they would be able to do it and I think they have convinced themselves but I could also say society has done a great job at convincing them that they can never be programmers and that stick of course.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I see a lot of learned helplessness when I talk to people who are not already &#8216;in tech&#8217; just even to the point where when I talk to people and I introduce myself and they say, &#8220;What do you do?&#8221; and I say, &#8220;I write software.&#8221; I&#8217;ve learned to leave it at that because most people will go, &#8220;Oh,&#8221; and move on to other topics because they don&#8217;t even feel like they have any handle on it, which is kind of sad.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This might have to do, of course also with the small definition that people see programming that they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Oh, programming. That&#8217;s apps and websites,&#8221; and it&#8217;s hard for them to relate because they don&#8217;t really know programming could mean to them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have noticed that it seems like because people associate programming with math and a lot of people have a lot of really negative experiences with math and they just automatically say, &#8220;Oh no. No, no, no. I can&#8217;t do that. It&#8217;s just like a lot of abstract math and I don&#8217;t even like math so I can&#8217;t program at all.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is so true. What we&#8217;re actually doing with teachers &#8212; I&#8217;m so happy you brought this. I&#8217;m now trying to teach programming in the context of language class so in my case, Dutch classes instead of math classes. I tried to focus on exercises that teachers and kids normally would do in the scope of reading. For example, storytelling or practicing with words because, of course a lot about programming is also reading.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you have to read a Scratch program, you are doing letter and word comprehension of course, because you&#8217;re reading the syntax. Instead of focusing on building, having the kids drag the blocks and creating a program, I&#8217;m more focused on reading and deconstructions so I&#8217;m giving them a program. They have to read and try to understand what it means by clicking the blocks and I found that connection to reading, rather than to mathematics is a good way to convince teachers that it&#8217;s useful and also to drag it to a space where teachers feel really comfortable. This emphasis on reading and storytelling can help people feel less scared because usually, the teachers are less scared of language than they are of math.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Starting with reading programs, that’s a really good idea. [Inaudible], we do anyway.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I have a degree in computer science and I do PhD in software engineering but I&#8217;m not reading books for elementary school teacher about how we teach language and language [inaudible] because there are so many good things in there that we can use in programming education that we haven&#8217;t thought about. One of the assumptions that we all have about programming is that creating a program will teach you how to create programs well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you think about reading, before kids start writing stories, if they&#8217;re seven or eight maybe they write their first stories, they&#8217;ve already been exposed to hearing stories for four or five years because their parents will read to them, they watched movies. Before we can even seriously think about teaching kids storytelling skills, we share stories with them. Maybe we can take some lessons from them into programming where we want to encourage kids to read programs first, what do you think programs are and can do and what are some canonical programs that make sense and only then starts focusing on construction. That&#8217;s one of the things that&#8217;s really interesting to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It occurs to me that a lot of what I&#8217;ve seen about teaching people programming is this idea that you have to get them hooked by giving them small empowering moments of control where they changed something and they see the computer response to what they said. Is that feasible in this approach that you&#8217;re talking about or do you just focus on reading? If so, how do you give them those little moments &#8216;aha&#8217;?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Those &#8216;aha&#8217; moments are absolutely necessary and of course, a difference between a story and a computer program is that you can change it and then it will do something. You can change a book with a [inaudible] of course but that&#8217;s really different from changing a program. I&#8217;m not like binary flipping to let&#8217;s do reading only. It&#8217;s a combination of the lesson that I gave to the teachers. In Scratch, you have sprites which are the elements of the game [inaudible] and a piano, for example. I make them create [inaudible] for one sprite and the other sprites will react to that. Then they see the reaction and then I tell them, &#8220;Now, go to the other sprite,&#8221; they&#8217;ve observed the behavior and then I give them a screenshot of the code and they had a little books from which they work and give them a screenshot of the code and the other sprite and then I say, &#8220;What created that reaction?&#8221; I make the one sprite say something to the other and it&#8217;s a condition. It&#8217;s a letter-eating monster and if you give it the right letters, then it will be happy and if you give the wrong letters, then it will not be happy. It will say, &#8220;Yuck, I didn&#8217;t like these letters,&#8221; and then there&#8217;s the difference between consonants and vowels. This is what they practice. It&#8217;s again, in the language setting. Then they switch to the other sprites and then they observe the conditional and then of course, there&#8217;s a list of things, the vowels, and if I give it something from that list, it will say &#8216;yes&#8217; and otherwise, it will say &#8216;no&#8217;. It&#8217;s definitely a combination because it&#8217;s just reading, it might not have that &#8216;aha&#8217; clicking moment.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Although, Felienne I love what you were saying about reading because as you were describing it, it made me think back on when I first started to get interested in programming and it was because I started to see actual programs and realized that I could understand the words. I could see what it was doing and that made me actually want to change it and see what else I could make it do. I think that this concept of looking at something from that perspective is probably something that should be done more.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I believe that there is another engineer. She makes this product called GoldieBlox and she talked about a similar thing where she made it a story that she wanted to focus on girls and learning how to be more comfortable with engineering. By giving them a story, they felt more engrossed and engaged to what they were doing as opposed to like giving them just blocks and seeing what they could build.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and this is definitely about inclusiveness in general but also about gender inclusiveness because most of the programming is really focused on building which just might not be too excited for all of the kids but only for some kids. I have this story where I come into a classroom and I have these written assignments on paper. I give it to kids and some of the kids, they take the assignments and they fill it to perfection. Those will be good programmers but other kids, they look at the assignments, they look at Scratch and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Oh, if I click blocks, I can figure out what it means,&#8221; and they throw away the assignments and they want to play in their own space. Those kids will be good programmers as well and we need to make sure in less material that we cater to both of those types of kids.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So they&#8217;ll be good programmers. There&#8217;s this identity thing in I am a programmer. I am not a programmer. The teachers are like, &#8220;I am not a programmer.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Which you&#8217;ll know is why I say, I write software rather than I am a programmer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I love that ultravision. I never really thought about it. It&#8217;s so true and this also has to do with its negative too. It&#8217;s also, you do PHP, therefore you are not a real programmer or you do spreadsheet, and therefore you&#8217;re not a real programmer. But it&#8217;s an in crowd and an outsider group. Even people that are professional programmers in BASIC program, there are other people that will say, &#8220;You’re not a programmer.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a whole other episode.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. There&#8217;s this whole thing about real programmer not a real programmer but if you rephrase it to, &#8220;I write software,&#8221; then nobody can tell you, &#8220;Oh, you don&#8217;t write real software.&#8221; It&#8217;s like, &#8220;It runs on a computer, it does the software.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I hadn&#8217;t thought of it that way. That&#8217;s really cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So just like every kid can write stories, kid can create programs or every person and like you said, if we start as children, they have it absorbed that you can&#8217;t do this yet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, if you phrase it like that, I love the analogy because all kids, for examples they&#8217;re all drawers. They all like to draw. They don&#8217;t care if they can never be a professional. They still like it. The same with writing, of course. They all write these crazy adventures. It&#8217;s not so tied to their identity. No one truly says to a seven-year old, &#8220;You can never be a writer,&#8221; but I think there are people who say to seven-year old, &#8220;You can never be a programmer because you suck at math.&#8221; I like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like this idea because it includes more people and it avoids this stigmatization of are you a programmer or are you good at math. But it does draw a new boundary that I think is interesting, which is what do we define in software and you do a lot of work. I was fascinated to read some of your work on spreadsheets and you talk about refactoring spreadsheets, testing spreadsheets, inventing duplication in spreadsheets, all sorts of things that I think of in my sort of way as being with stuff that programmers do. For me, it sounds like the argument that you would make is that spreadsheets are software and should be included. Could you maybe tell me if I&#8217;m right and expand on that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I totally agree and always say that&#8217;s because it&#8217;s such a good programming system that people don&#8217;t even realize their programming. They&#8217;re making the machine do their bidding but without the stigma, I think with all the power of Excel spreadsheets has, I think that the biggest power is that people don&#8217;t see it as programming, as scary, as threatening. I&#8217;ve talked to people in investment banks that built an entire risk dashboard on their company &#8212; this investment bank was running on their spreadsheet. They said, &#8220;Wow, that&#8217;s so cool. You’re like a programmer.&#8221; No, I&#8217;m not a programmer. This little thing, it&#8217;s just a simple model. I&#8217;m not a programmer so I think that makes it really strong and of course, it has some features that make it real programming. It&#8217;s even a functional program because a spreadsheet formula has no side effects. It can only take on auto formula and produce results.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I would even say that spreadsheets are the greatest programming system that has ever existed in the history of programming. They found that that it&#8217;s functional. It’s also reactive because the cells react to each other and has lots of hip programming features that are overlooked sometimes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am so happy right now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Same.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You mentioned that you built an IDE for spreadsheet. It is part of the reason that people are like, &#8220;Oh, Excels are terrible because it&#8217;s not maintainable,&#8221; and is it a tooling problem?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s a two-fold problem. It’s definitely a tooling problem and if you go back to what software was in the 60s and in the 70s, then it was also maintainable [inaudible] because we didn&#8217;t have tools and we didn&#8217;t have an understanding. In the beginning of programming, everyone was an end-user programmer. There were no professional programmers. People use a tool to do their job &#8212; being a scientist mainly &#8212; so no one thought about what happens if this program lives for 10 years what happens if someone else has to maintain it. This was not our problem so people didn&#8217;t think about it, that&#8217;s reason A and B, there were no tools. Of course, these two things have to do with each other because if you don&#8217;t see it as a problem, there will be no tools.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think spreadsheets are somehow is in similar situation where people don&#8217;t see them as software. They don&#8217;t see it as long-lived artifacts. They don&#8217;t go looking for maintenance solutions, either in a tool or in, of course you have guidelines as well like they&#8217;ll make your formula too long or don&#8217;t duplicate stuff all over the place but people don&#8217;t go looking for them because they don&#8217;t feel they&#8217;re programming.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you think it might be a factor that the actual programming in spreadsheets is mostly hidden? You see the results, the values but the formula are hidden away until you do and find them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s very interesting. If this is contributing to the fact that people see it as easy but it might also be contributing to the fact that it&#8217;s easy to make a mess out of things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If we can go back to that tooling question, you mentioned that because people don&#8217;t think of a spreadsheet as programming, they don&#8217;t look for tools, I have a sort of the opposite perspective which is I&#8217;m coming to a spreadsheet from a background as a professional software developer. I rely on tests and test driven development and I feel like I don&#8217;t want to put too much logic into a spreadsheet because I don&#8217;t have the mental model or the tools I would need to test drive a spreadsheet. Is there anything like that out there?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We actually worked on that ourselves a little bit but one of the things that people do even people that don&#8217;t come from software writing backgrounds is they use spreadsheet formulas to write tests because there is no [inaudible] unit for spreadsheets but of course, there are formulas. What we observe people do is write formulas like, &#8220;If A1 is 5 then error, else okay.&#8221; That&#8217;s formulas and then sometimes in important spreadsheets, there will be a worksheet called checks, in which all these formulas are grouped together and people looked at them, &#8220;Okay, okay, okay, okay,&#8221; and if everything is okay, then this model can be sent out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We worked on a tool called Expector that can harvest those test formulas and put them into a test suite where it was just a hidden worksheet and spreadsheet and then based on those, you can run those tests and it even shows you covered and uncovered cells. Looking at behavior that people already shows to a certain extent, about 10% spreadsheets we found in a field has those type of test formulas and then using that into a testing system because you want to avoid overloading people that aren&#8217;t really ready for the type of thinking with ideas from a totally different field. We really wanted to avoid giving them Visual Studio but make tools, build on what they do rather than just bringing in stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s really cool. Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You called spreadsheets the best programming system. It sounds like your qualification for the best programming system is the most people can program in it, can make the computer do their bidding.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And by most people, you mean a pretty broad range. Do you think everybody should be familiar enough with programming to be able to use it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, everyone is many people. I mean, yes in the sense that we also want everyone to be able to read and write. There’s no possible because some people can all do it but still in education, we want to focus on getting most people to be able to read and write. In that sense, yes everyone.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess, we try to make everyone able to read and write but we don&#8217;t require everyone to do calculus. Maybe programming is somewhere in that scale.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, absolutely. Also, reading and writing of course that we want everyone to learn at a basic level, not everyone needs to be able to author a novel and some people don&#8217;t, for different reasons. That’s where I was going with that. Some people don&#8217;t have the creativity. Other people don&#8217;t have the stamina, other people might not have the spelling skills or marketing skills or do social skills to find a publisher. For all of these reasons, not everyone is a novel writer but still we want a level up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That maybe kind of like more people can read than can write something that someone else would want to read. If we can start with the reading of programs. Maybe the basic skill is being able to read a program enough, to figure out how to interact with it and get it to respond positively.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes and there were different reasons why I think it&#8217;s really important for kids to program. One of the reasons is what you just touched upon. I would like people to be able to read a program and have some sense of what is going on. If we&#8217;re talking about the firmware of your pacemaker or systems that you&#8217;re really depending on or a website that you&#8217;re going to fool-heartedly may submit personal information to, we would like more people than now to be able if they really wanted to, to understand what is going on.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">Likewise, if you want to read up about a disease someone in your family has. You can read a scientific paper about the disease even though it&#8217;s hard but sometimes it&#8217;s really important and you want to, at least have the opportunity to dig into something if it&#8217;s super important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. One time, I was trying to do something on my router at home and the instructions on the website would like, &#8220;Push this button,&#8221; and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;That button grayed out,&#8221; and it was totally buggy and it wouldn&#8217;t un-gray the button. I&#8217;ve looked at the source code for the page and I was like, &#8220;If I were able to push that button, it would do this,&#8221; so I bring that on the console and it totally worked.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was exactly the kind of thing that doesn&#8217;t require a professional programmer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. I want more people to have that level of, &#8220;I know more or less, what&#8217;s in here and if I need it, I can figure it out.&#8221; What you&#8217;re saying is exactly right. You don&#8217;t need to be able to write a see-around system or source code for nuclear power plants. You don&#8217;t have to have the level of a professional developer to do something like that, to look into a little bit of source code and at least, understand what it&#8217;s doing there and that is if needed. Those are different skill levels. I think they really relate to writing. You don&#8217;t need to be novel author to be able to read a relatively difficult newspaper article about a topic that you are interested in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Felienne, it sounds like you’re talking about digital literacy, the ability to just be able to reason about your digital environment because you know something about the programming language. Is that right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, definitely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It kind of reminds me, I was having a session with someone a long time ago about whether or not people should learn how to program and there&#8217;s always a lot of opinions about whether everybody should and everybody shouldn&#8217;t. What you&#8217;re saying reminds me of when people used to talk about learning to read and write like way back in, I think the enlightenment period because everybody didn&#8217;t read. It wasn&#8217;t required. You didn&#8217;t have to. It wasn&#8217;t necessary for your job.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A lot of people who were able to read or write were the clergy or aristocrats and it was kind of seen as this highfalutin thing that only somebody who has the time would do and it feel like that&#8217;s what&#8217;s going on right now where programming and being a software developer and being able to read or write software is seen as a luxury. You don&#8217;t have to have it. There’s other people who do that for you. Then when people used to sit around and discus, whether they should learn how to read and write, I think what they were really trying to get at is reading and writing is going to be something that becomes the bedrock of our society so that in the future, if you can&#8217;t read and write, are you going to be at such a disadvantage that you can&#8217;t participate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In which case, they were right. In a lot of societies today. If you can&#8217;t read and write, you can&#8217;t do things like drive down the street or go to the grocery store or pay your bills. Do you think that with programming that it&#8217;s going to be like that in the future where if you can&#8217;t look at a program and be able to, at least kind of understand what&#8217;s going on, it&#8217;s going to inhibit your ability to fully participate?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes and also, this is where our brain, my Dutch liberal socialist agenda because what you&#8217;re saying about the time where not everyone could read and write, that was also of course greatly about power. Not everyone could write so we only heard the perspective of some people. If you look at history from the Roman Age, you see the history of people that couldn&#8217;t write and not everyone could read so not everyone can fully participate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I feel somehow, we&#8217;re also in that situation for programming. We don&#8217;t see their programs. We don&#8217;t see what many, many people could who create because programming is only for white boys, basically. This democratization of writing has of course, also may possible to hear different voices. Maybe somewhat towards the extreme because you have to at their end, you need to listen to many people that maybe rather that they couldn&#8217;t write. But it&#8217;s also given us the ability to many, many stories that would have otherwise be hidden to us. I am totally looking forward to living in a world where we will see more programs for more diverse people in [inaudible], really.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In the chat, Sam asked, &#8220;What&#8217;s the programming equivalent of a public library?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting and someone says it&#8217;s open source &#8212; non-toxic open source.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Felienne, You mentioned earlier that there are some canonical programs that people can read. Do those exist on your Scratch profile or something?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like thinking about this. They don&#8217;t exist. They should exist. There are some canonical stories like lovers want to get together but something is blocking that and then it ends well or lovers want to get together and something is blocking them but they overcome it or someone goes on a quest to find something. It takes really long, they eventually get it. These are stories that kids, for example will apply in their writing. Those simple stories that if you go trying to be or in a public library, it would be like, &#8220;Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.&#8221; Many of them are like that. What would be the list of canonical programs that kids could apply in their learning? I don&#8217;t know but now I want to still talking with you and think about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I can tell you it&#8217;s not quicksort and it&#8217;s definitely not quicksort on a whiteboard.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s not reversing a string. It’s not a [inaudible]. It’s not of those things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that the question actually goes deeper than just what&#8217;s the code that you can read because a public library offers a lot more benefit than just being a place where there are books. You know, it&#8217;s a free, open, mostly safe space that&#8217;s heated in the winter and cold in the summer. It’s available to everyone. I think beyond just having a bunch of books that you can read, if we&#8217;re going to talk about what would be the software equivalent, we have to talk about what are all of the values that a public library provides.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, like a community and adult supervision or adult guidance where a librarian can know you after a while and suggest you books and you can meet people and also like reading. Those are all interesting functions. Absolutely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And also curation. There’s a lot of making sure that you have this other right things like the basics available.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Especially for kid’s books. I don&#8217;t know if this exists in the US but probably for kid’s books in the Netherlands, you have levels so they have stickers on them with ABC which tells you more or less what level it is so as a kid, you can find something that fits your reading level and then you know you&#8217;re advancing. This is also important of course.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you think of open source as a public library, some of the roles could fail, you would go on it and then where would you start. If you&#8217;re a small kid, you just go to Age-5 section and then there are books without letters because you can&#8217;t read yet. It’s still for you. It feels like for you. It has pictures that make you feel in your place.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m going to jump on your bandwagon here and point out that public libraries are one of the most successful socialist programs ever introduced into the United States.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s probably true.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But they also have a really long history of protecting information too, of being at a safe place for controversial things or things that everybody doesn&#8217;t necessarily agree with but being protective because it has value.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And that&#8217;s been the function largely of librarians so I wonder if instead of asking what&#8217;s the programming equivalent of a library, maybe what I should have asked is what&#8217;s the programming equivalent of a librarian.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, a librarian. Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because librarians are awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe we can get a librarian on to get their thoughts on that because from the ones that I know, they have lots of really good thoughts about all sorts of things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But doesn&#8217;t that kind of already exists because doesn&#8217;t a lot of our theories about information come from library science?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I don&#8217;t know anybody who&#8217;s a programmer that has a background of library science.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know a couple and they are the best. I love programmers who used to be librarians.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, because they&#8217;re thinking about knowledge management and how you group information. It’s a different way of looking at it than just, &#8220;How do I make it awesome? How do I make it best?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and also I know, at least in the Netherlands that libraries are searching for their place in the changing world. Some of the libraries here are hosting [inaudible], for example on Saturdays to get kids into programming because they see that&#8217;s what kids also need. Somehow maybe they are reaching out to the programming world but we&#8217;re not really finding each other or lost.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or maybe it&#8217;s because of what you brought up earlier about this idea of what is a programmer, what is programming and they&#8217;re being such a big distinction between what some people believe of real program is versus what is not a real program.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. As programmers, we tend to focus on tools and technology, whereas I think perhaps there&#8217;s a lot more value to be had in thinking about people and communication.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, this is very true. I do remember someone brought up math and I think that&#8217;s one of the reasons that we see it because we&#8217;ve all framed programming as technical and by nature almost, technical professions are about technical skills and not so much, even though also they should be more about people skills but they&#8217;re not. By calling it software engineering, is that really a good frame because that engineering, that technical space is not really about people. Program construction or a programming as more literary activity might also bring a different frame about how we interact with each other.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things I wanted to mention, to bring out my smallest soapbox is that there&#8217;s this idea that I&#8217;ve seen going around in programming communities that STEM education is superior to other education or obsoletes other forms of education, especially with liberal arts. I can&#8217;t stand that idea because &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, just this week, they tweeted something like, &#8220;If you put a STEM major in writing class, they would get an A. but the other way around, the liberal arts students couldn&#8217;t do anything in our field.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I may have responded to that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My experience is that so many of the skills that make me a relatively decent programmer have nothing to do with the syntax of programs or data structures or algorithms. It has to do with forming mental models of systems and reading comprehension even and giving and receiving criticism. All sorts of things that you don&#8217;t get so much as the focus of a computer science education but you do get it as part of the focus of a liberal arts education.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, totally. If I see my students writing at an engineering school, they could use so much more practice in writing, not just the spelling and the grammar but writing as crafting a story around something they encounter. I always say to kids that I worked with, &#8220;Whatever you will practice, you will get better at.&#8221; You might not be a top sports player in soccer but if you practice it, you will advance to a certain extent.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If our students, they don&#8217;t practice writing heartily in any of their courses, it&#8217;s always an afterthought. It’s always in a course about taking oriented programming or five study credits, one credit will be devoted at presentation then they get one lecture about it. That’s never a thing that really deliberately practice so then probably the reverse of my statement and it&#8217;s also true if you don&#8217;t practice something, you will not get better at it. If we don&#8217;t practice these type of skills, then our students won&#8217;t get better at it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Speaking of deliberate practice, I look into you before the show that you have ideas around things that we can do to get better at programming other than programming.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. Last week, I was in Norway at a conference called BoosterConf. It was super awesome conference that I really like so you should all go there next year. It was great. They let me do a code and poetry workshop, which was awesome. What I did there is I had people create poems with source code by looking at the ingredients that poems normally have and finding them the algorithms. It sounds super weird.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For example, one of the exercises that was in there is I had people look at the line of code and count the syllables. How many syllables does &#8216;x is five&#8217; had? This seems the easiest question ever. If you really think about it, how do you pronounce the equal signs in your brain? Is that &#8216;x equals five&#8217;? Or is it &#8216;x is five&#8217;? Or maybe it&#8217;s &#8216;x becomes five&#8217;? Or &#8216;x stores five&#8217;?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> What does it even mean that the signed statements and this really open the minds of many people in my course and are like, &#8220;Oh, wow. I never really thought about how the code feels in my brain and how I read it out loud.&#8221; Some people really took it through so for example, they said if I&#8217;m defining a function, then it&#8217;s &#8216;f takes x&#8217;, for example as the integer x. But if it&#8217;s a function call, then it&#8217;s &#8216;f of x&#8217;. Even the context could define pronunciation of symbols and that was a simple exercise that&#8217;s why the first things you would do if you would teach someone creative writing is read it aloud to yourself and see how it feels. This is something we never do in source code so I have lots of fun.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In your example, Felienne actually makes me think that your earlier theory that maybe software is more related to writing than we originally thought and language makes a lot of sense because it kind of reminds me of the types of rules that you have in the language like English where it&#8217;s I before E except after C because there&#8217;s always conditions with which you have to think about what you&#8217;re doing. It’s not just a blanket one explanation for how something as it always has to be interpreted.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This ties in a little bit to what we&#8217;re talking about before with who are real programmers, what are real programs, why isn&#8217;t an Excel spreadsheet considered a program and I think a lot of it has to do with programmers have a very narrow view of what constitutes a program &#8212; it&#8217;s text in a file but not any text, not prose, not poetry. It’s text in a file with a very specific syntax and format and anything else, visual programming is mostly ignored. Spreadsheets aren&#8217;t considered to be programming, nothing else counts.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, also the assumption is to get better at it. You just have to do it a lot and this assumption goes really deep in our community. If you apply for jobs, people will look at your hobby Saturday projects. Not as a means of deliberate practice, as a means of building more stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I like what Jess is saying in the chat. I&#8217;m going to repeat it because she&#8217;s in an airport and her audio is a bit noisy. She says, &#8220;It&#8217;s like playing the piano. To get better at speed, you have to play well slowly. You have to study each sound,&#8221; and this is so much similar thing to programming where to get better at it, you have to look at it from different perspectives. You have to do different things. Sometimes you&#8217;re playing an entire piano piece. I really love the analogy, Jess.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But sometimes, also you&#8217;re just doing three notes repeated over and over again to some of the things. Of course, people in programming they do that with Katas that really nice, small deliberate exercises of practicing but we could totally use more of that. I think that only doing those wacky exercises like counting syllables in the line of code will also contribute to what the definition of programming is because some people started to make really crazy programs, of course for their own enjoyment. They totally said, &#8220;I made them do sorting algorithms just because there are a lot of them.&#8221; You can easily copy-paste the code from [inaudible] to get going on syllable counting. Some people stuck with that but there are people started to write things that made no sense which is really nice for your brain.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Katas come from martial arts. This idea that forced repetition of particular forms builds this muscle memory. It seems to me like a lot of the education in programming is being created by people who aren&#8217;t so much educators. A lot of it is programmers who are writing books on programming and not trained educators who are writing books on programming. It seems like a lot of the things we&#8217;re talking about are ideas around pedagogy that we know about in other fields like liberal arts and things, why don&#8217;t we have that so much coming in to programming education? Why are we slowing in Katas, for instance instead of something from liberal arts?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly. That’s a good question. I don&#8217;t know why other people are doing it but I can hypothesize about, for example a school teacher that would go to a conference about programming, how they would feel and be treated if they would say, &#8220;I have lots of programming education skills. Who wants to collaborate with me?&#8221; I don&#8217;t really think that we &#8212; of course I&#8217;m generalizing here and there are lots of great people in the programming community that I love. However, many people, like that tweet that we were talking about before, have such a huge disdain of all sorts of skills that aren&#8217;t labelled as technical that those types of collaboration&#8217;s are pretty hard.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, we have this arrogance and this myopia in the field that the things that we know we are really good at are the only things that matter and if you&#8217;re not exactly the same things, in exactly the same way that I am, then well I&#8217;m sorry but you&#8217;re just not a real programmer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly. It’s interesting. I never really realized or focalized the fact that Katas come from martial arts which is interesting because they could also have gone from writing education because they have to be similar. If you&#8217;re learning about spelling, the only way to learn about spelling is practicing. The teacher reads 25 words and you write then and we do that every week. This is, of course similar to those types deliberate practice that memory building is also alike too but they didn&#8217;t really come from that area because for all we think, martial arts is cool and liberal arts is weak.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it might have something to do with this idea of programming as being mystical, magical and only certain people have the ability. It’s a similar thing with martial arts. If you don&#8217;t know martial arts and you see somebody perform any type of martial arts, you are amazed because it seems inhuman. Jessica saying in chat, we think similar things about music and it&#8217;s also true that if you see a professional musician, especially someone who&#8217;s playing instrument perform, you are usually amazed because it seems like something you couldn&#8217;t do. Whereas a lot of things that we think of little arts like the ability to read and comprehend critical thinking, they&#8217;re not things that when you see it happening looks like, &#8220;I could never do that,&#8221; even though you&#8217;re not actually understanding all the complexity that might go into it or even understanding the difference between your skill and their skill because it&#8217;s not so easy to just look at it and see the difference. I think that might be contributing to why there&#8217;s less respect for it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It has to do with whether or not we believe, you need an innate ability to do it or rather that something you can train, which by the way is there&#8217;s lots of research that shows that the more people believe innate ability is needed for skill, the less women will participate in the field.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There is also of this thing that I think happens once you get the skills of a programmer. We seemed to want to create this mystique or mysticism around them to prevent them from being understood by others. One of the tropes that I&#8217;ve seen in programming is this idea of the master programmer has master with these unintelligible [inaudible] that are supposed to be deep wisdom or really just don&#8217;t make any sense to anyone, as a way of sort of protecting that knowledge.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Something you just said that made me think about medicine. You were saying that the more than a skill seems to be needed, the less that women will participate. Is that what you said?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No. I said, the more people believe that a skill is innate, that you need to be born with the right genes to do it, the more that people believe that, the less women participate in field. This is very true, for example for mathematics, we all as a society believe and continue to repeat the fact that if you&#8217;re not good at math, you&#8217;ll never be good at it. You have to have the right brain. I don&#8217;t know if your language has that or my language even has a thing. It’s called the [inaudible]. If people are really smart in math, people will say, &#8220;He really has a [inaudible] in his brain,&#8221; like physically, your brain will be different if you&#8217;re really good at math. This is something people say.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> More people believe that &#8212; this is a known fact &#8212; the last women who participate because they think, &#8220;Oh, I don&#8217;t have it so I&#8217;ll go do something else.&#8221; They don&#8217;t think, &#8220;Oh, if I practice a little then I will get better.&#8221; This is what I tell my kids in my schools all the time, if you practice and think, you will get better and that&#8217;s the truth. I want them to remember and not if you don&#8217;t have it by age eight, never mind. This also, of course is something that really professed in programming because we have these stories about, &#8220;I told myself about programming when I was 10 because I&#8217;m so smart.&#8221; Or you&#8217;re 17, you don&#8217;t do it yet, you&#8217;re lost for life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It seems to me &#8212; correct me if I&#8217;m wrong &#8212; the jargon that I&#8217;ve heard related to this is this idea of a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset where students, if they have taught that there is a growth mindset which is that they can improve by practicing then they will, in fact improve by practicing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, those things are definitely related to that innate ability type of thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There is a last thing about medicine which may not exactly fit now is because a lot of social scientists they study the medicalization of childbirth, basically meaning that it used to be that when you had children, there were midwives and that was like a woman&#8217;s thing and there was usually a bunch of women who helped to have a baby. Then, at least in Western societies, it starts to become medicalized in the sense that you need a doctor and the doctors are usually male. The doctors will tell you how to have a baby, how to nourish your child and it started to become this thing that you didn&#8217;t have any more it wasn&#8217;t an innate thing that you could have anymore so new woman, you have to have another professional help or else you were being primitive or savage.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It sounds similar to this evolution of programming and how people think about programming because from what I understand, it used to be that a lot of women participated in software engineering or writing because it was seen as more administrative and that the real innovation was going to come from actually building the devices and building the hardware, which was used in more male dominated. But then over time, when you start to see the power of what you can do you with software and not just hardware, it became this professional thing that you needed to have certain abilities for and then the women slowly were phased out of it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It seemed like a very similar things so it&#8217;s interesting that there&#8217;s this innate thing going on with something like mathematics where you have it. Because it also feels like, if you look at history, it&#8217;s a thing that we could change. We could lose the ability for it to be just because you have it innately needing something.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I never consider that but yes, that&#8217;s very true that sometimes, some phase starts out at a very male dominated profession and it can turn into a female dominated profession as well so the opposite can also happen. For example, with school teachers &#8212; this really happened in the Netherlands probably where you live with as well &#8212; when our parents went to school, all the teachers were male. There were a little female teacher and then females to go over the field and [inaudible] and lost prestige as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I used to be told in school by a male teacher, in an elementary school that was also in city council. That was the level of respect that teachers would have that they could be in a teacher and in city council at the same time. I think that totally changed due to more females participating in the job so this happens two ways: more man take over and it&#8217;s seen as more serious and reversed practice was shit. But also more women take over and then it loses respect and appeal.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is this why people in the program community fight against what is real programming because we can&#8217;t let too many people in?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t know why people feel the need to fight whatever you&#8217;re programming is. I&#8217;m not a psychologist. I asked them hypothesis but I don&#8217;t really know. I don&#8217;t feel qualified to speak about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, neither do we. We just speculate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s of course this power that I was talking about before that we programmers control the world in a sense. If you look at what happened with US elections, with hacking and filter bubble, we programmers do have some sort of control over the world that comes with some respect and also that respect is growing. You’re choose to be nerdy and now we&#8217;re getting more respect maybe people don&#8217;t want to their super profession to be diluted, maybe.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think it has something to do with that. I think it&#8217;s also not just programmers. If you look at [inaudible], they do something similar and doctors will do something similar. If you talk to people on Wall Street, they are very sure that their job is necessary. I&#8217;m not so sure because money is imaginary but I think it&#8217;s a professional thing where you have to do this. That’s like I have to all these hard things to get to this job so I&#8217;m not going to just make it easy for you to do, have those things and be able to do what I do. That’s not fair.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s actually a double whammy. It’s both that. It’s both which school did you go to, what&#8217;s your training and it&#8217;s also a form of essentialism which is either you&#8217;re born to be a programmer or you&#8217;re not. I think we get hit from both angles.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, but since we&#8217;re like all benevolent and we actually do want other people to be able to write programs and use them, what can we do to help? What can we do to do a little piece of what you do and spread the knowledge.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I gave a talk at Booster Conference last week and I ended that with what I wanted to give to people in the audience, if people tell you they&#8217;re programmers, you have to believe them. If people say they&#8217;re programming, they probably are, which I think is one of the things that we could start with. If you&#8217;re at a conference and someone says, &#8220;I&#8217;m a programmer,&#8221; and [inaudible], if only they&#8217;re just starting or they only know PHP, they&#8217;re still programmers. I think that&#8217;s a small thing that we can all do to incorporate more people into programming.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Don’t say, &#8220;Oh, you&#8217;re just a frontender,&#8221; or, &#8220;You&#8217;re just a designer.&#8221; If you try to pay attention to those small things and I will say that I will admit that I&#8217;ve been guilty of thinking and sometimes even seeing those things as well because we all like to feel powerful and better than other people. This happens if you think, &#8220;Oh, you&#8217;re just this,&#8221; or, &#8220;You don&#8217;t really, you don&#8217;t seriously.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If I could give the listeners one thing to ponder on, maybe it&#8217;s really try to limit that type of belittling or also surprise. People say to me all the time, &#8220;You&#8217;re really a programmer? You’re really a professor in software engineering?&#8221; This is how we continue the culture.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was a perfect transition into the way we usually like to end our show, which is to do reflections or calls to action. It sounds like you actually just did both but is there anything else that you would like to add as part of that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe one thing because there are probably listeners &#8212; if they listen to the show for this long maybe our listeners that are also doing programming education. If they are teaching at their local school or maybe even they&#8217;re teaching their kids, try not to contaminate their brains with what do you think programming is. If kids want to use programming to make a song or a story or an artwork, those things are fine too. Don’t push them too much to building useful stuff because many of the things kids are doing are practicing and not about being good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If your kid is drawing, you&#8217;re not going to say, &#8220;Let&#8217;s make something that could hang in the museum.&#8221; Sometimes, I see educators and parents pushing too much the profession of programming onto their kids and not just letting them play with stuff in a clearly playful way. This is sometimes really well-meant to like, &#8220;I want my kid to know programming because it&#8217;s useful,&#8221; but I want people more to think of it like you want your kids to program because it&#8217;s not a form of self-expression.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a ton of takeaways from this episode and one of them is [inaudible] is the hard part of programming. One of them is forming mental models of systems and Felienne talk a lot about is reading programming and reading comprehension, just understanding programs. I&#8217;m happy with this because it places an exclusive value on reading through the code and say a new service that I haven&#8217;t modified before, new to me and I&#8217;m forming a model of it. I&#8217;ve also noticed that if informing that model, I could draw a picture. People on the team get super happy so I&#8217;m going to do that more and feel better about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, I agree.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My reflection is actually kind of similar to what you just said, Jessica which is thinking about programming as in thinking about writing and thinking about it as language more so than about building blocks, which when you were talking about that Felienne, it just made a lot of sense to me and it makes it easier for me to think about tackling stuff that might be harder because I feel really confident in my ability to read and understand and I don&#8217;t always know how to build everything I want to build. I think that&#8217;s really useful advice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A few times in this episode, we&#8217;ve talked about the challenge of convincing people that they can program when it involves math. There are two ends that you can approach that from and we spend some time on. One of them to point out that there is a lot of programming that doesn&#8217;t need to involve that and I&#8217;d like to take a whack at the other end of the stick, which is that some programming does involve math but it&#8217;s not for the most part the math that you hated from high school.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The reason you hated that math in high school is that math education in our schools and around the world is fundamentally broken and bad and teaches people that math is awful and it is not so. What I would like to recommend is a book by Paul Lockhart called A Mathematician&#8217;s Lament, which describes how it&#8217;s broken, what we can do to fix it and describes how interesting and fun math can actually be. It’s not about rote memorization and rote application of rules. It’s intuitive, it&#8217;s created, it&#8217;s even an artistic pursuit. I would recommend that book to anyone who is daunted by this idea that they have to learn math and carries the baggage from awful Algebra 2 with them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I didn&#8217;t know that. Thanks for the suggestions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was originally a 25-page essay but it was expanded into a full book. The essay is free but the book is on Amazon.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Throughout this episode, I&#8217;ve been thinking just in the back of my head about this idea of code literacy or code fluency, which reminds me of this idea that I first ran across from Jim Shore and Diana Larsen and their work on what they call Agile Fluency, which as I understand it, came out of a group here in Portland called Language Hunters that they have this model of having levels of fluency and what really was important for me was this idea that you can be fluent at a very low level of proficiency and still be fluent.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They define fluency as what you can say without really having to think about it. That really to me is a useful reminder that we don&#8217;t have to look down on somebody because they&#8217;re not fluent at a high level of proficiency. We can encourage people to become fluent at whatever level they are at and that&#8217;s still really useful for people. That’s it for me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Felienne, for coming on this show today and thank you everybody for listening. We’ll see you next week.</span></p>
</div>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome everybody to Episode 24 of &#8216;The Netherlands Invented Gay Marriage, So We Should Be Scared of Them Now!&#8217; My name is Astrid.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, I&#8217;m scared now too. Hi, everybody this is Sam and I&#8217;m pretty sure that last time I was here it was Greater Than Code but let&#8217;s just go with it. Joining us again on the show is Rein.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello, everyone and welcome to the show, Jess.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you Rein and I&#8217;m Jessica and I&#8217;m super excited that today we have a special guest, Felienne.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, everyone. I&#8217;m Felienne.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Felienne is assistant professor at Delft University of Technology where she researches programming for everyone. She strongly believes that everyone can be a programmer but currently, not everyone has access to the right tools and educational materials. She has therefore developed tools to help people program in Excel and Scratch lessons for kids.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Today, 10,000 kids follow her [inaudible] on Scratch. Felienne also spread for love of programming outside of work hours. She teaches a bunch of kids programming each Saturday, organizes the Joy of Coding Conference in Rotterdam and speaking this year. She&#8217;s a host on SE Radio and Friends of RoboCup Junior Competition for Kids in the Netherlands. She loves running, knitting and card games. Felienne, welcome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks. I&#8217;m super excited to be on the show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Felienne, one of the ways that we like to get started is with your origin stories so tell us all about you and what your superpowers are.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My superpower is seeing programming where older people don&#8217;t see programming. My entire PhD dissertation was about programming in spreadsheets and usually, people don&#8217;t see programming as also including spreadsheets but I did and I thought people in spreadsheet, they put in secret codes and then some calculation happens. That&#8217;s totally [inaudible] of programming but where we programmers are used to having IDE with features like testing and debugging and analyzing, I saw people in spreadsheets lacking those type of IDE support like features.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> My entire PhD dissertation was about the summary it would be building an IDE for spreadsheets. Then after that, I moved along to working on programming education and also I want to expand the horizon of what programming could mean to children.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is a wonderful superpower. During the week, do you teach programming to supposed adults?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. As my university job as a professor, we have half of our time, we teach university students and the other half of the time we do scientific research. At the university, I teach they call themselves grownups and also I teach programming course for the non-computer science students. All of the students in my school can pick my course as an elective and these are architecture students, civil engineering students, aerospace engineering students so not people that necessarily want to be programmers but they will be programming, of course in their job. They will do some modelings, simulation or analysis and I teach them programming in my elective.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That sounds really fascinating. Do you find that people from those other backgrounds bring different perspectives that help them in their programming?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a really good question. At least they bring very interesting datasets and problems. For my course, as an end assignment, the assignment is just show me you learn something which the students, they love and hate it, of course. I encourage them to find dataset or problem from their own domain and apply programming to that so they will do, for example on data analysis, they sampled from &#8212; literally what happened to one of my students &#8212; a river in Africa and used his data analysis skills in Python to make a stronger analysis of that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m not sure if they bring a different perspective but they definitely bring really interesting problems and datasets to my course. Looking at these end report, for me is super interesting because I learned about a broadness of them and the piece is fresh for me as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Have you noticed differences between teaching kids how to program and teaching adults how to program?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It depends on the type of adults. I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s a real big difference between kids and university-age students because they&#8217;re still quite open-minded and eager to learn and they&#8217;re not scared of learning. But today, I gave a programming course to elementary school teachers &#8212; those are also adults of course &#8212; and that is different because these adults have already settled in their brain the idea that they cannot do programming. They&#8217;re like, &#8220;I went to teacher&#8217;s school. I will never learn programming. I&#8217;m unable to do this,&#8221; and I give them lecture material that I use on eight, nine, ten-year olds. It&#8217;s really not hard in an abstract sense. If you could measure it, it&#8217;s not hard. But they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Oh, my God. It&#8217;s programming.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Some type of adults, it&#8217;s not that they&#8217;re not smart. I&#8217;m sure they&#8217;re super smart people and they would be able to do it and I think they have convinced themselves but I could also say society has done a great job at convincing them that they can never be programmers and that stick of course.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I see a lot of learned helplessness when I talk to people who are not already &#8216;in tech&#8217; just even to the point where when I talk to people and I introduce myself and they say, &#8220;What do you do?&#8221; and I say, &#8220;I write software.&#8221; I&#8217;ve learned to leave it at that because most people will go, &#8220;Oh,&#8221; and move on to other topics because they don&#8217;t even feel like they have any handle on it, which is kind of sad.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This might have to do, of course also with the small definition that people see programming that they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Oh, programming. That&#8217;s apps and websites,&#8221; and it&#8217;s hard for them to relate because they don&#8217;t really know programming could mean to them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have noticed that it seems like because people associate programming with math and a lot of people have a lot of really negative experiences with math and they just automatically say, &#8220;Oh no. No, no, no. I can&#8217;t do that. It&#8217;s just like a lot of abstract math and I don&#8217;t even like math so I can&#8217;t program at all.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is so true. What we&#8217;re actually doing with teachers &#8212; I&#8217;m so happy you brought this. I&#8217;m now trying to teach programming in the context of language class so in my case, Dutch classes instead of math classes. I tried to focus on exercises that teachers and kids normally would do in the scope of reading. For example, storytelling or practicing with words because, of course a lot about programming is also reading.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you have to read a Scratch program, you are doing letter and word comprehension of course, because you&#8217;re reading the syntax. Instead of focusing on building, having the kids drag the blocks and creating a program, I&#8217;m more focused on reading and deconstructions so I&#8217;m giving them a program. They have to read and try to understand what it means by clicking the blocks and I found that connection to reading, rather than to mathematics is a good way to convince teachers that it&#8217;s useful and also to drag it to a space where teachers feel really comfortable. This emphasis on reading and storytelling can help people feel less scared because usually, the teachers are less scared of language than they are of math.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Starting with reading programs, that’s a really good idea. [Inaudible], we do anyway.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I have a degree in computer science and I do PhD in software engineering but I&#8217;m not reading books for elementary school teacher about how we teach language and language [inaudible] because there are so many good things in there that we can use in programming education that we haven&#8217;t thought about. One of the assumptions that we all have about programming is that creating a program will teach you how to create programs well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you think about reading, before kids start writing stories, if they&#8217;re seven or eight maybe they write their first stories, they&#8217;ve already been exposed to hearing stories for four or five years because their parents will read to them, they watched movies. Before we can even seriously think about teaching kids storytelling skills, we share stories with them. Maybe we can take some lessons from them into programming where we want to encourage kids to read programs first, what do you think programs are and can do and what are some canonical programs that make sense and only then starts focusing on construction. That&#8217;s one of the things that&#8217;s really interesting to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It occurs to me that a lot of what I&#8217;ve seen about teaching people programming is this idea that you have to get them hooked by giving them small empowering moments of control where they changed something and they see the computer response to what they said. Is that feasible in this approach that you&#8217;re talking about or do you just focus on reading? If so, how do you give them those little moments &#8216;aha&#8217;?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Those &#8216;aha&#8217; moments are absolutely necessary and of course, a difference between a story and a computer program is that you can change it and then it will do something. You can change a book with a [inaudible] of course but that&#8217;s really different from changing a program. I&#8217;m not like binary flipping to let&#8217;s do reading only. It&#8217;s a combination of the lesson that I gave to the teachers. In Scratch, you have sprites which are the elements of the game [inaudible] and a piano, for example. I make them create [inaudible] for one sprite and the other sprites will react to that. Then they see the reaction and then I tell them, &#8220;Now, go to the other sprite,&#8221; they&#8217;ve observed the behavior and then I give them a screenshot of the code and they had a little books from which they work and give them a screenshot of the code and the other sprite and then I say, &#8220;What created that reaction?&#8221; I make the one sprite say something to the other and it&#8217;s a condition. It&#8217;s a letter-eating monster and if you give it the right letters, then it will be happy and if you give the wrong letters, then it will not be happy. It will say, &#8220;Yuck, I didn&#8217;t like these letters,&#8221; and then there&#8217;s the difference between consonants and vowels. This is what they practice. It&#8217;s again, in the language setting. Then they switch to the other sprites and then they observe the conditional and then of course, there&#8217;s a list of things, the vowels, and if I give it something from that list, it will say &#8216;yes&#8217; and otherwise, it will say &#8216;no&#8217;. It&#8217;s definitely a combination because it&#8217;s just reading, it might not have that &#8216;aha&#8217; clicking moment.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Although, Felienne I love what you were saying about reading because as you were describing it, it made me think back on when I first started to get interested in programming and it was because I started to see actual programs and realized that I could understand the words. I could see what it was doing and that made me actually want to change it and see what else I could make it do. I think that this concept of looking at something from that perspective is probably something that should be done more.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I believe that there is another engineer. She makes this product called GoldieBlox and she talked about a similar thing where she made it a story that she wanted to focus on girls and learning how to be more comfortable with engineering. By giving them a story, they felt more engrossed and engaged to what they were doing as opposed to like giving them just blocks and seeing what they could build.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and this is definitely about inclusiveness in general but also about gender inclusiveness because most of the programming is really focused on building which just might not be too excited for all of the kids but only for some kids. I have this story where I come into a classroom and I have these written assignments on paper. I give it to kids and some of the kids, they take the assignments and they fill it to perfection. Those will be good programmers but other kids, they look at the assignments, they look at Scratch and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Oh, if I click blocks, I can figure out what it means,&#8221; and they throw away the assignments and they want to play in their own space. Those kids will be good programmers as well and we need to make sure in less material that we cater to both of those types of kids.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So they&#8217;ll be good programmers. There&#8217;s this identity thing in I am a programmer. I am not a programmer. The teachers are like, &#8220;I am not a programmer.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Which you&#8217;ll know is why I say, I write software rather than I am a programmer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I love that ultravision. I never really thought about it. It&#8217;s so true and this also has to do with its negative too. It&#8217;s also, you do PHP, therefore you are not a real programmer or you do spreadsheet, and therefore you&#8217;re not a real programmer. But it&#8217;s an in crowd and an outsider group. Even people that are professional programmers in BASIC program, there are other people that will say, &#8220;You’re not a programmer.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a whole other episode.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. There&#8217;s this whole thing about real programmer not a real programmer but if you rephrase it to, &#8220;I write software,&#8221; then nobody can tell you, &#8220;Oh, you don&#8217;t write real software.&#8221; It&#8217;s like, &#8220;It runs on a computer, it does the software.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I hadn&#8217;t thought of it that way. That&#8217;s really cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So just like every kid can write stories, kid can create programs or every person and like you said, if we start as children, they have it absorbed that you can&#8217;t do this yet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, if you phrase it like that, I love the analogy because all kids, for examples they&#8217;re all drawers. They all like to draw. They don&#8217;t care if they can never be a professional. They still like it. The same with writing, of course. They all write these crazy adventures. It&#8217;s not so tied to their identity. No one truly says to a seven-year old, &#8220;You can never be a writer,&#8221; but I think there are people who say to seven-year old, &#8220;You can never be a programmer because you suck at math.&#8221; I like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like this idea because it includes more people and it avoids this stigmatization of are you a programmer or are you good at math. But it does draw a new boundary that I think is interesting, which is what do we define in software and you do a lot of work. I was fascinated to read some of your work on spreadsheets and you talk about refactoring spreadsheets, testing spreadsheets, inventing duplication in spreadsheets, all sorts of things that I think of in my sort of way as being with stuff that programmers do. For me, it sounds like the argument that you would make is that spreadsheets are software and should be included. Could you maybe tell me if I&#8217;m right and expand on that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I totally agree and always say that&#8217;s because it&#8217;s such a good programming system that people don&#8217;t even realize their programming. They&#8217;re making the machine do their bidding but without the stigma, I think with all the power of Excel spreadsheets has, I think that the biggest power is that people don&#8217;t see it as programming, as scary, as threatening. I&#8217;ve talked to people in investment banks that built an entire risk dashboard on their company &#8212; this investment bank was running on their spreadsheet. They said, &#8220;Wow, that&#8217;s so cool. You’re like a programmer.&#8221; No, I&#8217;m not a programmer. This little thing, it&#8217;s just a simple model. I&#8217;m not a programmer so I think that makes it really strong and of course, it has some features that make it real programming. It&#8217;s even a functional program because a spreadsheet formula has no side effects. It can only take on auto formula and produce results.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I would even say that spreadsheets are the greatest programming system that has ever existed in the history of programming. They found that that it&#8217;s functional. It’s also reactive because the cells react to each other and has lots of hip programming features that are overlooked sometimes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am so happy right now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Same.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You mentioned that you built an IDE for spreadsheet. It is part of the reason that people are like, &#8220;Oh, Excels are terrible because it&#8217;s not maintainable,&#8221; and is it a tooling problem?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s a two-fold problem. It’s definitely a tooling problem and if you go back to what software was in the 60s and in the 70s, then it was also maintainable [inaudible] because we didn&#8217;t have tools and we didn&#8217;t have an understanding. In the beginning of programming, everyone was an end-user programmer. There were no professional programmers. People use a tool to do their job &#8212; being a scientist mainly &#8212; so no one thought about what happens if this program lives for 10 years what happens if someone else has to maintain it. This was not our problem so people didn&#8217;t think about it, that&#8217;s reason A and B, there were no tools. Of course, these two things have to do with each other because if you don&#8217;t see it as a problem, there will be no tools.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think spreadsheets are somehow is in similar situation where people don&#8217;t see them as software. They don&#8217;t see it as long-lived artifacts. They don&#8217;t go looking for maintenance solutions, either in a tool or in, of course you have guidelines as well like they&#8217;ll make your formula too long or don&#8217;t duplicate stuff all over the place but people don&#8217;t go looking for them because they don&#8217;t feel they&#8217;re programming.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you think it might be a factor that the actual programming in spreadsheets is mostly hidden? You see the results, the values but the formula are hidden away until you do and find them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s very interesting. If this is contributing to the fact that people see it as easy but it might also be contributing to the fact that it&#8217;s easy to make a mess out of things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If we can go back to that tooling question, you mentioned that because people don&#8217;t think of a spreadsheet as programming, they don&#8217;t look for tools, I have a sort of the opposite perspective which is I&#8217;m coming to a spreadsheet from a background as a professional software developer. I rely on tests and test driven development and I feel like I don&#8217;t want to put too much logic into a spreadsheet because I don&#8217;t have the mental model or the tools I would need to test drive a spreadsheet. Is there anything like that out there?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We actually worked on that ourselves a little bit but one of the things that people do even people that don&#8217;t come from software writing backgrounds is they use spreadsheet formulas to write tests because there is no [inaudible] unit for spreadsheets but of course, there are formulas. What we observe people do is write formulas like, &#8220;If A1 is 5 then error, else okay.&#8221; That&#8217;s formulas and then sometimes in important spreadsheets, there will be a worksheet called checks, in which all these formulas are grouped together and people looked at them, &#8220;Okay, okay, okay, okay,&#8221; and if everything is okay, then this model can be sent out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We worked on a tool called Expector that can harvest those test formulas and put them into a test suite where it was just a hidden worksheet and spreadsheet and then based on those, you can run those tests and it even shows you covered and uncovered cells. Looking at behavior that people already shows to a certain extent, about 10% spreadsheets we found in a field has those type of test formulas and then using that into a testing system because you want to avoid overloading people that aren&#8217;t really ready for the type of thinking with ideas from a totally different field. We really wanted to avoid giving them Visual Studio but make tools, build on what they do rather than just bringing in stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s really cool. Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You called spreadsheets the best programming system. It sounds like your qualification for the best programming system is the most people can program in it, can make the computer do their bidding.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And by most people, you mean a pretty broad range. Do you think everybody should be familiar enough with programming to be able to use it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, everyone is many people. I mean, yes in the sense that we also want everyone to be able to read and write. There’s no possible because some people can all do it but still in education, we want to focus on getting most people to be able to read and write. In that sense, yes everyone.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess, we try to make everyone able to read and write but we don&#8217;t require everyone to do calculus. Maybe programming is somewhere in that scale.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, absolutely. Also, reading and writing of course that we want everyone to learn at a basic level, not everyone needs to be able to author a novel and some people don&#8217;t, for different reasons. That’s where I was going with that. Some people don&#8217;t have the creativity. Other people don&#8217;t have the stamina, other people might not have the spelling skills or marketing skills or do social skills to find a publisher. For all of these reasons, not everyone is a novel writer but still we want a level up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That maybe kind of like more people can read than can write something that someone else would want to read. If we can start with the reading of programs. Maybe the basic skill is being able to read a program enough, to figure out how to interact with it and get it to respond positively.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes and there were different reasons why I think it&#8217;s really important for kids to program. One of the reasons is what you just touched upon. I would like people to be able to read a program and have some sense of what is going on. If we&#8217;re talking about the firmware of your pacemaker or systems that you&#8217;re really depending on or a website that you&#8217;re going to fool-heartedly may submit personal information to, we would like more people than now to be able if they really wanted to, to understand what is going on.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">Likewise, if you want to read up about a disease someone in your family has. You can read a scientific paper about the disease even though it&#8217;s hard but sometimes it&#8217;s really important and you want to, at least have the opportunity to dig into something if it&#8217;s super important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. One time, I was trying to do something on my router at home and the instructions on the website would like, &#8220;Push this button,&#8221; and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;That button grayed out,&#8221; and it was totally buggy and it wouldn&#8217;t un-gray the button. I&#8217;ve looked at the source code for the page and I was like, &#8220;If I were able to push that button, it would do this,&#8221; so I bring that on the console and it totally worked.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was exactly the kind of thing that doesn&#8217;t require a professional programmer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. I want more people to have that level of, &#8220;I know more or less, what&#8217;s in here and if I need it, I can figure it out.&#8221; What you&#8217;re saying is exactly right. You don&#8217;t need to be able to write a see-around system or source code for nuclear power plants. You don&#8217;t have to have the level of a professional developer to do something like that, to look into a little bit of source code and at least, understand what it&#8217;s doing there and that is if needed. Those are different skill levels. I think they really relate to writing. You don&#8217;t need to be novel author to be able to read a relatively difficult newspaper article about a topic that you are interested in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Felienne, it sounds like you’re talking about digital literacy, the ability to just be able to reason about your digital environment because you know something about the programming language. Is that right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, definitely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It kind of reminds me, I was having a session with someone a long time ago about whether or not people should learn how to program and there&#8217;s always a lot of opinions about whether everybody should and everybody shouldn&#8217;t. What you&#8217;re saying reminds me of when people used to talk about learning to read and write like way back in, I think the enlightenment period because everybody didn&#8217;t read. It wasn&#8217;t required. You didn&#8217;t have to. It wasn&#8217;t necessary for your job.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A lot of people who were able to read or write were the clergy or aristocrats and it was kind of seen as this highfalutin thing that only somebody who has the time would do and it feel like that&#8217;s what&#8217;s going on right now where programming and being a software developer and being able to read or write software is seen as a luxury. You don&#8217;t have to have it. There’s other people who do that for you. Then when people used to sit around and discus, whether they should learn how to read and write, I think what they were really trying to get at is reading and writing is going to be something that becomes the bedrock of our society so that in the future, if you can&#8217;t read and write, are you going to be at such a disadvantage that you can&#8217;t participate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In which case, they were right. In a lot of societies today. If you can&#8217;t read and write, you can&#8217;t do things like drive down the street or go to the grocery store or pay your bills. Do you think that with programming that it&#8217;s going to be like that in the future where if you can&#8217;t look at a program and be able to, at least kind of understand what&#8217;s going on, it&#8217;s going to inhibit your ability to fully participate?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes and also, this is where our brain, my Dutch liberal socialist agenda because what you&#8217;re saying about the time where not everyone could read and write, that was also of course greatly about power. Not everyone could write so we only heard the perspective of some people. If you look at history from the Roman Age, you see the history of people that couldn&#8217;t write and not everyone could read so not everyone can fully participate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I feel somehow, we&#8217;re also in that situation for programming. We don&#8217;t see their programs. We don&#8217;t see what many, many people could who create because programming is only for white boys, basically. This democratization of writing has of course, also may possible to hear different voices. Maybe somewhat towards the extreme because you have to at their end, you need to listen to many people that maybe rather that they couldn&#8217;t write. But it&#8217;s also given us the ability to many, many stories that would have otherwise be hidden to us. I am totally looking forward to living in a world where we will see more programs for more diverse people in [inaudible], really.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In the chat, Sam asked, &#8220;What&#8217;s the programming equivalent of a public library?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting and someone says it&#8217;s open source &#8212; non-toxic open source.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Felienne, You mentioned earlier that there are some canonical programs that people can read. Do those exist on your Scratch profile or something?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like thinking about this. They don&#8217;t exist. They should exist. There are some canonical stories like lovers want to get together but something is blocking that and then it ends well or lovers want to get together and something is blocking them but they overcome it or someone goes on a quest to find something. It takes really long, they eventually get it. These are stories that kids, for example will apply in their writing. Those simple stories that if you go trying to be or in a public library, it would be like, &#8220;Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick.&#8221; Many of them are like that. What would be the list of canonical programs that kids could apply in their learning? I don&#8217;t know but now I want to still talking with you and think about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I can tell you it&#8217;s not quicksort and it&#8217;s definitely not quicksort on a whiteboard.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s not reversing a string. It’s not a [inaudible]. It’s not of those things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that the question actually goes deeper than just what&#8217;s the code that you can read because a public library offers a lot more benefit than just being a place where there are books. You know, it&#8217;s a free, open, mostly safe space that&#8217;s heated in the winter and cold in the summer. It’s available to everyone. I think beyond just having a bunch of books that you can read, if we&#8217;re going to talk about what would be the software equivalent, we have to talk about what are all of the values that a public library provides.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, like a community and adult supervision or adult guidance where a librarian can know you after a while and suggest you books and you can meet people and also like reading. Those are all interesting functions. Absolutely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And also curation. There’s a lot of making sure that you have this other right things like the basics available.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Especially for kid’s books. I don&#8217;t know if this exists in the US but probably for kid’s books in the Netherlands, you have levels so they have stickers on them with ABC which tells you more or less what level it is so as a kid, you can find something that fits your reading level and then you know you&#8217;re advancing. This is also important of course.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you think of open source as a public library, some of the roles could fail, you would go on it and then where would you start. If you&#8217;re a small kid, you just go to Age-5 section and then there are books without letters because you can&#8217;t read yet. It’s still for you. It feels like for you. It has pictures that make you feel in your place.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m going to jump on your bandwagon here and point out that public libraries are one of the most successful socialist programs ever introduced into the United States.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s probably true.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But they also have a really long history of protecting information too, of being at a safe place for controversial things or things that everybody doesn&#8217;t necessarily agree with but being protective because it has value.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And that&#8217;s been the function largely of librarians so I wonder if instead of asking what&#8217;s the programming equivalent of a library, maybe what I should have asked is what&#8217;s the programming equivalent of a librarian.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, a librarian. Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because librarians are awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe we can get a librarian on to get their thoughts on that because from the ones that I know, they have lots of really good thoughts about all sorts of things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But doesn&#8217;t that kind of already exists because doesn&#8217;t a lot of our theories about information come from library science?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I don&#8217;t know anybody who&#8217;s a programmer that has a background of library science.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know a couple and they are the best. I love programmers who used to be librarians.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, because they&#8217;re thinking about knowledge management and how you group information. It’s a different way of looking at it than just, &#8220;How do I make it awesome? How do I make it best?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and also I know, at least in the Netherlands that libraries are searching for their place in the changing world. Some of the libraries here are hosting [inaudible], for example on Saturdays to get kids into programming because they see that&#8217;s what kids also need. Somehow maybe they are reaching out to the programming world but we&#8217;re not really finding each other or lost.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or maybe it&#8217;s because of what you brought up earlier about this idea of what is a programmer, what is programming and they&#8217;re being such a big distinction between what some people believe of real program is versus what is not a real program.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. As programmers, we tend to focus on tools and technology, whereas I think perhaps there&#8217;s a lot more value to be had in thinking about people and communication.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, this is very true. I do remember someone brought up math and I think that&#8217;s one of the reasons that we see it because we&#8217;ve all framed programming as technical and by nature almost, technical professions are about technical skills and not so much, even though also they should be more about people skills but they&#8217;re not. By calling it software engineering, is that really a good frame because that engineering, that technical space is not really about people. Program construction or a programming as more literary activity might also bring a different frame about how we interact with each other.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things I wanted to mention, to bring out my smallest soapbox is that there&#8217;s this idea that I&#8217;ve seen going around in programming communities that STEM education is superior to other education or obsoletes other forms of education, especially with liberal arts. I can&#8217;t stand that idea because &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, just this week, they tweeted something like, &#8220;If you put a STEM major in writing class, they would get an A. but the other way around, the liberal arts students couldn&#8217;t do anything in our field.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I may have responded to that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My experience is that so many of the skills that make me a relatively decent programmer have nothing to do with the syntax of programs or data structures or algorithms. It has to do with forming mental models of systems and reading comprehension even and giving and receiving criticism. All sorts of things that you don&#8217;t get so much as the focus of a computer science education but you do get it as part of the focus of a liberal arts education.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, totally. If I see my students writing at an engineering school, they could use so much more practice in writing, not just the spelling and the grammar but writing as crafting a story around something they encounter. I always say to kids that I worked with, &#8220;Whatever you will practice, you will get better at.&#8221; You might not be a top sports player in soccer but if you practice it, you will advance to a certain extent.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If our students, they don&#8217;t practice writing heartily in any of their courses, it&#8217;s always an afterthought. It’s always in a course about taking oriented programming or five study credits, one credit will be devoted at presentation then they get one lecture about it. That’s never a thing that really deliberately practice so then probably the reverse of my statement and it&#8217;s also true if you don&#8217;t practice something, you will not get better at it. If we don&#8217;t practice these type of skills, then our students won&#8217;t get better at it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Speaking of deliberate practice, I look into you before the show that you have ideas around things that we can do to get better at programming other than programming.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. Last week, I was in Norway at a conference called BoosterConf. It was super awesome conference that I really like so you should all go there next year. It was great. They let me do a code and poetry workshop, which was awesome. What I did there is I had people create poems with source code by looking at the ingredients that poems normally have and finding them the algorithms. It sounds super weird.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For example, one of the exercises that was in there is I had people look at the line of code and count the syllables. How many syllables does &#8216;x is five&#8217; had? This seems the easiest question ever. If you really think about it, how do you pronounce the equal signs in your brain? Is that &#8216;x equals five&#8217;? Or is it &#8216;x is five&#8217;? Or maybe it&#8217;s &#8216;x becomes five&#8217;? Or &#8216;x stores five&#8217;?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> What does it even mean that the signed statements and this really open the minds of many people in my course and are like, &#8220;Oh, wow. I never really thought about how the code feels in my brain and how I read it out loud.&#8221; Some people really took it through so for example, they said if I&#8217;m defining a function, then it&#8217;s &#8216;f takes x&#8217;, for example as the integer x. But if it&#8217;s a function call, then it&#8217;s &#8216;f of x&#8217;. Even the context could define pronunciation of symbols and that was a simple exercise that&#8217;s why the first things you would do if you would teach someone creative writing is read it aloud to yourself and see how it feels. This is something we never do in source code so I have lots of fun.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In your example, Felienne actually makes me think that your earlier theory that maybe software is more related to writing than we originally thought and language makes a lot of sense because it kind of reminds me of the types of rules that you have in the language like English where it&#8217;s I before E except after C because there&#8217;s always conditions with which you have to think about what you&#8217;re doing. It’s not just a blanket one explanation for how something as it always has to be interpreted.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This ties in a little bit to what we&#8217;re talking about before with who are real programmers, what are real programs, why isn&#8217;t an Excel spreadsheet considered a program and I think a lot of it has to do with programmers have a very narrow view of what constitutes a program &#8212; it&#8217;s text in a file but not any text, not prose, not poetry. It’s text in a file with a very specific syntax and format and anything else, visual programming is mostly ignored. Spreadsheets aren&#8217;t considered to be programming, nothing else counts.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, also the assumption is to get better at it. You just have to do it a lot and this assumption goes really deep in our community. If you apply for jobs, people will look at your hobby Saturday projects. Not as a means of deliberate practice, as a means of building more stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I like what Jess is saying in the chat. I&#8217;m going to repeat it because she&#8217;s in an airport and her audio is a bit noisy. She says, &#8220;It&#8217;s like playing the piano. To get better at speed, you have to play well slowly. You have to study each sound,&#8221; and this is so much similar thing to programming where to get better at it, you have to look at it from different perspectives. You have to do different things. Sometimes you&#8217;re playing an entire piano piece. I really love the analogy, Jess.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But sometimes, also you&#8217;re just doing three notes repeated over and over again to some of the things. Of course, people in programming they do that with Katas that really nice, small deliberate exercises of practicing but we could totally use more of that. I think that only doing those wacky exercises like counting syllables in the line of code will also contribute to what the definition of programming is because some people started to make really crazy programs, of course for their own enjoyment. They totally said, &#8220;I made them do sorting algorithms just because there are a lot of them.&#8221; You can easily copy-paste the code from [inaudible] to get going on syllable counting. Some people stuck with that but there are people started to write things that made no sense which is really nice for your brain.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Katas come from martial arts. This idea that forced repetition of particular forms builds this muscle memory. It seems to me like a lot of the education in programming is being created by people who aren&#8217;t so much educators. A lot of it is programmers who are writing books on programming and not trained educators who are writing books on programming. It seems like a lot of the things we&#8217;re talking about are ideas around pedagogy that we know about in other fields like liberal arts and things, why don&#8217;t we have that so much coming in to programming education? Why are we slowing in Katas, for instance instead of something from liberal arts?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly. That’s a good question. I don&#8217;t know why other people are doing it but I can hypothesize about, for example a school teacher that would go to a conference about programming, how they would feel and be treated if they would say, &#8220;I have lots of programming education skills. Who wants to collaborate with me?&#8221; I don&#8217;t really think that we &#8212; of course I&#8217;m generalizing here and there are lots of great people in the programming community that I love. However, many people, like that tweet that we were talking about before, have such a huge disdain of all sorts of skills that aren&#8217;t labelled as technical that those types of collaboration&#8217;s are pretty hard.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, we have this arrogance and this myopia in the field that the things that we know we are really good at are the only things that matter and if you&#8217;re not exactly the same things, in exactly the same way that I am, then well I&#8217;m sorry but you&#8217;re just not a real programmer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly. It’s interesting. I never really realized or focalized the fact that Katas come from martial arts which is interesting because they could also have gone from writing education because they have to be similar. If you&#8217;re learning about spelling, the only way to learn about spelling is practicing. The teacher reads 25 words and you write then and we do that every week. This is, of course similar to those types deliberate practice that memory building is also alike too but they didn&#8217;t really come from that area because for all we think, martial arts is cool and liberal arts is weak.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it might have something to do with this idea of programming as being mystical, magical and only certain people have the ability. It’s a similar thing with martial arts. If you don&#8217;t know martial arts and you see somebody perform any type of martial arts, you are amazed because it seems inhuman. Jessica saying in chat, we think similar things about music and it&#8217;s also true that if you see a professional musician, especially someone who&#8217;s playing instrument perform, you are usually amazed because it seems like something you couldn&#8217;t do. Whereas a lot of things that we think of little arts like the ability to read and comprehend critical thinking, they&#8217;re not things that when you see it happening looks like, &#8220;I could never do that,&#8221; even though you&#8217;re not actually understanding all the complexity that might go into it or even understanding the difference between your skill and their skill because it&#8217;s not so easy to just look at it and see the difference. I think that might be contributing to why there&#8217;s less respect for it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It has to do with whether or not we believe, you need an innate ability to do it or rather that something you can train, which by the way is there&#8217;s lots of research that shows that the more people believe innate ability is needed for skill, the less women will participate in the field.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There is also of this thing that I think happens once you get the skills of a programmer. We seemed to want to create this mystique or mysticism around them to prevent them from being understood by others. One of the tropes that I&#8217;ve seen in programming is this idea of the master programmer has master with these unintelligible [inaudible] that are supposed to be deep wisdom or really just don&#8217;t make any sense to anyone, as a way of sort of protecting that knowledge.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Something you just said that made me think about medicine. You were saying that the more than a skill seems to be needed, the less that women will participate. Is that what you said?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No. I said, the more people believe that a skill is innate, that you need to be born with the right genes to do it, the more that people believe that, the less women participate in field. This is very true, for example for mathematics, we all as a society believe and continue to repeat the fact that if you&#8217;re not good at math, you&#8217;ll never be good at it. You have to have the right brain. I don&#8217;t know if your language has that or my language even has a thing. It’s called the [inaudible]. If people are really smart in math, people will say, &#8220;He really has a [inaudible] in his brain,&#8221; like physically, your brain will be different if you&#8217;re really good at math. This is something people say.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> More people believe that &#8212; this is a known fact &#8212; the last women who participate because they think, &#8220;Oh, I don&#8217;t have it so I&#8217;ll go do something else.&#8221; They don&#8217;t think, &#8220;Oh, if I practice a little then I will get better.&#8221; This is what I tell my kids in my schools all the time, if you practice and think, you will get better and that&#8217;s the truth. I want them to remember and not if you don&#8217;t have it by age eight, never mind. This also, of course is something that really professed in programming because we have these stories about, &#8220;I told myself about programming when I was 10 because I&#8217;m so smart.&#8221; Or you&#8217;re 17, you don&#8217;t do it yet, you&#8217;re lost for life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It seems to me &#8212; correct me if I&#8217;m wrong &#8212; the jargon that I&#8217;ve heard related to this is this idea of a fixed mindset versus a growth mindset where students, if they have taught that there is a growth mindset which is that they can improve by practicing then they will, in fact improve by practicing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, those things are definitely related to that innate ability type of thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There is a last thing about medicine which may not exactly fit now is because a lot of social scientists they study the medicalization of childbirth, basically meaning that it used to be that when you had children, there were midwives and that was like a woman&#8217;s thing and there was usually a bunch of women who helped to have a baby. Then, at least in Western societies, it starts to become medicalized in the sense that you need a doctor and the doctors are usually male. The doctors will tell you how to have a baby, how to nourish your child and it started to become this thing that you didn&#8217;t have any more it wasn&#8217;t an innate thing that you could have anymore so new woman, you have to have another professional help or else you were being primitive or savage.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It sounds similar to this evolution of programming and how people think about programming because from what I understand, it used to be that a lot of women participated in software engineering or writing because it was seen as more administrative and that the real innovation was going to come from actually building the devices and building the hardware, which was used in more male dominated. But then over time, when you start to see the power of what you can do you with software and not just hardware, it became this professional thing that you needed to have certain abilities for and then the women slowly were phased out of it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It seemed like a very similar things so it&#8217;s interesting that there&#8217;s this innate thing going on with something like mathematics where you have it. Because it also feels like, if you look at history, it&#8217;s a thing that we could change. We could lose the ability for it to be just because you have it innately needing something.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I never consider that but yes, that&#8217;s very true that sometimes, some phase starts out at a very male dominated profession and it can turn into a female dominated profession as well so the opposite can also happen. For example, with school teachers &#8212; this really happened in the Netherlands probably where you live with as well &#8212; when our parents went to school, all the teachers were male. There were a little female teacher and then females to go over the field and [inaudible] and lost prestige as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I used to be told in school by a male teacher, in an elementary school that was also in city council. That was the level of respect that teachers would have that they could be in a teacher and in city council at the same time. I think that totally changed due to more females participating in the job so this happens two ways: more man take over and it&#8217;s seen as more serious and reversed practice was shit. But also more women take over and then it loses respect and appeal.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is this why people in the program community fight against what is real programming because we can&#8217;t let too many people in?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t know why people feel the need to fight whatever you&#8217;re programming is. I&#8217;m not a psychologist. I asked them hypothesis but I don&#8217;t really know. I don&#8217;t feel qualified to speak about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, neither do we. We just speculate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s of course this power that I was talking about before that we programmers control the world in a sense. If you look at what happened with US elections, with hacking and filter bubble, we programmers do have some sort of control over the world that comes with some respect and also that respect is growing. You’re choose to be nerdy and now we&#8217;re getting more respect maybe people don&#8217;t want to their super profession to be diluted, maybe.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think it has something to do with that. I think it&#8217;s also not just programmers. If you look at [inaudible], they do something similar and doctors will do something similar. If you talk to people on Wall Street, they are very sure that their job is necessary. I&#8217;m not so sure because money is imaginary but I think it&#8217;s a professional thing where you have to do this. That’s like I have to all these hard things to get to this job so I&#8217;m not going to just make it easy for you to do, have those things and be able to do what I do. That’s not fair.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s actually a double whammy. It’s both that. It’s both which school did you go to, what&#8217;s your training and it&#8217;s also a form of essentialism which is either you&#8217;re born to be a programmer or you&#8217;re not. I think we get hit from both angles.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, but since we&#8217;re like all benevolent and we actually do want other people to be able to write programs and use them, what can we do to help? What can we do to do a little piece of what you do and spread the knowledge.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I gave a talk at Booster Conference last week and I ended that with what I wanted to give to people in the audience, if people tell you they&#8217;re programmers, you have to believe them. If people say they&#8217;re programming, they probably are, which I think is one of the things that we could start with. If you&#8217;re at a conference and someone says, &#8220;I&#8217;m a programmer,&#8221; and [inaudible], if only they&#8217;re just starting or they only know PHP, they&#8217;re still programmers. I think that&#8217;s a small thing that we can all do to incorporate more people into programming.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Don’t say, &#8220;Oh, you&#8217;re just a frontender,&#8221; or, &#8220;You&#8217;re just a designer.&#8221; If you try to pay attention to those small things and I will say that I will admit that I&#8217;ve been guilty of thinking and sometimes even seeing those things as well because we all like to feel powerful and better than other people. This happens if you think, &#8220;Oh, you&#8217;re just this,&#8221; or, &#8220;You don&#8217;t really, you don&#8217;t seriously.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If I could give the listeners one thing to ponder on, maybe it&#8217;s really try to limit that type of belittling or also surprise. People say to me all the time, &#8220;You&#8217;re really a programmer? You’re really a professor in software engineering?&#8221; This is how we continue the culture.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was a perfect transition into the way we usually like to end our show, which is to do reflections or calls to action. It sounds like you actually just did both but is there anything else that you would like to add as part of that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe one thing because there are probably listeners &#8212; if they listen to the show for this long maybe our listeners that are also doing programming education. If they are teaching at their local school or maybe even they&#8217;re teaching their kids, try not to contaminate their brains with what do you think programming is. If kids want to use programming to make a song or a story or an artwork, those things are fine too. Don’t push them too much to building useful stuff because many of the things kids are doing are practicing and not about being good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If your kid is drawing, you&#8217;re not going to say, &#8220;Let&#8217;s make something that could hang in the museum.&#8221; Sometimes, I see educators and parents pushing too much the profession of programming onto their kids and not just letting them play with stuff in a clearly playful way. This is sometimes really well-meant to like, &#8220;I want my kid to know programming because it&#8217;s useful,&#8221; but I want people more to think of it like you want your kids to program because it&#8217;s not a form of self-expression.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a ton of takeaways from this episode and one of them is [inaudible] is the hard part of programming. One of them is forming mental models of systems and Felienne talk a lot about is reading programming and reading comprehension, just understanding programs. I&#8217;m happy with this because it places an exclusive value on reading through the code and say a new service that I haven&#8217;t modified before, new to me and I&#8217;m forming a model of it. I&#8217;ve also noticed that if informing that model, I could draw a picture. People on the team get super happy so I&#8217;m going to do that more and feel better about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, I agree.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My reflection is actually kind of similar to what you just said, Jessica which is thinking about programming as in thinking about writing and thinking about it as language more so than about building blocks, which when you were talking about that Felienne, it just made a lot of sense to me and it makes it easier for me to think about tackling stuff that might be harder because I feel really confident in my ability to read and understand and I don&#8217;t always know how to build everything I want to build. I think that&#8217;s really useful advice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A few times in this episode, we&#8217;ve talked about the challenge of convincing people that they can program when it involves math. There are two ends that you can approach that from and we spend some time on. One of them to point out that there is a lot of programming that doesn&#8217;t need to involve that and I&#8217;d like to take a whack at the other end of the stick, which is that some programming does involve math but it&#8217;s not for the most part the math that you hated from high school.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The reason you hated that math in high school is that math education in our schools and around the world is fundamentally broken and bad and teaches people that math is awful and it is not so. What I would like to recommend is a book by Paul Lockhart called A Mathematician&#8217;s Lament, which describes how it&#8217;s broken, what we can do to fix it and describes how interesting and fun math can actually be. It’s not about rote memorization and rote application of rules. It’s intuitive, it&#8217;s created, it&#8217;s even an artistic pursuit. I would recommend that book to anyone who is daunted by this idea that they have to learn math and carries the baggage from awful Algebra 2 with them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>FELIENNE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I didn&#8217;t know that. Thanks for the suggestions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was originally a 25-page essay but it was expanded into a full book. The essay is free but the book is on Amazon.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Throughout this episode, I&#8217;ve been thinking just in the back of my head about this idea of code literacy or code fluency, which reminds me of this idea that I first ran across from Jim Shore and Diana Larsen and their work on what they call Agile Fluency, which as I understand it, came out of a group here in Portland called Language Hunters that they have this model of having levels of fluency and what really was important for me was this idea that you can be fluent at a very low level of proficiency and still be fluent.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They define fluency as what you can say without really having to think about it. That really to me is a useful reminder that we don&#8217;t have to look down on somebody because they&#8217;re not fluent at a high level of proficiency. We can encourage people to become fluent at whatever level they are at and that&#8217;s still really useful for people. That’s it for me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Felienne for coming on this show today and thank you everybody for listening. We’ll see you next week.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="http://devreps.com/">DevReps, LLC</a>.</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Felienne Hermans: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/Felienne"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@Felienne</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.felienne.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">felienne.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.tudelft.nl/en/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Delft University of Technology</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://joyofcoding.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Joy of Coding Conference</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.se-radio.net/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">SE Radio</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboCup_Junior"><span style="font-weight: 400;">RoboCup Junior</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “The Netherlands Invented Gay Marriage, So We Should Be Scared of Them Now!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:28</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story</span></p>
<p><b>03:17</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Programming Perspectives From People of Different Backgrounds; Teaching Adults vs Children</span></p>
<p><b>06:12 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Teaching Programming as a Language; Aha! Moments</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://scratch.mit.edu/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scratch Programming</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.goldieblox.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">GoldieBlox</span></a></p>
<p><b>12:26 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Identity and why do we so often use the phrase &#8220;not real programming&#8221;? What do we define as software? Tooling</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://products.office.com/en-us/excel"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Microsoft Excel</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.felienne.com/Expector"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Expector</span></a></p>
<p><b>20:13 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">–  Should everyone know programming? Why? What should they know/be able to do? (Digital Literacy)</span></p>
<p><b>28:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What is the programming equivalent of a library/librarian?</span></p>
<p><b>33:06 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Does STEM education make other forms of education obsolete? Why not?</span></p>
<p><b>35:15 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Things to Get Better at Programming Other Than Programming</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://codekata.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">CodeKata</span></a></p>
<p><b>48:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Fighting Against “Real” Programming and Being Hesitant to Let in Newcomers</span></p>
<p><b>50:40 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What can we do to help spread the knowledge? </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Felienne: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">If people say they are programming, they are. Limit belittling and surprise. Do not contaminate others with what your own idea of programming is.</span></p>
<p><b>Jessic]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Felienne Hermans: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/Felienne"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@Felienne</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.felienne.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">felienne.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.tudelft.nl/en/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Delft University of Technology</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://joyofcoding.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Joy of Coding Conference</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.se-radio.net/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">SE Radio</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RoboCup_Junior"><span style="font-weight: 400;">RoboCup Junior</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “The Netherlands Invented Gay Marriage, So We Should Be Scared of Them Now!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:28</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story</span></p>
<p><b>03:17</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Programming Perspectives From People of Different Backgrounds; Teaching Adults vs Children</span></p>
<p><b>06:12 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Teaching Programming as a Language; Aha! Moments</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://scratch.mit.edu/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Scratch Programming</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.goldieblox.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">GoldieBlox</span></a></p>
<p><b>12:26 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Identity and why do we so often use the phrase &#8220;not real programming&#8221;? What do we define as software? Tooling</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://products.office.com/en-us/excel"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Microsoft Excel</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.felienne.com/Expector"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Expector</span></a></p>
<p><b>20:13 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">–  Should everyone know programming? Why? What should they know/be able to do? (Digital Literacy)</span></p>
<p><b>28:27 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What is the programming equivalent of a library/librarian?</span></p>
<p><b>33:06 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Does STEM education make other forms of education obsolete? Why not?</span></p>
<p><b>35:15 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Things to Get Better at Programming Other Than Programming</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://codekata.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">CodeKata</span></a></p>
<p><b>48:58 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Fighting Against “Real” Programming and Being Hesitant to Let in Newcomers</span></p>
<p><b>50:40 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What can we do to help spread the knowledge? </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Felienne: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">If people say they are programming, they are. Limit belittling and surprise. Do not contaminate others with what your own idea of programming is.</span></p>
<p><b>Jessic]]></googleplay:description>
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					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
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					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>58:10</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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					<title>Episode 023: Politics and Software with Lorena Mesa</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-023-lorena-mesa/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 15 Mar 2017 23:13:16 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=434</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[In this episode, Lorena Mesa joins us to talk about politics and software, using Python for data collection, and communication and organization within communities.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[In this episode, Lorena Mesa joins us to talk about politics and software, using Python for data collection, and communication and organization within communities.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/loooorenanicole"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lorena Mesa</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://lorenamesa.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">lorenamesa.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://sproutsocial.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sprout Social</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.python.org/psf/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Python Software Foundation</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.meetup.com/Chicago-PyLadies/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">PyLadies Chicago</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.writespeakcode.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Write/Speak/Code</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Hey! I Made a Bong Out of This Podcast!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:26</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.p2012.org/candidates/obamaorg.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Obama For America Campaign</span></a></p>
<p><b>05:46</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Politics and Software; Data Collection</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWBZNxPzoUY&amp;feature=youtu.be">Danah Boyd: Be Careful What You Code For</a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Thank you </b><a href="https://twitter.com/gkfox"><b>Greg Fox</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p><b>16:43 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Working in Python for Data Collection</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://djangogirls.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Django Girls</span></a></p>
<p><b>19:46 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://www.python.org/psf/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Python Software Foundation (PSF)</span></a></p>
<p><b>23:55 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Communication and Organization Within Communities</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2011-08-19-matz-is-nice-so-we-are-nice"><span style="font-weight: 400;">MINSWAN: Matz is Nice So We Are Nice</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Encounter_Party"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Social Encounter Party</span></a></p>
<p><b>33:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">–  Power Structures and Forming Relationships</span></p>
<p><b>36:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– PSF Funding</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Each of our languages has a metalanguage that people use to talk about the language.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Needs more sleep</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Code can and should touch everything: What is it not doing that it should be doing?</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Weapons-Math-Destruction-Increases-Inequality/dp/0553418815"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy</span></a></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Software is not neutral.</span></p>
<p><b>Rein:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Software is inherently political. It is made for people by people. There’s no way it can’t be political.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning and welcome to the show that we&#8217;d like to call &#8216;Hey! I Made a Bong Out of This Podcast!&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That explained so much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>With me today is Sam Livingston-Gray.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning, Coraline and that is probably the second best podcast name ever and you know the rest of that sale so I&#8217;ll just hand it over to Jessica Kerr</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Sam. I am super happy to be here on Greater Than Code. I&#8217;m thrilled to be here with Astrid Countee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Jessica and I am thrilled to introduce our guests today, Lorena Mesa. Lorena is a political analyst turned coder, a software engineer at Sprout Social Platform. She is the director on the Python Software Foundation, PyLadies Chicago Organizer and Write/Speak/Code conference organizer. Lorena loves to make meaning out of data, asking big questions and using her code to build models to derive that meaning. Part Star Wars fanatic but mostly a Trekkie, Lorena abide by the model, &#8216;Live long and prosper.&#8217; Welcome to Greater Than Code, Lorena.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello. Thank you for that glorious intro with so many words so you killed it. Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Here on Greater Than Code, we usually like to start by finding out your origin story. Tell us everything about you since you were born.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow, since I was born. There are many things I can talk about when I was little. Spanish is my first language. Fun fact: I actually had speech language therapy for many moons because I always inverted my English and Spanish. But rather than talk about that for a long time, I think what&#8217;s kind of cool that I like to share with people is a little bit about the story about how I got into coding because I am a career-changer. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In university, I actually studied at a university here in Illinois that was uniquely positioned to be able to do some work on Obama for America. At that time, when I started doing work at Obama for America, I majored in Political Science, there was not that there&#8217;s big belief I think that we see today that code can touch everything and ought to do everything. This idea that code is a new literacy, I don&#8217;t think we had reached many chambers and many people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It was really exciting to work on that campaign to see how people who may not have otherwise coded were able to get into a political campaign and do some cool stuff with code. I worked on the Latino vote aspect there, doing a lot of data munching, data cleaning which is how I actually started working with Python. I did that for two campaigns and eventually over time, through a combination of meeting amazing people in the Chicago civic engagement space and the open source software community in Chicago found my way into coding. I&#8217;m more than happy to talk more specifics about that but I come from the political research background and have moved into the role of a day-to-day software engineer just a few years ago. That’s me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Lorena, what&#8217;s your superpower?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What is my superpower? Ummm &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I asked you first.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] You know, I don&#8217;t know if this is a superpower or not but I&#8217;ve been told by many people, especially when they hear the kind of activities that I partake in, that I have endless energy. I do a lot of things and I think after grad school, I just got to a place where I sleep only five hours a night and I&#8217;m pretty good on that. Perhaps, the idea that I don&#8217;t need a lot of sleep is a superpower but I don&#8217;t know, maybe that add eccentricities to me so I&#8217;m not sure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m a little more interested in what you learned while you were doing the campaign work because you said, you got started with Python there. What were you doing that made you have to start using Python?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When you think about politics, it&#8217;s a lot of these ideas that it&#8217;s people have issues and those issues are kind of unfathomable. When aligning with this issue, there are certain language that you use to talk to people and there&#8217;s kind of a certain belief that, for example, Illinois, Chicago. Chicago is always a blue so the idea of it possibly having spaces for independent or Republican candidates, sometimes can be thrown by the wayside because party politics is party politics as usual.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think what was a little different at OFA &#8212; Obama for America was this idea that we can actually use data to develop where specific kind of what we may think of the UI/UX community personas and have a better understanding of what issues may speak to people and really understand better, get out the vote initiatives. It was actually trying to track data, add more data sets to make it more comprehensive understanding of what people were and what issues that spoke to them and also, trying to diversify ways in which outreach happens.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think what was really interesting there was just taking some of these assumptions of this community is always going to align this way to saying, &#8220;Let&#8217;s actually put some data behind it and see if these troops hold up.&#8221; I think just the idea of integrating new data sources into politics was a pretty, profound thing. A lot of the idea of how data collection happened would be you registered as a candidate for this party, you may have voted historically this way and there may be other sources of data that you could purchase but really, at Obama for America, they started and trying to add more data collection points and with the tools that were developed at Obama for America through the website and actually having more communities for people that wasn&#8217;t just like, &#8220;I&#8217;m a Democrat or I&#8217;m a Republican or I&#8217;m a veteran,&#8221; but having a wider plethora of identities and which people could participate and see if their voice could be heard or aligned with the rhetoric of the campaign.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Lorena, I&#8217;m curious. I&#8217;m kind of divorced in the political process because I&#8217;m not allowed to vote for personal security reasons but the registration roles republic and I&#8217;m someone who gets a lot of harassment and I get [inaudible] my address out there, anyway. Do you try and stay politically engaged and I&#8217;m curious if you found that in traditionally blue areas, blue voters don&#8217;t turn out quite as frequently as people who maybe feel more marginalized by the political process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s a great question. An issue that&#8217;s near and dear to my heart is basically the issue of undocumented immigrants. My father&#8217;s family is from Mexico and I have had the fortune of working closely with some activists in that space. I think that is another community that&#8217;s clearly that being public threatens their livelihood here in the United States, the impact that they can continue to stay here. I think when it comes to this idea, the fallacy that blue is blue and red is red, I think what we&#8217;re increasingly saying from the 2008 campaign forward is that these arbitrary labels, the idea that we have a dichotomy of beliefs that it has to be this or that is really starting to crumble.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This last campaign has really given us a lot of insight into that. People are getting frustrated with the politics as normal. I&#8217;m not a political pundit by any means but I, myself have found that I&#8217;m increasingly getting more frustrated participating within the common structure as it exists today. When it comes to the discussion of what politics matter within blue areas, I think it&#8217;s easy to over emphasize the priority of some of the issues but I think the thing that we need to be mindful of is, &#8220;Are these issues of privacy? Are these issues of who is at the bullhorn?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I guess the big thing for me, when I got started in politics, I moved into software because I felt that participating within the structure as it currently exists doesn&#8217;t amount to change. I think we need to have discourse that happen outside of the political structures that exist and I think one way that we can do that is through like this, like podcast like this. It&#8217;s going out into the community and speaking to people and speaking to them in ways that is meaningful and creates access.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I do think that the last few campaigns have maybe giving us more ways to think about that and has inserted code as a tool that can help us develop other ways to be an activist or to inspire conversation but it has also been a little bit separate. I don&#8217;t know if I exactly answered your question but I think some of that frustration that you feel is something that I, myself have been feeling over the last three big presidential campaigns.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow, so you actually got into software and data through people?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. My master&#8217;s research actually, I looked at the impact of the mortgage crisis on undocumented Latinos in the Chicagoland area and what I&#8217;ve essentially found as there was a minimal amounts of data to describe this experience. When you get to the question of data apex and how do you report on things like that, that&#8217;s actually a huge topic that I&#8217;m really interested in. I&#8217;m not quite sure where to go with it but it is something that I&#8217;m seeing pop up increasingly more and more around it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A lot of the line of inquiry and how I&#8217;ve been developing my career has been at the intersection of data and software, what kind of things do we assess as software engineers or people who can code or people who are code literate, however you define that. Our responsibility in the data collection and data usage policies are if there aren&#8217;t policies, how do we create them? A lot of where I would like to see conversations going, that is very much informed by this space and I think we are seeing a lot of people who are asking questions around that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>By collecting data and analyzing the data on these communities that were, otherwise unknown, you&#8217;d added visibility.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I think that&#8217;s a suspect thing. The kind of work I did with my master&#8217;s research was more repurposing so that we have these census data that happens every ten years but then there&#8217;s also other community surveys that happen that speak to more nuance, socioeconomic factors. I kind of try to flush out some more of that. While this is hard to quantify, I did do more qualitative research in trying to make use of the idea of a moral witness and trying to bring in testimony but, at least tell it in the idea of through additional medium of what someone&#8217;s experience maybe and the idea of perhaps, having a &#8216;persona&#8217;, which I understand that there&#8217;s problems of that as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you can at least have a diversified source of data sets available, you can try to at least tell the story a little bit more holistically. But it can also present challenges because I think one of the things that a little scary was when you&#8217;re starting those relationships with people and they want to know what you&#8217;re doing, you can tell someone, &#8220;This is what I want to do,&#8221; but you create a data set.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I would like to think of it this way: imagine you have a startup, you do something really cool and then you have a [inaudible]. What happens to that data after the fact? I think one of the big questions, at least from a social scientist that I think about now as a software engineer is if there&#8217;s a bias, what happens to that data in the future. At least as a social scientist, it&#8217;s my proprietary research and the idea of maybe I went in and did a PhD. Ideally, I would be doing research in one area for the duration of my academic career. But as a software engineer we change problem spaces so frequently that I think that&#8217;s one of the things that can be lost. What happens today after the fact is how can we keep track about?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And there&#8217;s a lot of safety and security concerns with that, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. I think we see that in many ways. It was really interesting to see what was happening with Mary Deblasio in New York when essentially, they had started collecting data around giving out identification cards for folks who were otherwise undocumented. But then, the federal government said, &#8220;We want to actually use this in some of our overhaul and how ICE is going to be doing deportation and processing.&#8221; People who may be kind of in a gray like legal space so then the idea of like, &#8220;We&#8217;ve actually collected this data. We have good intentions,&#8221; but then who owns it? Does the federal government own it? Or does the city on it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s all this conflict that happens and so knowing the lifecycle of our data is really, really important. I am so curious if we have good tools to do that. I guess maybe I&#8217;m newer to this and I&#8217;m sure about that many people think about this but that is something that I just keep hearing people talk about where they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Oh yeah, we can collect this data thing,&#8221; without really thinking about why they need the use it or trying to come up with that argument first. It’s a little interesting to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I saw a talk recently by Danah Boyd. She&#8217;s a researcher and she runs Data &amp; Society Institute in New York and her talk was about data that&#8217;s being used to predict crime and how it&#8217;s already biased because of some of the method that are used to actually go out and police the streets and how that information is recorded. We need to really careful just because we have lots of data doesn&#8217;t mean that our data is the full-pitcher because there&#8217;s this kind assumption that lots of data needs accuracy and not necessarily that you have to try to control for the bias that was used to collect the data because, usually the data when it was being collected, wasn&#8217;t being collected for the purpose with which it&#8217;s being used now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s a lot of concern about how to move forward with that because in the last ten years, we&#8217;ve generated so much data via social reasons like our phones and other statuses. Now, there&#8217;s companies that are emerging to try to repackage that data and sell that data. There’s a lot of unanswered questions and ethical gray areas as to how you&#8217;re supposed to move forward because there&#8217;s not a law yet that&#8217;s been created around this. With the same problem that you just stated about who owns the data, who gets to decide its purpose and that type of stuff, I don&#8217;t know if we have created real tools for yet because it seems like people are starting to think about these questions in a bigger way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. In Chicago here, it&#8217;s a little bit of a conservative in the traditional context. A think tank called the Chicago Council on Global Affairs but they had an event that was named something to the effect about security that the name eludes me right now. But the director for the Electronic Frontier Foundation was there and she pretty much, I thought was the only voice who raise in saying, &#8220;You&#8217;re all talking about Russia and we need to think about security idea from the national security perspective. But what about the idea of individual people?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> She kept pointing out that I&#8217;m really distraught that the EFF is a small nonprofit. It&#8217;s basically creating the tools to inform the broader business world about what it means to collect data and what kind of security tools and implementation you have to had in your organization and things that you have to think about. I think it&#8217;s really interesting that these conversations seem to be coming from when we do think about it. It’s always such a police conversation of no this is national security, national intelligence but again, it&#8217;s really just coming back down to us as individuals to be more informed, more empowered.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Here in Chicago, we have [inaudible] and there&#8217;s a really great cybersecurity one-on-one that they do and kind of like what do you need to know as an activist for how to protect your data and protect yourself as a person in the [inaudible] space. I think a lot of these efforts is stuff I&#8217;m really interested in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;d like to give a shout out to one of our newer Patrons, Greg Fox. He is @gkfox on Twitter and remind everyone that we are a 100% listener-funded show. If you would like to support us in the work that we do go, to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. Pledge at any level and get access to our Patreon-only Slack community where we do cool things like sometimes, we have a lottery to see if a Patreon wants to be a guest panelist or give people the opportunity to talk to our guest after a show or suggest guest. It&#8217;s kind of a cool community and definitely worth your while. Pledge at any level to get access to that and thank you for your ongoing support. We love you all.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wait. We got some new person here. Sam, who is your friend?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You mean, Lorena?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Lorena is also my friend but no. There&#8217;s a whole other new person here. We have another surprise today for our listeners and that is my friend and former coworker, Rein Hendricks has just joined us. Rein, describes himself as a caring and considerate technical leader, coach, mentor and teammate. His two greatest passions are helping people work better together and helping people solve hard, technical challenges, especially in infrastructure and distributed systems. He also wrote a database in Haskell once so he has that going for him which is nice. Rein, welcome to the show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, everyone.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, Rein.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, I Am delighted and excited to be here and you can tell that I prepare that because it rhymes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But let&#8217;s face it, that&#8217;s really all the prep you did, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m getting cold out in the first 30 seconds. Awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And fun fact, when I name-checked him on our last show, I had no idea that Rein was going to join us this time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>All the things you don&#8217;t know.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Everything that rises must converge.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love that song.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Lorena, when you started doing data collection and data modeling, it seems like Python is kind of a natural choice for that kind of work. Is that why and how you got it in the Python?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s two languages or is that three? There&#8217;s many languages, let’s face it. If you have the desire to do a thing and you have a language to do a thing, you can do the thing. I&#8217;m a huge believer in that. But that being said, I do think that Python is kind of a nice fit, just because there&#8217;s good scientific libraries in it and also, it&#8217;s easy to pick up. For me, someone who&#8217;s not a hard core statistician, that&#8217;s why I didn&#8217;t opt to use R and I did actually use R a little bit but I found it a little bit frustrating when I was reading documentation and having to look up every other thing because it was a lot of heavy stat-speak. There&#8217;s also SAS, of course but I found Python to be a nice medium in where there is an active community that I can field questions to, there&#8217;s much libraries and it is user-friendly so yay for me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And you manage to, not only learn Python but become a prominent figure in the Python world.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. This will be my endless love for Chicago &#8212; you talking about how I love Chicago here &#8212; but I think what&#8217;s really cool about Chicago is we have a very rich, for example a Ruby community. A lot of the people that I know we&#8217;re very active in creating spaces for people who are underrepresented via by [inaudible], via by how you identify, or whatever way you slice and dice it. I very much enjoyed that Ruby had a very welcoming space for people who are beginners and I really want to try to create more of that for the Python community in Chicago.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We do have a very, very well established Python user group but going to that meeting, which is I think it&#8217;s every second Thursday of the month, that sometimes the topics can be very beginner-friendly but sometimes they can be very deep because we have a very rich data science community and a really rich community of academics who use Python in their research so it can just be like, &#8220;Whew! This is completely over my head.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It kind of tapping into the welcome beginner-friendly atmosphere that Ruby had created and that had empowered me when I was making this switch into software. I wanted to try to do that with Python. I started with PyLadies here in Chicago. From there, as my work in that community continued to grow, we brought Django Girls, which if you are familiar with any of the other various workshops that teaching framework, it&#8217;s same kind of concept to do it in a day or two. We brought Django Girls to Chicago and then eventually, I wanted to do more on a kind of a global kind of view where then I put my name up last year for the Python Software Foundation Board. Not thinking I would actually get it because there was a lot of really cool people who put their names for but I was very pleasantly surprised to get nominated as a director for this past year. I guess it started with I want to do more things and see more people who are like me, talking and doing things in Python. Then it just went from there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What exactly does a Python Software Foundation do?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The Python Software Foundation, we aren&#8217;t the people who go in and oversee the future like what&#8217;s going to be in the language but instead, we are the group that gives out money to people to do Python events around the world. We are people that oversees code of conduct violations, we maintain a blog, we&#8217;re the people who are trying to create and promote the Python culture around the world and make sure that we are continuing to evangelize in a way that makes it accessible for people, pretty much of all backgrounds and for all regional spaces. A really big emphasis is to make sure that we are getting Python into people&#8217;s hands that are further removed from software engineering or maybe even from coding than some other communities maybe.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We offer grants for events, we give out a CSA &#8212; a community service award &#8212; every quarter to two folks, we maintain a blog of events of things that are going on, we have different mailing lists that we oversee like our infrastructure, we&#8217;ve got different Python code repository that we kind of manage behind the scenes, we make sure to maintain dialogues with IRC channels, we do not, ourselves govern those but we make sure to try to kind of stay aware what&#8217;s going on with that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A lot of it is just, I like to say, it&#8217;s glorified email briefing but you really essentially are a volunteer doing the not-exciting grunt work of making sure that people are able to do really cool events around the world and making sure that they are able to get the resources they need to make that thing happen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m so jealous of that. I know PHP has a foundation that does some other things and you talk about outreach being sort of the core of the mission of the Python Software Foundation. In the Ruby world, we have one small team of people, led by Matz who handle language. We have Ruby Central which puts on RailsConf and RubyConf and helps to organize events. We have Ruby Together, which raises money to fund paying developers to maintain critical infrastructure but there&#8217;s no one who&#8217;s responsible for outreach. There’s no one who&#8217;s responsible for the culture of the Ruby community. I really wish that we had some kind of structure in place for that kind of things. I&#8217;m really jealous.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think the Ruby community could learn a lot from these other language communities and really improve what we do. We have Rails Girls and we have Rails Bridge and some other organizations like that, that do some limited amount of outreach but their budgets are small and they&#8217;re not core to the community, frankly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. I think what&#8217;s actually really interesting also about what you mentioned is these smaller workshops that are easy to export and bring to communities that have a very well-defined learning objectives. In the Python space, that would be Django Girls, which was started in Berlin. To me, it&#8217;s kind of comparison as someone who is Latino living in Chicago and Chicago being a very big Ruby and Rails community for the web development space.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Seeing Rails Bridge and seeing Rails Girls, it does from my perspective, have a very strong US-centric kind of worldview. Again, that&#8217;s just how I experience in Chicago but when I started participating in Django Girls, I found out the community was very, very different and it complemented well because it was started by women from West Europe and it actually has a very strong representation outside the United States. There’s much more of these to Django Girls events happening. I think like the Django Software Foundation, actually I think has a really good well informed conversation with their community in ways that I think the PSF is trying to understand better, or at least from my perspective as a director coming in, how do we stay informed with organizers in the field doing the work? How do we do these kind of things? How do we make sure we&#8217;re properly empowering them?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that you are speaking to the same kind of observations that I&#8217;ve seen as a Python language person, if you will, which is that these smaller communities that have gained global spread, if you will, have been perhaps a power engine to help, maybe unify some conversation or at least identify target areas that we can start putting agenda items around.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Going back to what you were saying a few minutes ago, Coraline. It does seemed like as Lorena mentioned that there are plenty of learning resources in Ruby but it does have a different character. It&#8217;s like there&#8217;s a bunch of law, little resources that somebody wrote but they&#8217;re all passion projects that are one or two people, might not get updated for a couple of years. Like you said, there&#8217;s just not a lot of structure and I wonder if that&#8217;s something in Ruby&#8217;s culture that maybe we&#8217;re missing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If it&#8217;s a cultural thing and I think it is because Ruby is essentially an autocracy, from a language perspective and we have this motto of, &#8220;We&#8217;re nice because Matz is nice.&#8221; We have no definition of what niceness is, we have no history of enforcing niceness or introducing consequences when someone is not &#8216;nice&#8217;. We’re lacking anything that sort of governs and directs the culture of the language community. I think that&#8217;s a real lack. I don&#8217;t want to get into the whole Ruby so I&#8217;m going to stop right there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess, maybe to supplement a little bit on that and to ask a question. I was recently in Cuba and the way I actually got to Cuba was A, I just wanted to go so that&#8217;s actually why but B, I really want to meet some of the people who are doing software and that are coding in Cuba and there is a Python Cuba mailing list. I don&#8217;t know anything about the mailing lists for Ruby or how conversations bubble up because I know I have [inaudible] checks, I know have sisters, I know I have all my Python lists if I want to reach out to people who are doing Python. How do people tend to communicate with one another in other communities?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I am kind of curious about that because for me, I was able to send an email to Python Cuba and say, &#8220;I&#8217;m coming. I want to talk to people who do Python. I was invited to the University of Havana. I got to see how they use Python in computer science. I got to see how they&#8217;re using in an artificial intelligence.&#8221; I was able to speak at &#8212; yes, this is a legitimately the name of the group &#8212; Social Encounter for Developers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I was invited to speak up at that but again, it&#8217;s just like there&#8217;s these contracts that are easily available and I think the PSF, we just surface that. We maintain the infrastructure of that but how does that happen in the Ruby space? Yes, it&#8217;s a really awkward name: Social Encounter for Developers. I laughed really hard when I heard that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But it abbreviated to SED so that&#8217;s okay.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There you go.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, I can speak to that at least a little bit. There are plenty of regional Ruby mailing lists, I should say. PDX Ruby has one that I&#8217;ve been running for years or helping to run. We recently started a Slack and recently, as in the last year or so and pretty much all of the conversation has migrated over to Slack. The email list is pretty much just announcements to 1200 people at this point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I did do what you talked about the last time I went to London and the London Ruby mailing list is pretty good. It’s quiet for a while and then there will be a thread with 10 or 15 contributions to it but I did do that. I emailed the list and said, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to be in London. Do any Rubyist want a meetup?&#8221; And I had a nice conversation with two guys in a pub. It doesn&#8217;t seem like there&#8217;s as strong an interconnection between those regional groups.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the areas I&#8217;m really, really interested in is Python in Latin America broadly speaking in the Caribbean. A lot of it has been through the mailing list. I find that when I say, &#8220;Let&#8217;s talk in Slack,&#8221; and this is a broader question, which is what is the future of organizing in languages because I find that the idea of, &#8220;What is Slack?&#8221; is already weird for some people. I don&#8217;t know how to properly express that but I find that like there&#8217;s a fatigue for, &#8220;Where do I go and get sources of information to do a thing?&#8221; And then, at least a mailing list is something I can check in on every once in a while but then &#8212; while I love Slack &#8212; I also find the idea of that to be a little bit of a fatigue so I&#8217;m curious if anyone has any expertise around that for the future of our organization.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve noticed that it seems to be something that if you&#8217;re a little bit younger, you&#8217;re more open to Slack and if you&#8217;re a little bit older, it feels like you had another place to go. I help to start an anthropology Slack and there, a lot of the younger anthropologist are like, &#8220;Yay! We finally have one.&#8221; A lot of the older ones are like, &#8220;Look, we have [inaudible]. I don&#8217;t know if I need another place. I don&#8217;t want to check my email.&#8221; And I was like, &#8220;It was not email. It’s a chat.&#8221; They&#8217;re like, &#8220;We already do this so we don&#8217;t need this again.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, if you&#8217;re not paying for Slack, you lose back scroll and if you&#8217;re working with people around the world, losing back scroll can be pretty terrible. Slack has publicly stated they&#8217;re not interested in developing features for nonpaying customers or for community groups and things like that. I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s going to improve anytime soon.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s really cool and I don&#8217;t know, maybe I&#8217;ve just become more involved increasingly from the regional level to a broader local but it&#8217;s been really exciting to see all these podcasts. I was very excited when I got to hear about this podcast, for example but just the idea of how do people synthesize information and what&#8217;s a great way to make it digestible such that people can hear it and participate in a way that&#8217;s meaningful and relevant to them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Podcast have been really interesting in that space for me too because again, there are podcasts that speak more broadly to us as coders, us as what we do day-to-day but also us within the specific communities in which we interacts, that might be a language, that might be a problem space, etcetera, etcetera.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to go back to this idea that there may be a difference in the Python and the Ruby community, in terms of how they organize. I think at least in my experience, having a centralization of resources and support and information has a lot of advantages but it has some disadvantages too. I wonder how, in the Python community, they make sure that they are presenting diverse voices and not favoring one group over other groups and things like that, when they have a centralized place where people go to get that information.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s a really, really great question and obviously, something that needs to constantly be looked at and reviewed. You might think you have a solution today but that doesn&#8217;t mean it&#8217;s going to be a solution in two months, two weeks, a year, etcetera. One of the ways in which we try to think about that is, for example when it comes to requesting grants for an event, like I am in Nepal and I want to have this Python day and here&#8217;s my budget of items.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you have a board that entirely made up of people from Chicago, we&#8217;re not going be able to speak very well to the idea of what&#8217;s a practical budget for a Python day in Nepal, what does that mean and what does that looks like? There’s actually a working group of grants, which has two people for each regional area that participate in the grants review, if you will and also any time when a grant does come up that need expertise from a regional context, we make sure to incorporate those voices. Granted this is an ongoing effort and not something that is 100% fixed, we are always actively trying to make sure we have a fair number of people to talk with and people that we actually know are doing things that are actually who they say they are. That is one way we would try to think about it &#8212; having grants group that has a diverse geographical make-up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also making sure that there is a limit on the number of terms that a person can do on board of directors. It’s another way to think about it. Also there&#8217;s been a lot of conversation in thinking about, for example the EuroPython community is very well-established. They have their own working groups. There’s some idea of perhaps, maybe the PSF turning a little bit more into a&#8230; I&#8217;m not sure what the proper word would be but perhaps more like an overarching umbrella and underneath, having regionalized Python bodies that have more power and have working groups that are explicitly defined to their geographic area and then continue to grow up from there. The way that we can perhaps think about is rather than the PSF overseeing grants that are broadly happening and what we may think of is Europe, perhaps we passed that off to the EuroPython Society and then from there, their working groups can do things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s a lot to be said about how do you have a proper structure, how do you have a proper voices in and how do you ensure that that is actually happening? I think these are all questions only board members continue to surface over and over. The other things too is also how do you make sure that knowledge is transparent and that things are happening. I know that there&#8217;s just a lot of projects that the board members is trying to do. I&#8217;m working on an organizers manual for like, &#8220;You want to run your first Python,&#8221; and a big effort that I&#8217;m doing is try to create a section that&#8217;s for regional organizers, not where I put their contact information in there but I actually say, &#8220;We would love for you to contribute your name, if you&#8217;ve been a regional organizer or you&#8217;re interested in being a regional organizer on this GitBook that we&#8217;re creating.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A big thing for us is just making sure that we continue to understand what is within the purview of the PSF and what is not, making sure that we expose ignorance on issues that we know that we are woefully ignorant on and making sure we push those discussions to mailing lists when applicable and as much as possible, going out into the world and talking about what the PSF does.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I went to PyCon Jamaica and I spoke about the PSF. I was in Cuba. I&#8217;m probably going to Mexico and this is not something that&#8217;s paid. This is something that I opt to do as a volunteer who was nominated on the board of directors. Clearly, you&#8217;ve got to be someone who really likes doing this kind of stuff. But I think with the right kind of mindset and the right kind of structures in place, you can at least get something that works, something you can continue to iterate on that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m pretty fascinated by how groups of people organized and form relationships with each other and the power structures that emerged from those relationships. With something like PSF or any sort of organizing body, it really depends on the good faith of the people doing the work. I&#8217;m happy to say that as far as I&#8217;ve seen, PSF has always done a great job of considering the issues that you&#8217;re talking about. But how do you maintain that as a group? How do you ensure that everyone that have participated in the PSF is doing the best work they can and thinking about all these issues?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We have the power to veto someone out if need be. Unfortunately, there&#8217;s truth in that this kind of work doesn&#8217;t fit with everyone&#8217;s life that people&#8217;s life change and sometimes not able to give a commitment that they could otherwise. Another way and this might not speak explicitly to holding individuals on the board accountable but at least, seeing what the board does or rather what does the money that the PSF have do in the community. I&#8217;ve been trying to create more content for the PSF blog and trying to put more effort into having write ups from the events, actually make its way into the blogs so at least, people can see what&#8217;s happening in the community in the world around us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There is still a bit of this honor system, if you will but the other thing to think about is tooling around. Like elections, I know that there was a lot of feedback with the election last year: how that should work, how it should be announced, what that ought to look like, where should that information be published? Sadly, I would say it&#8217;s still something that when I talk to some people about Python, they&#8217;re like, &#8220;What is the PSF?&#8221; And I think that is a really big sign that we need to continue to keep on doing this good work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One way we might think about changing that is how long do people actually serve on the board? Is it practical to have 12 new people every year? Should we try to think about restructuring to have more stability such that knowledge is transferred a little bit more smoothly? Do we think about hiring more people for the PSF that are actual staffers? I don&#8217;t know. These are kind of questions that happen within the board itself and it&#8217;s something that&#8217;s actively ongoing but at least for the big Python events, granted it does assume that you can go to something like you&#8217;re a Python or to something like PyCon. We do at least have the PSF member meeting where people can come and chat and that all being said, pretty much every board member is very, very active on social media and we do our best to try to make ourselves as accessible as possible.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s been small changes in the idea of writing monthly reports, the idea of how do we do with the election cycle and what does the tool look like. Then also, just making sure that we&#8217;re pushing as much information to the blog as possible. But obviously, there&#8217;s still a lot more work that needs to be done.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How was PSF funded?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s corporate sponsorship. We also accept donations and that is pretty much the big stuff. PyCon is really big. It funds a lot of things and then we have organizations that are sponsors at different levels. Like I said, we&#8217;ve got the individual folks who might donate through Python.org.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>PSF is a 501(c)(3), right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Uhm-mm.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So it&#8217;s a nonprofit organization that comes with some regulations and restrictions on putting business?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yep.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A lot of what you&#8217;re talking about is governance and how much of that is what you have to do to meet with the rules and regulations of being a nonprofit organization. None of that is self-imposed. You have to grow and desire to do better and to govern well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This presents interesting and unique challenges when we get funding requests because we are registered in the United States, where we have sanctions with countries that restricts us from being able to fund events as a software foundation. In Zimbabwe for example, is a kind of interesting space for us. We want to be able to fund events and activities there but there are restrictions that are imposed upon us by being a nonprofit in the United States.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Other ways to think about that is perhaps, can we created a dialogue around a GoFundMe to get a speaker out there? Is there ways that we can be an ally in helping create awareness about the event that allows us to perhaps both bring agency to this community and empower this community in some way? While also respecting the legal implications of how we are set up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We also have Kurt, who is our overlord of everything financial and he knows all of that, inside and out. I would say I am not versed on that but the good thing is we have a lawyer on retainer. We also have Ava, who is the director for the Python Software Foundation. I don&#8217;t know how she does everything she does but she&#8217;s very well-versed in nonprofit management and is actively always participating in trainings and things like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> From my perspective as an individual, I always try to say, &#8220;If we can&#8217;t do that, how can we do this?&#8221; A lot of that then will require directors to do outreach on their own to try to have dialogues around what are other ways we can help and then how the dialogue with the foundation to make sure that what we are doing is indeed legal. It can be difficult at times.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There are times when what you want to do as a foundation, what you think is the right thing for you to do, is in conflict with the regulations imposed on you by being a nonprofit.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>From the time that I&#8217;ve seen it, the way I&#8217;ve experienced it has been, if we can fund grants and areas where there may be sanctions?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s probably a lot of the regulations are dealing have to do with who you can get money from, who you can give money to, how you track that money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yep. Like I said, I by no means, an expert in that area. The reality of it is sometimes you get that answer where you&#8217;re like, &#8220;Why is this not a thing we can do,&#8221; and unless you&#8217;re able to talk to whatever power that be that oversees economics sanctions on a country, you just can&#8217;t do it but that&#8217;s not a unique constraint for the PSF. That&#8217;s a constraint that other non-profits will face. If you are a nonprofit that&#8217;s trying to evangelizing technology in other ways, you are going to face those implications.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s kind of interesting the Do Good Data for Social Justice, I think I might be botching that name but it&#8217;s a fellowship at the University of Chicago. They’ve done some really cool work where they are trying to create transparency with elections and areas that may have some questionable outcomes and the question may be is, &#8220;Is this actually a fair and viable election?&#8221; Some of the stories they talk there about how they can do that, what they can do, being in fellowship in a private university is difficult. I guess these are constraints we faced, both as individuals, as people and nonprofits and also, as a part of businesses or whatever communities that you&#8217;re in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s very different perspective than what I&#8217;m used to like all they talk about politics and identity. I&#8217;m like I don&#8217;t even have those framework to be able to talk about these things so it&#8217;s super great that you do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think the most fascinating thing for me has been, it was by becoming a coder that I think I was much more capable of talking about these things in a way that other people can bring their own experiences to it because I think for a long time the way I looked at problems and I tried to dissect them, made a lot of assumptions. Whereas, as a software engineer, you have to flush those assumptions up to the front. I think code has empowered me in some capacity to think a little bit more holistically about things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Holistically like rigorously?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I hope rigorously. That’s always a work in progress, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. That&#8217;s interesting because a lot about the way we think in the languages we already speak, you mentioned earlier &#8212; maybe this is my reflection &#8212; that you shied away from R because the [inaudible] as soon as that you speaks statistics, each of our languages has a metalanguage that people use to talk about the language like in Haskell, you need to know category theory to understand a lot of it. In Scala, you need some type theory and that affects the audience that can come to that one which a remark at PyCon in Chicago, there were a lot of academics and data science. The [inaudible] language that people used to talk about the language of Python and with PyLadies and Django Girls and all these other initiative and the PSF, there is a conscious effort to brought that on a ramp, to decrease the prerequisite, to speak in a language that more people can understand about the language of Python, which then in turn has taught you new ways of speaking about politics.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and I think the really cool thing also, at the minimum, I always get so silly because I think there are some people who will say my language is better than your language but I think what they&#8217;re trying to speak to is some of this some cultural nuances to different communities. Like I said, I&#8217;ve learned so much from the Chicago Ruby community. It is such a warm and accessible community. Some of the people I met, like I met Coraline at the very early on in my time pivoting into writing code, that it empowered me that I could do this and then some.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I kind of laugh when people talk about, &#8220;My language is better than your language,&#8221; when really they&#8217;re talking about the culture and it&#8217;s not even so much about the language. Then I have to roll my eyes and say, &#8220;You can do whatever you want with that language or with this language. It doesn&#8217;t really matter.&#8221; I think there&#8217;s a lot to be said about how communities organize themselves? What kind of messaging that they use? But then how does that also then inform us as coders today about the tools that we create and how those tools that we create can help change the landscape around us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s awesome. Sam do you have any thoughts on our conversation?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My thoughts on the conversation are that I slept very poorly last night and I really look forward to listening to this episode so I can find out what everybody said. Sorry.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Astrid, how about you?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really liked Lorena that it seemed like what brought you to programming was you were already interested in, which was political science because that&#8217;s something that I can relate to, having had a previous or I guess, an ongoing career as a social scientist. Part of my reflection, I think is a kind of a question because in the beginning, when you were talking about your origin story, when you first got started that this idea that code can and should touch everything wasn&#8217;t a concept that people really considered at the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Part of what, I guess want to know if you have any answer is what do you think that it could be doing code and programming that is not doing because now, we hear about how everybody should be a programmer and you think code does everything, everywhere. But then, as a testimony to some of things you mentioned, a lot of gaps in our knowledge about what&#8217;s actually going on and how we address it. What do you think that could be doing that it&#8217;s not doing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think I&#8217;ve kind of said this in a few different ways but the &#8216;now you can code and what do I do with that?&#8217; The idea of that you write beautiful code and it&#8230; I don&#8217;t know. It cut X number of time, it met my SLA, I got my VC funding&#8230; I don&#8217;t know, I&#8217;m being obviously silly but I think to me I&#8217;m really, really concerned about the way we built tools and how the assumptions we make when we create our tools actually changes the world around us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For me, that&#8217;s very much seen in the political space so the news recommender algorithm that Facebook created, which may or may not have polarized more, our idea of how we received news, how we then create these echo chambers, the idea of fake news in Twitter, even with Uber. A few years ago, they have that whole scandal with the mapping the ride of shame.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> People are creating these tools and I think that&#8217;s kind of thrown things over the fence, expecting that Like, &#8220;I made this. I don&#8217;t have to think about that concept or retool it over time.&#8221; The idea of [inaudible]. There is a social discourse and dialogue that I think each of you here understand and participate with, in your own way. I think it&#8217;s really incumbent upon us as tool makers to be at the forefront of that conversation and making sure we&#8217;re advocating appropriately and understanding our own biases and how that brings very real implications to the social fabric around us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The one book that I really love, that I encourage everyone to read is Weapons of Math Destruction, which was published just very recently but essentially she&#8217;s a data scientist who talks about how she was in finance and really just her transition from the academic space into data science and how some of these glaring implications in the social fabric that she really hadn&#8217;t thought about before until it really started changing people&#8217;s lives and she could see it. I think that&#8217;s out right now and maybe your day-to-day job isn&#8217;t writing the software, maybe you&#8217;re not Nate Silver and you&#8217;re predicting like the next person who is going to win a campaign or not. But you could be someone who&#8217;s like you&#8217;re working at Airbnb, you&#8217;re thinking about how do people book rentals around you, what does that actually mean about how people then interact in the physical spaces around them. Are we actually redlining again? Are we actually like redefining some of these demarcations in the social landscape that already exist?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I just think sometimes these conversations are so remiss or perhaps we don&#8217;t think enough about that that it can be very scary and for those of you who don&#8217;t know what the ride of shame thing was, essentially Uber started mapping late night repeat trips that people were taking from one location to another. It&#8217;s like the idea, you might say the walk of shame, if you think like college students, one person walking from one room in a dorm to another with the suspect that perhaps there was a romantic connection there. Now, Uber was doing that as a ride of shame.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Anyways, it&#8217;s very scary and I think these are the things that I really want people to think about when they&#8217;re thinking about how to create their tool. But it&#8217;s not just I created the tool. It’s like, now the tools are being used, let&#8217;s reevaluate. You need to have that ongoing discourse and reflection.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That could have ties into what I&#8217;ve been thinking about and I had a brief tweet storm about it last week, I think. We had this idea, as developers that we&#8217;re free of bias, that we&#8217;re logical, that we&#8217;re irrational. I talk about this all the time. We think of software as neutral and I got into an argument with someone about how software is not neutral. They&#8217;re like how does bias reflected up in the sales system but so much of the software that we write, it&#8217;s not neutral software, it&#8217;s always sociopolitical.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Software always has social consequences and in some cases, political consequences and that&#8217;s something, I think that we as developer seemed to pay more attention to so Lorena, what you&#8217;re saying about the life cycle of data, this is really important too. Think about the data you&#8217;re collecting, why you&#8217;re collecting it and what your plan on doing with it when you&#8217;re started to belly up because I have heard stories of startups in their death rows, trying to raise money by selling personal data that they&#8217;ve collected about their users. That’s the kind of thing that happened.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It was recently pointed out to me that you can find out who I am by searching &#8216;Coraline trans Chicago&#8217;. That takes you directly to my Wikipedia page. Data collection is scary and the networks of collected data are really scary and may have real repercussions for real people. That’s the thing we should be thinking about more.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. [Laughs] I have nothing more to add to that, just, &#8220;Yes,&#8221; times a bunch.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Rein, do you have any thoughts on today&#8217;s episode?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>REIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have many thoughts. The first one is that I think it&#8217;s time to do away with this notion that software can be a political or that it should be a political like you were saying software is inherently political. It’s what you get when people come together and do work together. It’s also the way that we mediate our interaction with potentially millions of people by shipping it. To put it in another way, software is made by people, for people. There is no way it can&#8217;t be political.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>LORENA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Just the whole idea like when I think of from 2008, when I started playing with code and political campaigns like now, even that conversation has changed so much. I think, we&#8217;re becoming more aware of it. It’s just that we need to be unapologetic about this conversation, I think. I reflect on myself a lot and I do my best to hold myself accountable but I meet other people that hold myself accountable so I think that also the other edge of it, right? It’s not just that we know it happens but also, when you get that feedback, what do you do with that feedback?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This has been a great discussion and I want to thank everyone who participated. A special thanks to Lorena and Rein who joined us at relatively short notice this week. We’re very happy to have both of your voices as part of the conversation this week and we hope to hear from you again in the near future. Everyone out there, we hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, consider contributing at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode and we will talk to you next week. Thanks and bye.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/loooorenanicole"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lorena Mesa</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://lorenamesa.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">lorenamesa.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://sproutsocial.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sprout Social</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.python.org/psf/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Python Software Foundation</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.meetup.com/Chicago-PyLadies/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">PyLadies Chicago</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.writespeakcode.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Write/Speak/Code</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Hey! I Made a Bong Out of This Podcast!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:26</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.p2012.org/candidates/obamaorg.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Obama For America Campaign</span></a></p>
<p><b>05:46</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Politics and Software; Data Collection</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWBZNxPzoUY&amp;feature=youtu.be">Danah Boyd: Be Careful What You Code For</a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Thank you </b><a href="https://twitter.com/gkfox"><b>Greg Fox</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p><b>16:43 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Working in Python for Data Collection</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://djangogirls.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Django Girls</span></a></p>
<p><b>19:46 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://www.python.org/psf/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Python Software Foundation (PSF)</span></a></p>
<p><b>23:55 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Communication and Organization Within Communities</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2011-08-19-matz-is-nice-so-we-are-nice"><span style="font-weight: 400;">MINSWAN: Matz is Nice So We Are Nice</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Encounter_Party"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Social Encounter Party</span></a></p>
<p><b>33:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">–  Power Structures and Forming Relationships</span></p>
<p><b>36:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– PSF Funding</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Each of our languages has a metalanguage that people use to talk about the language.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Needs more sleep</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Cod]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ReinH"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rein Henrichs</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/loooorenanicole"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Lorena Mesa</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://lorenamesa.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">lorenamesa.com</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://sproutsocial.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sprout Social</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.python.org/psf/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Python Software Foundation</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://www.meetup.com/Chicago-PyLadies/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">PyLadies Chicago</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.writespeakcode.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Write/Speak/Code</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Hey! I Made a Bong Out of This Podcast!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:26</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.p2012.org/candidates/obamaorg.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Obama For America Campaign</span></a></p>
<p><b>05:46</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Politics and Software; Data Collection</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWBZNxPzoUY&amp;feature=youtu.be">Danah Boyd: Be Careful What You Code For</a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Thank you </b><a href="https://twitter.com/gkfox"><b>Greg Fox</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p><b>16:43 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Working in Python for Data Collection</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://djangogirls.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Django Girls</span></a></p>
<p><b>19:46 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://www.python.org/psf/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Python Software Foundation (PSF)</span></a></p>
<p><b>23:55 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Communication and Organization Within Communities</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://blog.steveklabnik.com/posts/2011-08-19-matz-is-nice-so-we-are-nice"><span style="font-weight: 400;">MINSWAN: Matz is Nice So We Are Nice</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Encounter_Party"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Social Encounter Party</span></a></p>
<p><b>33:49 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">–  Power Structures and Forming Relationships</span></p>
<p><b>36:39 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– PSF Funding</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Reflections:</b></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Each of our languages has a metalanguage that people use to talk about the language.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Needs more sleep</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Cod]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Banners_and_Alerts_and_Slack_-__Code.png"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Banners_and_Alerts_and_Slack_-__Code.png"></googleplay:image>
										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/434/episode-023-lorena-mesa.mp3" length="50047435" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>52:08</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>Episode 022: You Are An Asset</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-022-you-are-an-asset/</link>
					<pubDate>Tue, 07 Mar 2017 15:22:48 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=417</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[In this episode, we focus heavily on technical interviews and ideal work environments.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[In this episode, we focus heavily on technical interviews and ideal work environments.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Panelists:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ryder Timberlake: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/rydertimberlake"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@rydertimberlake</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and<br />
</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jacob Stoebel: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jstoebel"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@jstoebel</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.jstoebel.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">jstoebel.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Mob Programming” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Thank you to our newest $50-per-month-level patron, Bryan Karlovitz!</b></p>
<p><b>02:39</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Stories From All!</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://fourhourworkweek.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tim Ferriss and The 4-Hour Workweek</span></a></p>
<p><b>12:37</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Work/Life Balance and Ideal Work Environments</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Stockholm Syndrome</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>If you’re looking for a hilarious podcast that focuses on issues that software developers face, such as getting fired, pay raises, strategies for pushing back on bad ideas, and even stock options, check out </b><a href="https://softskills.audio/"><b>Soft Skills Engineering</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://softskills.audio/"><img class="alignnone wp-image-418 size-thumbnail" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SSE-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="150" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SSE-150x150.jpg 150w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SSE-300x300.jpg 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SSE.jpg 400w" sizes="(max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://softskills.audio/2016/05/09/episode-10-mentors-and-stock-options/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Episode 10: Mentors and Stock Options</span></a></p>
<p><b>16:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Technical Interviews</span></p>
<p><b>20:41 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Computer Science Degrees: Are they worth it?</span></p>
<p><b>27:42 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Compulsions to Know: Contempt Culture</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://blog.aurynn.com/contempt-culture"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aurynn Shaw: Contempt Culture</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://automation-excellence.com/blog/zens-python-and-ruby"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Zens of Python and Ruby</span></a></p>
<p><b>34:12 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">–  </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatekeeping_(communication)"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gatekeeping</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in Tech</span></p>
<p><b>37:11 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Technical Interviews (Cont’d) </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pair_programming"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Pair Programming</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to Episode 22 of Mob Programming. I&#8217;m your host, Sam Livingston-Gray and with me this morning is Coraline Ada Ehmke.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, Mob Programming is the name of our podcast. I fully believe you, Sam and I will not argue with you under any circumstances. It has nothing to do with a tweet that you have prepared about me and given me a screen capture of, that you will tweet if I disagree with you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Who else do we have? Oh, we have Jessica Kerr with us today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Coraline and I am thrilled to be here today with guest panelist, Ryder Timberlake.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Jessica. I am also thrilled to be here with guest panelist, Jacob Stoebel.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks, Ryder and collectively, we are&#8230;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ALL:</b> Greater Than Code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, did I messed up?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Together we are not on cue.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Totally works.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You might notice, we have a couple of guest panelists today. We have Ryder and Jacob with us. How did we select Jacob and Ryder? Does anyone know? Well, as you may know, if you&#8217;re a regular listener of this podcast, if you pledge on Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode at any level, you can get access to our Slack community and this week our guest had to cancel so we decided to reach out to people in our Slack community and see who is interested in co-hosting with us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We did a little lottery and it was adorable, Mandy&#8217;s daughter picked names out of a hat and that&#8217;s how we ended up with Ryder and Jacob and we are so thrilled to have them with us. If you want the opportunity to maybe take part in a future show or if you like the idea of being somewhere where you can talk about serious things and often, do fun things like that, go sign up. You can sign up for as low as a dollar a month then join us and join our wonderful community.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Speaking of Patreons, we want to thank Bryan Karlovitz who is our newest $50 sponsor. Our show is 100% listener funded. We are open to corporate sponsorships for the right companies. You can contact us about that but at present, we are 100% listener funded and we really appreciate people who donate at any level but Bryan Karlovitz at the $50 level is going to be a big help to us so thank you so much, Bryan.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Jacob, we like to start the show with origin stories and you haven&#8217;t been on before. How did you acquire your superpowers?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I work for a college right now. I was hired in a job that&#8217;s a little bit different from what it is right now. It sort of evolved. Basically, I was hired to be an Excel data entry person. I was hired because I had some competencies in Microsoft Excel. After working for about six months or so, I found that the systems that they were hiring that work manually were really unwieldy and at the same time I had been learning Python and doing some neat things to automate really boring tasks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I approached my boss and I said, &#8220;How would you feel if I created some software that could automate what we&#8217;re doing?&#8221; Fast forward to four years later which is now, I&#8217;m managing a Rails app that has completely overhauled this big data system for the department I work for. I guess, in a way my origin story is still taking shape. I write software for most of my job but my job title does not say software developer in it. I would like for it soon but that&#8217;s where I came from.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow, so you automated yourself out of one job and into another?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And then another?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, basically.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is the best. I love doing that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If it gives you any hope, I have a dear friend named Jack who pretty much was doing the same thing. He worked for a mass mail marketing company and hated the job. He was doing data entry too, started programming and now he&#8217;s a pretty well-known frontend engineer. He worked his way out of that job and automated his way out of that job so there&#8217;s definitely a path forward for that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s really good to know. I am mostly self-taught. I also live in a small town so in terms of pairing up with other developers is a thing that I have to drive 45 minutes for to meet other people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; Is your friend.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. It&#8217;s just encouraging to know that because for standing on this side of it, it feels like a canyon that I&#8217;m hoping to traverse soon but it is a canyon nonetheless.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, based on your work for a college and your title doesn&#8217;t say software engineer and you evolved into this job, I&#8217;m going to guess that you&#8217;re severely underpaid.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s extremely likely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. I&#8217;m going to take that as a compliment. I&#8217;m going to be a dad soon and I won&#8217;t lie. I hope the money situation will improve as well because it&#8217;s nice to have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, if you can&#8217;t have sleep, you can at least have money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Parenting as a software engineer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s sort of in a nutshell. It&#8217;s like ask me again in six months because &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think, it&#8217;s exciting to hear.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; It&#8217;s still happening but that&#8217;s me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Ryder, how about you? How did you get to software and become&#8230; Wait, what have you become?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>An automation engineer at Salesforce. When I started out, I had worked a number of jobs I was pretty underpaid and overqualified for. Although, of course, if you&#8217;re not working, you&#8217;re not overqualified for anything so I had a rocky beginning to mid-career trajectory where I was just working at places. I was also inflexible about moving geographically so I was working at places that met that criteria. I was always attracted towards more autonomy, creative lines of analysis and thinking. I wanted to be a musician. I tried to be an artist a couple of times professionally, which is hard to do. I&#8217;m sure some of you have experience with that. Eventually, it seems like a profitable thing to pursue. I actually came to programming by way of stock trading. I did stock trading first and programming is a little bit less stressful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because you can always undo, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, maybe.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Source control for the stock market.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Seriously, in programming, we have the ultimate power. We can save our game.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The next person who says block chain is fired, by the way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The thing you said the next person and otherwise, right? I&#8217;m old enough that my first job in tech that my title was webmaster, in 1994.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Fire GIFs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was more tasteful than that. I worked for an engineering company and I don&#8217;t have a traditional background at all. I sort of did and I sort of don&#8217;t. I started programming at seven and by twelve, I taught myself assembly language because you couldn&#8217;t make high-res graphics go fast using any other language. I always knew I wanted to develop software for a living. Then I got to college and I took my first CS class and it bored the hell out of me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Our semester long project was to write ATM software in C and I was like, &#8220;What am I going to do with the rest of my time?&#8221; I was like, &#8220;If this is what software development is like, I guess it&#8217;s not for me,&#8221; but I kept hacking on side projects. I went to work for this engineering company. I was actually doing media relations. I built them a database for tracking press releases and stuff like that so I was still doing tech stuff but not really. But I knew all the geeks because we all smoked together. I had a good relationship with the software developers and sysadmins.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One day, when one of them comes up to me and was like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know if you heard but the company&#8217;s starting a web team.&#8221; I was like, &#8220;That&#8217;s really cool. Yeah, get on the web. That would be great for the company,&#8221; and then they said, &#8220;What do you think that&#8217;s going to do for your career?&#8221; I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Career? I don&#8217;t have a career.&#8221; But that was the start of my career. It was interesting. From my interview, I had to study how to do tables made of [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I remember. Those were useful, as long as you know how to slice your files appropriately.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s excellent.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I majored in physics in college because it sounded hard which is the best interview answer. It&#8217;s actually true. That was silly and it sounded hard. It wasn&#8217;t hard though.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Really? I have a really hard time with it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I started at bachelors and it depends a lot on your teacher. We had good teachers but physics, if you want to go into that, you just have to have a huge passion for it because you&#8217;ve got to go to school for 10 years and you&#8217;re going to have to move around the country and look for positions and move around the world and just hope to find something that let you do research in that field.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I was lucky enough to get a programming internship to a friend of my aunt&#8217;s during college and I was like, &#8220;Wow, this is pretty sweet.&#8221; I&#8217;m pretty good at it. It&#8217;s a lot of fun. I got to program in this mapping software. It was ArcInfo at GIS and like make maps. It was super fun. This is for FedEx. I was like, &#8220;Wow and you get to go home at 5:30 and there&#8217;s no homework, right?&#8221; There&#8217;s no papers and projects hanging over you that you&#8217;re supposed to do. I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I could totally do this.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then I found out that I could get a job anywhere in the country with my bachelor&#8217;s degree and make $40,000 a year in 1999. I was like, &#8220;Sweet. It&#8217;s good, this physics thing,&#8221; and I did and that&#8217;s worked out. I&#8217;ve been developing professionally for 15 years. I no longer have the property where I can go home at 5:30 and forget about it but that&#8217;s a choice because I&#8217;ve discovered the software is incredibly fascinating and the people in software are incredibly fascinating. Now, I do not put it down. Well, okay, I do put it down at six o&#8217;clock but only for a couple hours so my kids go to bed.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hopefully, you&#8217;re making more than $40,000 a year now too. At least, 45, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, nine-to-five was a luxury worth relinquishing for how cool software is for you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s kind of like that Tim Ferriss&#8217; The 4-Hour Workweek thing where it&#8217;s very easy to say that you only work for hours a week, if you redefine everything that you do as work as not work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Especially now that I&#8217;m at Atomist, I&#8217;m doing the stuff that I used to do in my free time and I get to do it full time so it really blurs the line now because it used to be, I worked until six. Then after I come back and learn, stop and read and write blog posts and make talks &#8212; mostly make talks &#8212; but now, that&#8217;s all the same thing. I can work on my talks in regular hours and I can code on the weekends and it&#8217;s just all blurred together. The work-life balance doesn&#8217;t seem like a problem when your work feels like life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I could get the same thing working at GitHub on the team that I worked on rebuilding the entire [inaudible] community management features. I&#8217;m basically getting paid to do the stuff that I was doing anyway, except now I have leverage over the entire open source world, which is a definite advantage but I have a dream job and I get all these recruiters that are like, &#8220;There&#8217;s this hot new startup,&#8221; and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Do you know where I work? Do you have any idea what I do and what that means to me? Thank you but no.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Now, what you were describing, Coraline about the ladies room at GitHub, that sounded really inspiring and like a wonderful and supportive place to be.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s great. My team member are amazing but my interactions with other people outside my team have been pretty good as well like really good with a couple of that-was-weird moments but overall, really, really good. The culture is definitely changing. for those who didn&#8217;t know what that reference is about the bathroom, on the engineering level at GitHub HQ, there are posted notes and Lisa Frank stickers and a bunch of Sharpies and we leave encouraging messages for one another and we ask each other questions. One person&#8217;s even doing like the [inaudible] adventure story. There&#8217;s a sword in front of you, what do you do and it&#8217;s like, pick-up the sword and it&#8217;s like, in columns down the entire door. It&#8217;s so cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s amazing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The game master is coming back and writing the bits or different people also being the game master?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, the game master is coming back. Judging from the handwriting, it&#8217;s the same person coming back and doing the responses.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is it all set in a bathroom?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It actually starts out in a laboratory, not a lavatory but a laboratory.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Come in a place to find sword just lying about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Has anyone ever encountered a time because I have, when at first the work-life mixture was a good one and in other times, it didn&#8217;t work out so well?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is the same job?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Not this job, no. I come from the arts world, theater specifically and in that world, nonprofit theater is like, &#8220;Why would we be doing this?&#8221; If not because we loved it like there&#8217;s no other reason. I think what followed from that was while we have to go to the [inaudible] together, we have to do XYZ, we all have to sort of live together too. At some point that became, I don&#8217;t think essentially a bad thing but it just turned out to not work for me and I&#8217;m wondering when does it work and when does it not? When does that work-life blurring become negative?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think to a degree there&#8217;s a Stockholm Syndrome because it kind of sneaks up on you and you&#8217;re like, &#8220;Oh, I&#8217;m new. I have to work extra,&#8221; and then that becomes a new normal for you and you forget the fact that you&#8217;re working 60 hours a week.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And then the next new person starts and looks at you and thinks that&#8217;s the expectation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had a job where people started doing commits on weekends. I actually went to management and I was like, &#8220;You need to tell them to not do this because this will become the new normal.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And then did you have to explain why that was a bad thing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and guess how effective it was?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How long did you stay in that job?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe 14 months.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, not surprisingly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Long enough for my stock options to bust.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I had the options conversation with a potential employer recently and I think I might have hurt some feelings when I basically explained that I value options at zero because there are just so many variables that I don&#8217;t even want to think about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Lottery tickets.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, you&#8217;d rather buy me lottery tickets because I can calculate the expected value on those very easily.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I worked for about six or seven startups but one of them actually did payoff and it did payoff pretty big. My strike price was $4.76 and I sold the stock at $24. That&#8217;s just once.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. Speaking of stock options, I was listening to another podcast called Soft Skills recently and they actually had a really interesting episode. I think it was Episode 10: Mentors and Stock Options. They had a really good explanation of stock options and how they work. If you got lost when, Coraline said strike price, go listen to that. It&#8217;ll clear a lot up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sweet. Shout out to Soft Skills Engineering. That&#8217;s another podcast that you&#8217;ll might want to check out. If you&#8217;re looking for a hilarious podcast that focuses on issues that software developers face such as getting fired, pay raises, strategies for pushing back on bad ideas and even stock options, check out Soft Skills Engineering at SoftSkills.io.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Jacob, you said that you are working as a software engineer but you haven&#8217;t yet acquired software engineering job in the traditional sense so you are going to have to go through the dreaded hurdle of your first technical interview.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I&#8217;ve read about it and thinking about it, trying to at least mentally prepare myself or emotionally prepare myself. It&#8217;s almost like a system of reproduction like we have CS degrees that they went through that ringer to get their job and once they feel like that is a reasonable expectation for everybody, they&#8217;re going to subject the same people do it so we end up with more CS degrees. It&#8217;s a little scary. I&#8217;ve taken a few CS classes but put together a [inaudible]. That would be tough for me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s important to note that interviews are two ways. You will learn as much about what the company values from the coach on they give you, the abstract or the algorithm and so on or does it reflect the work that you&#8217;re actually going to be doing because I have never had to invert a binary tree in my entire career. I have never had to write my own sorting algorithm because my language provides a sort method. These quiz questions, they tend to be too CS-y for me. Like I said, I&#8217;m a dropout and if that&#8217;s what the company values, I really don&#8217;t want to work there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, fair.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it sort of says that the engineers that are haven&#8217;t really thought at all about interviewing so they&#8217;re just going to go back to standard nerd gate-keeping behavior which is horrible.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah definitely. I think you can have some of that stuff in the interview but it&#8217;s the main component. That says a lot, Coraline definitely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. How many times as an engineer actually write code on a fucking whiteboard. It does not happen. It&#8217;s like saying, &#8220;Oh, if you would design a programming language, what would it do and do it on the whiteboard.&#8221; I&#8217;m like, &#8220;No, I&#8217;m not going to do that.&#8221; I&#8217;ve actually turned away jobs because of programming exercises they expected me to do. I got one exercise from a company that a very prominent Rubyist works for, where they&#8217;re like, &#8220;We want you to complete this within one hour. We want you to do your first commit and then your last commit. We’re going to look at the time difference between them.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then I&#8217;m like, &#8220;If you value me being able to write a really, really good code in one hour, you&#8217;re not giving me time to test, you&#8217;re not giving me time to refactor. Fuck you.&#8221; I&#8217;m so sick of that and that sets such expectations and sets the bar so high that people from non-traditional backgrounds get filtered out of jobs where they could really be a valuable asset. They could really bring some different thinking to the table but because of this monoculture, it&#8217;s like, &#8220;I know these cover things because I have this CS degree and I took an algorithm class and I think everyone should think exactly like me and everyone should be a robot just like me.&#8221; We&#8217;re keeping people out that deserve and it works really hard that they deserve to be in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>People who are good at different things than you are, as supposed to using the interview to make yourself feel smart.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and people who could help us solve cultural problems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As the representative of the computer science degree holding population, I would just like to say that all that shit is bull crap. I had a really good time in some of my computer science classes. I did all the data structures stuff. Side rant: I did my data structures homework in Python first and homework took me about four hours and I did a TDD. Then I would take the thing that I&#8217;d implemented in four hours in Python doing TDD and I would just try to reimplement the solution with very few tests in C++ or Java. I kept track of how long it took me and the minimum multiplier from going from Python to Java was about 5x. Going from Python to C++ for me, the worst one was 9x.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I was like, &#8220;Why am I doing this? It took me four hours to do the homework and then I spent like 25 reimplementing it just because they didn&#8217;t want to read Python. What the hell?&#8221; I mean, I could rant for hours about how CS has taught but I&#8217;ll give you the brief version. It&#8217;s just that there&#8217;s a lot of valuable stuff in computer science and I feel for the people who are designing CS curricula because they&#8217;re trying to serve people who are going to go into academia, they&#8217;re trying to serve people who are going to go, like a big employer out here in Portland as Intel. If you&#8217;re going to go into chip design, you need a different set of skills, perhaps than somebody who&#8217;s going to go into web development so they&#8217;re trying to meet a broad range of needs, at least in theory.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But then they have this one-size, fits-all curriculum where they start everybody off with C and C is pretty frustrating. But when I started in on C++, C looked really good. It was just really hard to get my head around and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Why am I getting all these fucking no pointer errors?&#8221; I basically feel like there&#8217;s an element of hazing that goes on. It&#8217;s like I learned this the hard way and I feel now I need to make you prove that you can go through this so that I don&#8217;t feel like my time was wasted. Maybe that&#8217;s a little unfair, I don&#8217;t know but that&#8217;s how I feel about it when I&#8217;m super cranky.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, or me worrying that I have a CS degree and I learned a lot of C. Me worrying that learning all that C maybe isn&#8217;t quite as valuable as it was 15 years ago.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right so I have to assert this upon the world.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and it&#8217;s not that C isn&#8217;t valuable. Like you said, it&#8217;s incredibly valuable but not in every state. I work in a college and the department I work in is as a teacher training so we train school teachers. My boss has some really, really interesting things to say about education theory. One of them, maybe you&#8217;ve heard it too, was the idea that we should be meeting kids where they are and that&#8217;s the starting point and then help walking with them as they go to where both of us want to be.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think like the text stack, like we have the microchip at the very bottom and then we have a lower level language like C sitting on top of that and then maybe we have an interpretative language like Python, like you&#8217;re saying Sam. It seems to me that the theory that we need to start learning about what&#8217;s going on deep down inside the computer and work our way up, it&#8217;s really counterintuitive. We need to start with the user who is interacting with higher levels things and then work our way down to first of all, learn Python and then we&#8217;ll learn what Python is doing under the covers. &#8220;Oh, it&#8217;s C,&#8221; and then what&#8217;s going on even lower down than that so it&#8217;s like starting with the learner and getting down to the technology as opposed technology first.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think one of the advantages of that kind of approach too is that a lot of people who get into programming, they couldn&#8217;t through PHP because maybe they&#8217;re in high school and they have a WordPress site and they want to customize it so they learn PHP and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Oh, programming is pretty cool. I think I&#8217;ll go to school and maybe get this degree,&#8221; and the first thing they see is C and has no relation at all to their idea of programming and that&#8217;s going to scare them away.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The other day, I was at Northwestern University. They have just night labs program, KM [inaudible], which is a collaboration between the journalism school and the computer science department to work on interactive storytelling in journalism. It was like a round table discussion. I was the guest and one of the students, Mr [inaudible] was like, &#8220;I think the thing I&#8217;m looking forward to most in professionally doing CS is applying the scientific method to everything I do. When I do a feature, we&#8217;ll do AB testing on the feature to see if the implementation was good.&#8221; Now, I had to tell him &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, dear.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; That happens on the frontend UX/UI stuff but that does not happen anywhere else and I&#8217;ve never had to apply the scientific theory to anything I do. I&#8217;d rather &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Debugging.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ll do all the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes that&#8217;s true. But in terms of the features that you write and like, &#8220;This product manager has two different ideas for how we can implement this so let&#8217;s implement them both and see which one really works.&#8221; That simply doesn&#8217;t happen. In short, I think that we should have computer science degrees for people that are new to computer science-y things and we should have software development degrees where they&#8217;re taught practical skills like actual methodology, pair programming, source control and things that you&#8217;ll actually use in a job as a software developer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But all of those ideally would have a heavy component opinion of working with actual people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that would be good. I actually lucked out and I got to take a class in extreme programming from a person who has my undergrad advisor and James Shore who is well-known in the Agile community. That was a super fun and super hard class. I actually almost quit it on the first lab day.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] Did you get a cranky partner or were you the cranky partner?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think we&#8217;d all agree that there&#8217;s use in being exposed to, not necessarily computer science but thinking like a computer scientist. I hope there&#8217;s value in that and it&#8217;s how do we get to a place where we can have both. Let’s think about like, &#8220;Let&#8217;s approach this scientifically,&#8221; and let&#8217;s think about being nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I laughed because of how both seamlessly intuitive, that should be for us and how much it&#8217;s not and how much that would really advance the field, if that were the case.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There was this great series of tweets last week that a lot of people participated in and it was basically like, &#8220;I work at X doing Y and I still have to Google Z.&#8221; I thought that was really great because these were, in many cases, pretty prominent programmers confessing and admitting for the benefit of more general people that you don&#8217;t have to memorize all this stuff and it&#8217;s okay to look things up and it&#8217;s okay not to know everything. Don’t be intimidated by not knowing everything and I thought that was really great.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that is great and I think so often, we feel like we have to know. I know this is a topic that you&#8217;ve discussed on the show before. There&#8217;s this compulsion to know and not to be able to put out that you don&#8217;t know and rest in that and have people look at you and be invariable like 20% or 50% of tech audience who would look at you and say, &#8220;Wait? You don&#8217;t know?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Let&#8217;s talk about contempt culture.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Let&#8217;s talk about contempt culture. It&#8217;s toxic and bad.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For listeners who are new to this concept, Aurynn Shaw wrote a wonderful blog post about contempt culture and she&#8217;s recently followed it up with talk that expanded on some of those ideas that I have yet to watch. But her basic thesis is that all of this stuff that where we make people feel bad for their technology choices is essentially shaming people and discouraging them from participating. It&#8217;s a gate-keeping behavior, it&#8217;s toxic and it&#8217;s surprisingly pervasive.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We were talking in the pre-call about using Python versus Ruby and how they&#8217;re basically the same language but there are some cultural differences between them. Even in that short conversation where everybody&#8217;s friends here, I could see that we were coming close to that edge of there&#8217;s critique of the language itself. There&#8217;s discussion of the differences between the cultures and then there&#8217;s this judgment. That judgment, I think is the thing that as programmers, we tend to do a lot more than I think we should.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I used to be really contemptuous of JavaScript. But what I say now is that JavaScript doesn&#8217;t make me happy so I don&#8217;t want to program in JavaScript and that&#8217;s not a judgment on the language. It&#8217;s not a judgment on the people who enjoy the language. It’s a reflection of my relationship with the language which I think is not contemptuous and is perfectly fine for me to talk about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, you&#8217;re not injecting baggage into it. You&#8217;re not saying when you use JavaScript, don&#8217;t you know that it does X, Y, Z with Types. You&#8217;re not making any kind of judgement about the person who chose to use it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, we can make our opinions about us because, really almost everything we do is not about the person we&#8217;re speaking or the person that we appear to be reacting to. It&#8217;s almost always about us in our experience, in our context and this language is at the same way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a link I like I have taped to door. People in the Python world now that&#8217;s in the Python. If you open your Python Rattle and type-in [inaudible], that&#8217;s what you see and it talks about sort of values. [inaudible] I don&#8217;t know that constitute Pythonic code or idiomatic Python, things like beautiful is better than ugly, flat is better than nested, readability counts. Somebody wrote this out of Ruby, which when you put them side by side, you see these counterarguments that are like, &#8220;Python says that simple is better than complex.&#8221; The side of Ruby said, &#8220;Simple is boring.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Seriously?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah this is very tongue-in-cheek. It&#8217;s quite cute.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And what it sort of reveals to me, they&#8217;re kind of is a little bit of touching on, flirting with contempt in this post but I think what it&#8217;s also revealing for me is we put forth the ideas that Python thinks this and like how could this not be true. But then you make a counterargument that&#8217;s like, &#8220;Oh, right, they&#8217;re kind of is a counterargument to that. Why does everything have to be simple?&#8221; Maybe there&#8217;s some joy in writing something that&#8217;s a little bit more expressive, for example.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sam has just posted to the chat that its tradeoffs all the way down and I couldn&#8217;t agree more. There this dangerous and pervasive idea that there is a best way to do thing and that there exist best practices, rather than a best way to do thing in a given context or good practices or best practices, if you happen to have built the other stuff this way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that the strongest statement we can possibly make that is fair is that there&#8217;s something is the best tool for you right now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or even just a good enough tool because that all right. You&#8217;re not comparing everything you know. We haven&#8217;t taken into account every possibility. It&#8217;s just good enough.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I do a lot of artificial intelligence work on the side like a passion project of mine to get a program that understands and creates metaphors, which is not a simple problem. People are like, &#8220;Did you do that in Lisp?&#8221; I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Ruby.&#8221; And they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Ruby&#8217;s terrible for that.&#8221; I am like, &#8220;But I am fluent in Ruby and I can execute on my idea without thinking about syntax so it is the most natural place for me to do it. It&#8217;s the best job for me at this time.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, absolutely and once you&#8217;ve built it in that, you could take it to a Lisp or whatever. It pains me that we don&#8217;t have more people who are really robustly polyglot and really robustly unconcerned with what languages people should do. It little bit touches on what we&#8217;re talking about as moment ago and what Greg posted to the chat, this sense of the role for a learner should be you adopt the context of the learner and you&#8217;re this spotter at the side of the trampoline and you&#8217;re making sure that your learner doesn&#8217;t do any crazy talk that might hurt themselves with.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s a great analogy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The more languages you learn without exerting, &#8220;That&#8217;s just wrong judgment,&#8221; then the wider your perspective get, the more approaches you can bring and the more perspectives you can understand when you&#8217;re teaching. Like Jacob said, as the teacher, it&#8217;s your responsibility to adapt the context of the learner.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Someone mentioned the concept of gate-keeping and I think that&#8217;s where I&#8217;m going back to. Gate-keeping is this notion that there are authorities with opinions and you have to either agree with their opinions or get their blessing to have a different opinion before you can be right on the internet. Gate-keeping takes a lot of different forms. Gate-keeping is a term that is used with transgender people to reflect the number of hoops you have to jump through to actually get treatment, all of the letters you have to get like for my passport, I had to have two letters from my doctor which is ridiculous.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But gate-keeping in tech, I think is just as insidious because you have the self-appointed leaders or self-appointed expert who maybe did something interesting five years ago or 10 years ago or maybe have the luxury of being paid to do open source and their opinion matters more than anyone else&#8217;s. If they disagree with you and they disagree with you publicly, your idea is just treated as shit, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and also they&#8217;re not being held to the same standard, Coraline. Their ideas are not being put under this microscope in the same way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was thinking about this just yesterday. The concept that an idea in order to get an idea under consideration and tried, you need two things. One, somebody has to have the idea. Two, a person has to present it who is listened to so an idea need a sponsor and I&#8217;ve noticed that sometimes when I have an idea, if it&#8217;s really an important one, I won&#8217;t always just throw it out there. I might go talk to somebody and let it be their idea. Somebody who is like most likely to be listened to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Like a virus?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is that a gender dynamic?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know it&#8217;s just politics, just who knows who, who listens to who. I mean, a gender can be a part of those politics. There are some people but they&#8217;re not going to listen to me or any other woman but those are rare in my personal experience.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because they&#8217;re all at Uber.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Earlier, Sam I was agreeing with Coraline but that said, but it is that way. I think the more we can recognize that as a reality and overcome this knee-jerk, yeah it&#8217;s terrible that it&#8217;s that way and I&#8217;m disgusted with the politics of it. The more I don&#8217;t want to be involved, the more effective we can be in some ways.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s stuff we can all do to help with that which is when you hear someone&#8217;s idea and you&#8217;re like, &#8220;That might be a good idea,&#8221; or even if you don&#8217;t have no idea, there&#8217;s a good idea but you observe that it&#8217;s not being heard: amplify, echo.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I get so angry if I go on a rant and I have notifications turn on and it&#8217;s like, &#8220;So and so is like this. Like 52 people like this.&#8221; I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Why didn&#8217;t 52 people fucking retweet it?&#8221; You know?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would really like to get back to the technical interview question and in particular, I&#8217;d like to hear from everybody. What are the best technical interviews you&#8217;ve had? What is a good technical interview?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am very biased towards pair programming so I&#8217;ll just get that out there. But many of the best technical interviews that I&#8217;ve had and I&#8217;ve had some good ones, involve pair programming with somebody else. When I was at Living Social, I interviewed with a bunch of people including [Raine Hendrix?] and we sat down and we actually paired on a bug that he had observed in production and that was really fun. In the end he&#8217;s like, &#8220;That&#8217;s a really neat solution. Let’s put that into the code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There was another one where I was interviewing and the person that I was with sat me down and I started writing a test for the first feature and I made it pass. I went to write the second test and he reached for the keyboard and I was like, &#8220;Wait, what? You and I actually ping pong this? Great!&#8221; And I tossed it over to him and that was a wonderful surprise. For me, the best interviews are those where I get to learn a lot about the person that I&#8217;m pairing with. For me, pair programming is the best way to do it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have to agree emphatically.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s not what can you do within an hour by yourself with no guidance.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. It&#8217;s really the best way to find out, at least for me, how somebody else thinks. Now, I have to acknowledge that this process is biased against people who don&#8217;t do well in that environment and I don&#8217;t know how to address that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I guess if you have a pairing environment, the best way to interview is pairing. I agree. Those are my favorite interviews too. Especially, remote pairing because then you don&#8217;t have to fly a candidate in, you can get a good idea of what it&#8217;s like to work with them without going anywhere.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, we have these tools. Why not make use of them?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like remote pairing, even better than pairing in person.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How come?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You got the personal space problem figured out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I love using remote pair programming tools when I&#8217;m pairing in person because we don&#8217;t have to sit together and crane our necks to see the same screen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, everybody has their own keyboard. Everyone is comfortable and you really do have your own screen. Sometimes, I&#8217;m watching exactly what you&#8217;re doing. I have might switch over to Chrome and looks something up for you or I might be keeping my eyes on Slack and it&#8217;s like all of the input and the back and forth, without this pressure to look like you&#8217;re staring at the same thing all the time. It&#8217;s like not having to maintain eye contact in a conversation. You can focus more.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had a really great interview experience at GitHub. There was a take home exercise which take home exercises are kind of [inaudible] because they assume a certain level of free time but this was relatively small. I think it took me an hour to complete it. GitHub does anonymous reviews of the take home assignment so you&#8217;re assigned non-identifying ID and associate it with a repo. The people who do the technical review have no idea who you are, what your name is, what your gender is, what your background is. It is strictly a technical evaluation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Assuming you get past that level, there&#8217;s fake pairing where you have people watching you but not ever taking control of a keyboard but walking through an actual web app. If you&#8217;re applying for a web developer position, you&#8217;re like do you see any problems with performance here. The interesting thing is to tried our best to avoid bias, we have a rubric for every single question that gets asked of a candidate so we say if they talk about X, this is worth five points. If they fail to talk about X but they mentioned Y, that&#8217;s worth three points and so on so there&#8217;s no room for, &#8220;I wouldn&#8217;t have a beer with this person after work,&#8221; and kind of crap like that. It&#8217;s all very well-defined in terms of what kind of feedback you can get from them. Then best of all, in my opinion is at the end we actually ask questions about awareness of social issues in programming because that&#8217;s the reflection of what the company values are now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I should also point out that I interviewed with eight people and six of them are women and GitHub does its best to not have a chain of white dudes that you talk to so you&#8217;re not getting eight Chads. You&#8217;re getting a cross-section of people from different parts of the company and from different backgrounds. I think that really affects the overall experience.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Was it eight people in one day? I hope not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, some of them is about half and half.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay. Because that&#8217;s another thing that I find in a good interview is two hours max in a day. If you&#8217;re doing it remotely, you can still have more interviews just don&#8217;t put it on the same day. That&#8217;s so stressful for people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and if you want to make good use of your developer&#8217;s day who&#8217;s doing the interviewing, they can do three two-hour interviews in one day but they don&#8217;t have to be with the same person.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One other example of a good interview that I liked, they gave us some code to look at. It was like a little sample application. This is back at my Java days. I had a little Java app and there were deliberately some bugs in it, there were deliberately some key code. There were plenty of opportunities for you to comment on the application until the interview, once you came in, they gave you a feature and asked you to implement it. But it was the code you&#8217;d already gotten to look at and they also asked you like, &#8220;What would you change about this code if you had time?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That&#8217;s was low pressure, getting to know the code, take as much time as you need. Then in the interview, can you talk about it? Not can you implement a ton of stuff in a short amount of time but can you step through it? Then the actual thing they may ask to implement was small enough that there was no rush. I like that one and that&#8217;s with a lot of prep on the part of the department. It was good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But you got to reuse it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, but actually, they stopped using that interview because the code got out of date and it was nobody&#8217;s job to update it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That seems like a really good way to maybe find out if somebody has the skills in diplomacy to be able to critique code without doing the throwing up your hands and saying this is crap and doing a table flip and leaving the room, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s true.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Did anybody do that and got filtered out on that stage?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I interviewed at this company with that interview. I didn&#8217;t do interviews.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it sounds like a brilliant process and it evokes some of what you were talking about too, Sam as far as like using code that is actually used like when you describe your Living Social experience. That&#8217;s critical, that&#8217;s huge. It&#8217;s so valuable and Jessica, this just occurred to me for some reason when you were describing your experience but if we could actually take it a step further and like in medical school, in certain medical programs, they&#8217;ll have actors who are playing the roles of patients and then they&#8217;ll have this number of symptoms on which you do your differential and so on. Could we have actors playing the role of a recalcitrant engineer or some terrible boss and just have a scenario where we put you in and we see how you work in that situation. We see what soft skills you leverage. We get just a little more insight not just the code review piece but what makes you throw the table and rage quit.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think if a company did that to me, I would leave.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[inaudible] that a very prominent, large consulting company. They were like, &#8220;There&#8217;s going to be this logic test and we&#8217;re going to give you a sample test first,&#8221; and there were four or five candidates at the same time. They said, &#8220;We&#8217;re going to give this test first and feel free to collaborate,&#8221; so the sample test was maybe four or five questions and basically, it was a state machine and you had no scrap paper to work off of. A lot of trace through the state machine and perform the calculations on the numbers that were provided as inputs and just say what the output was.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s a lot to keep in your head at the same time and there is this guy who is like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know why I have to do this. I&#8217;m not applying for a technical position but I guess I have to do this anyway,&#8221; and he kept asking me for help. He was like, &#8220;What did you get on step seven of problem number two?&#8221; I&#8217;m trying to keep numbers in my head which is problematic for me personally, anyway. I have an actual problem with that. He kept interrupting me and I kept losing my place and I have to go back and start over so the sample test was done. She comes back in and she&#8217;s like, &#8220;All right. Here’s the real test. You have one hour to complete as many problems as you want,&#8221; and business guy continued to ask me questions. I was like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t think we&#8217;re supposed to be collaborating anymore. He&#8217;s like, &#8220;No, I think it&#8217;s fine for us to collaborate still.&#8221; I had misgivings about that and again, these problems are even more complex so I was not able to finish more of them. I didn&#8217;t do well on that test at all and I suspected that after the interview, he was a plant to see how well I would do at interruptions and that made me so angry.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Like a mind game, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Like are you supposed to follow the instructions and then not get in trouble for not following instructions or you&#8217;re supposed to like collaborate because that&#8217;s what a good programmer does. It’s like what&#8217;s the thing that&#8217;s going to get me the job because at the end of the day, that&#8217;s why you&#8217;re here to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Where is the ethical review board on that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that does sound very stressful and sub-optimal, definitely. Coraline, I want to ask you, had the company been upfront about, &#8220;We&#8217;re going to put you in a situation and we want to see how you respond. Would that have resolve your misgivings or no?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Potentially, it would have changed my interactions with the interrupter but really the nature of the test itself was stacked against me because as an example, if I asked someone for their phone number and they tell me their phone number, I will remember the first two digits if I&#8217;m lucky. The rest simply falls out of my head. I cannot process numbers in that way. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> With no way to write down the interim steps and write down my interim numbers, there is no way that I could have done. Even under the best circumstances, I could not have done well in that test. As a logic test, I guess it was well-designed but for someone like me with that kind of mental block, there was no way for me to pass it. If that didn&#8217;t relate to the work I was being done, it was not a good test.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>They produced a false negative.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My wife does HR. She sits in every interview that her company does. She was telling me that it&#8217;s a really popular thing in interviews &#8212; you&#8217;ve probably gotten this before, I have &#8212; just some kind of theoretical to see what would a candidate do in a situation like this. She was telling me that every version of that question is just fundamentally bunk because everyone knows how to cheat that. Everyone knows how to hack that question because they answer how they know they&#8217;re supposed to. But really, what you&#8217;re really interested is dispositionally, what is that person disposed to do when they&#8217;re not under a microscope.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and everyone on the driver&#8217;s test puts, &#8220;I would not accelerate at a yellow light.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Let&#8217;s just remember that there are some limitations. I would guess, most interviewers are not psychological experimentalists. The thing they think they&#8217;re doing that&#8217;s so clever, may actually not be that valid and let&#8217;s try to be transparent about what we&#8217;re trying to get from people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But Jacob, we are scientists.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have zero beakers in my office.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My daughter has a water bottle shaped like an Erlenmeyer flask with a straw on top. It’s adorable.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Did you do AB testing to determine what the best water bottle for her was?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, I think she got it as swag somewhere.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sam, I agree with you the pair programming pieces is really important. That for me is the fundamental thing. If you&#8217;re doing it with production code, that&#8217;s even better but just aligning as closely as possible, the circumstances of the interview with the circumstances of the actual work you&#8217;ll be doing that job.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I&#8217;ve seen some companies espoused the idea that you should not interview at all and instead, do a one-week contract project with this person. I can see where they&#8217;re coming from with that. Of course, it also selects even more strongly for somebody who has the free time to be able to take a week off of their regular job and then come in interview with you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It does. Ideally, I guess they would put you up in a hotel and they would pay. No, there&#8217;s no good way to do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If you&#8217;re unemployed, it&#8217;s a mini-vacation but if you have a job then you&#8217;re sort of stuff that came down that are like, &#8220;I have a cold and it&#8217;s going to last a week.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or if you have kids or if you caring for a family member or pretty much, any of a variety of other things or you have a disability. It selects against a lot of people, which I mentioned earlier the idea of a false negative in that logic test that you described, Coraline and I want to talk at least a little bit about some of the sort of background radiation that I&#8217;ve observed around the hiring process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Every once in a while, I run across an article about how to structure your interview process. Even in the days before [inaudible] pieces were a thing. One very common theme that I see in those is this idea that your interview process should be skewed in favor of producing false negatives because it is &#8212; according to these people &#8212; much better to reject a good person than to hire a bad one because hiring a bad person is somehow thoughts to be extremely costly. Maybe there&#8217;s an HR perspective on that. I&#8217;m not sure but it seems to me like structuring your interview process in that way means that you&#8217;re going to miss out on a lot of good candidates and it means that you&#8217;re going to miss out on a lot of diversity that would really benefit you as a company. Anyway, I just wanted to mention that as I mean that&#8217;s out there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It makes you risk averse, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Totally because the risk is you fire somebody and then they sue you because they thought there was an implied contract or something.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You usually have more to lose from a toxic person, unless the person is great, have to gain by hiring a great person. One toxic person can take everything down.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s true and I&#8217;ve seen that happen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and certainly the perception it sounds like these HR departments are working with.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right but say it with me, everybody: HR&#8217;s job is to protect the company.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We introduce this notion of a probationary period of three months or something like that, where it&#8217;s long enough that you can feel you can safely leave your job and maybe three months is long enough to determine if you&#8217;re a toxic person and to have an escape clause for the company or it&#8217;s like, &#8220;We made some kind of mistake. You didn&#8217;t meet all the criteria for a valued employee so we&#8217;re going to try and find someone else.&#8221; Maybe that would help solve the problem. I don&#8217;t know.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As a new person, I would have strong questions about what is not being said about some kind of writer like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, they have to be very explicit like these are our expectations and you have to have regular check-ins to see how you&#8217;re doing. You wouldn&#8217;t want to be surprised at the end of three weeks or three months, rather.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I think if there was a writer like that, I would be extra on the lookout for strange culture in that place because if I get a whiff of like there are a company that&#8217;s like looking to axe people left and right when they make one mistake&#8230; I have a stable job now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I&#8217;ve worked in one place where the lesson that I took away when they and I parted ways was that I really, really should have asked what is the median tenure of your employees because it turns out it was like two months.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And why is it what it is? Why do you think it is what it is?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Singing] &#8220;To everything turn, turn, turn.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>RYDER:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sounds like we&#8217;re saying it takes work to make the hiring process better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s got to be somebody&#8217;s responsibility. There has to be one person responsible for making an experience as effective and positive as possible. You can&#8217;t leave it up to, &#8220;Oh, you&#8217;re a manager here. Figure out what to do.&#8221; This is an area of specialization.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JACOB:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and interviews can be &#8212; what&#8217;s the word? Not traumatizing. That’s over dramatic. But people can walk away with hurt feelings after interviews and then if they end up getting the job, they&#8217;re going to take that in with them when they start, if they start.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, it&#8217;s been really great discussion today and Ryder and Jacob, I&#8217;m so happy that you&#8217;re able to join us today. I think the lottery turned out just perfectly and we got some really interesting conversation with you both. We want to thank everyone for listening and we will be back next week.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I have to remind you one more time that if you want to support us as a listener, go to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode, pledge at any level, get access to our Slack community which includes our guests. Our guests stick around and you can ask them questions so if you feel like there&#8217;s something we didn&#8217;t cover in the podcast, you can get your question answered which is pretty cool. Again, thank you all. Thanks to our guest panelists and thanks to you, the listener.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Panelists:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ryder Timberlake: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/rydertimberlake"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@rydertimberlake</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and<br />
</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jacob Stoebel: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jstoebel"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@jstoebel</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.jstoebel.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">jstoebel.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Mob Programming” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Thank you to our newest $50-per-month-level patron, Bryan Karlovitz!</b></p>
<p><b>02:39</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Stories From All!</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://fourhourworkweek.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tim Ferriss and The 4-Hour Workweek</span></a></p>
<p><b>12:37</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Work/Life Balance and Ideal Work Environments</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Stockholm Syndrome</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>If you’re looking for a hilarious podcast that focuses on issues that software developers face, such as getting fired, pay raises, strategies for pushing back on bad ideas, and even stock options, check out </b><a href="https://softskills.audio/"><b>Soft Skills Engineering</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://softskills.audio/"><img class="alignnone wp-image-418 size-thumbnail" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SSE-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="150" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SSE-150x150.jpg 150w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SSE-300x300.jpg 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SSE.jpg 400w" sizes="(max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://softskills.audio/2016/05/09/episode-10-mentors-and-stock-options/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Episode 10: Mentors and Stock Options</span></a></p>
<p><b>16:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Technical Interviews</span></p>
<p><b>20:41 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Computer Science Degrees: Are they worth it?</span></p>
<p><b>27:42 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Compulsions to Know: Contempt Culture</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://blog.aurynn.com/contempt-culture"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aurynn Shaw: Contempt Culture</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://automation-excellence.com/blog/zens-python-and-ruby"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Zens of Python and Ruby</span></a></p>
<p><b>34:12 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">–  </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatekeeping_(communication)"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gatekeeping</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in Tech</span></p>
<p><b>37:11 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Technical Interviews (Cont’d) </span></p>
<]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Panelists:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ryder Timberlake: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/rydertimberlake"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@rydertimberlake</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and<br />
</span><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jacob Stoebel: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jstoebel"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@jstoebel</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://www.jstoebel.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">jstoebel.com</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Mob Programming” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Thank you to our newest $50-per-month-level patron, Bryan Karlovitz!</b></p>
<p><b>02:39</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Stories From All!</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://fourhourworkweek.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tim Ferriss and The 4-Hour Workweek</span></a></p>
<p><b>12:37</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Work/Life Balance and Ideal Work Environments</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Stockholm Syndrome</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>If you’re looking for a hilarious podcast that focuses on issues that software developers face, such as getting fired, pay raises, strategies for pushing back on bad ideas, and even stock options, check out </b><a href="https://softskills.audio/"><b>Soft Skills Engineering</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://softskills.audio/"><img class="alignnone wp-image-418 size-thumbnail" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SSE-150x150.jpg" alt="" width="150" height="150" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SSE-150x150.jpg 150w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SSE-300x300.jpg 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/SSE.jpg 400w" sizes="(max-width: 150px) 100vw, 150px" /></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://softskills.audio/2016/05/09/episode-10-mentors-and-stock-options/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Episode 10: Mentors and Stock Options</span></a></p>
<p><b>16:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Technical Interviews</span></p>
<p><b>20:41 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Computer Science Degrees: Are they worth it?</span></p>
<p><b>27:42 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Compulsions to Know: Contempt Culture</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://blog.aurynn.com/contempt-culture"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aurynn Shaw: Contempt Culture</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://automation-excellence.com/blog/zens-python-and-ruby"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Zens of Python and Ruby</span></a></p>
<p><b>34:12 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">–  </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatekeeping_(communication)"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gatekeeping</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> in Tech</span></p>
<p><b>37:11 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Technical Interviews (Cont’d) </span></p>
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					<googleplay:explicit>Yes</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
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					<itunes:duration>56:01</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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					<title>Episode 021: Social Justice Warrioring and Codes of Conduct with Phil Sturgeon</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-021-phil-sturgeon/</link>
					<pubDate>Thu, 23 Feb 2017 21:56:31 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=404</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[Phil Sturgeon joins us to talk about codes of conduct, contempt culture, and what it means to be a Social Justice Warrior.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[Phil Sturgeon joins us to talk about codes of conduct, contempt culture, and what it means to be a Social Justice Warrior.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Phil Sturgeon: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/philsturgeon"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@philsturgeon</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span><a href="https://philsturgeon.uk/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">philsturgeon.uk</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to Greater Than Code: The SJW Takeover</span></p>
<p><b>00:53</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story, Superpowers, and Bike Messengering</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://leanpub.com/build-apis-you-wont-hate"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Build APIs You Won&#8217;t Hate</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.instacart.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Instacart</span></a></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en" style="text-align: left;">Had pesto chicken pasta for dinner, in honor of <a href="https://twitter.com/philsturgeon">@philsturgeon</a>’s interview on <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode">@greaterthancode</a> today. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/2.3/72x72/1f60b.png" alt="😋" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></p>
<p>— Sam Livingston-Gray (@geeksam) <a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam/status/834644793376411648">February 23, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>07:59</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Long-form Blogging (aka Rants)</span></p>
<p><b>08:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Codes of Conduct: Adoption, Enforcing, Conspiracy Theories</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://contributor-covenant.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Contributor Covenant</span></a></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">“Codes of Conducts are so full of slippery slope arguments, they could open a waterslide park.” <a href="https://twitter.com/philsturgeon">@philsturgeon</a></p>
<p>— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode/status/834862579004628994">February 23, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>17:40 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What it means to be a “Social Justice Warrior”, Tolerance, and “Being Nice”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d6376?gi=5a03baffa4c2#.ty01vckbo"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tolerance is not a moral precept</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://where.coraline.codes/blog/on-opalgate/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke: On Opalgate</span></a></p>
<p><b>27:46 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– False Reports vs Genuine Issues; Dogmatic Logic vs Empathy</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Susan J. Fowler: Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://philsturgeon.uk/2016/07/23/talking-about-diversity-marginalization/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Phil Sturgeon: Talking About Diversity: Marginalization</span></a></p>
<p><b>39:40 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Transitioning From a Men’s Rights Activist and Being a Good Ally</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://melmagazine.com/i-was-a-men-s-rights-activist-55a0d2eb6052#.fi15jf9tn"><span style="font-weight: 400;">I Was a Men’s Rights Activist: One man’s journey from misogyny to feminism</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/sarahsharp/status/833599571242545152"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah Sharp Tweetstorm</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">  </span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">“Being an ally isn’t a badge that you earn. Being an ally is a process and you’re going to fuck it up.” <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda">@CoralineAda</a></p>
<p>— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode/status/834874610554454016">February 23, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script><br />
<b>47:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– PHP vs Ruby</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://blog.aurynn.com/contempt-culture"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Aurynn Shaw: Contempt Culture</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-002-avdi-grimm/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Greater Than Code Episode 002: Avdi Grimm</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Takeaways:</b></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Turning confusion into something that assuages everyone else’s. Also, failing upwards: When something doesn’t work out, something better will.</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">“It’s not about, ‘No, past me was okay,’ it’s about, ‘Hm. Future me is going to be better.” <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron">@jessitron</a></p>
<p>— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode/status/834878807194681347">February 23, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> In tech we have tools for doing root cause analysis, and we’re really used to using those to figure out technical issues, but those very same tools can work for social issues as well. Try </span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The 5 Whys</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> on something that isn’t technical.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Thinking about how to get past people’s visceral reactions against social justice issues and think about how to create better allies.</span></p>
<p><b>Phil:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Start bookmarking things that are helpful.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!</b></p>
<div id="Transcript" style="display: none;">
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The role of Jenn Schiffer today will be played by Phil Sturgeon.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m happy to play that role. I am a lizard made entirely of CSS and HTML.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to Episode 21 of Greater Than Code: The SJW Takeover. I&#8217;m Coraline Ada Ehmke and with me today is Sam Livingston-Gray.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning, Coraline and I just have a clarifying question. Are you perhaps suggesting that this is not always been an SJW takeover point. Anyway, with that out of the way, I would like to welcome to the show, Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Sam and I get to welcome our guests today. Hello, Phil Sturgeon. Phil used to contribute to the PHP-FIG, the League of Extraordinary Packages, PHP The Right Way, CodeIgniter, FuelPHP, PyroCMS and a bunch of other stuff but he gave it all up to join the circus. Phil, I hear you&#8217;re in the Ruby these days.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Last couple of years, I&#8217;ve been doing a bit of Ruby. The companies I work for just happen to use Ruby and I&#8217;ve been doing PHP for 15 years before that. Luckily, they didn&#8217;t mind me swapping over and kind of learning how it all work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Are you saying that Ruby is a circus, Phil?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] Uhmmm&#8230;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I believe it was Jessica who implied that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Things over there actually seem a little bit more sane a lot of the time but I don&#8217;t get as involved as I used to in PHP. Maybe the nonsense is happening. I just don&#8217;t see it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;d like to start off the show with every guest, explaining their background story, how they discovered their superpowers and whether or not they use their superpowers for good or for awesome. Phil, how did you get started in the circus?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I started in the world of programming, in general when I was at school. There was an online magazine that there&#8217;s a games review section and there&#8217;s a cooking thing and these are all different things that people contributed when we were like 11 or 12 years old. Most of them were done with self-publisher and mostly they were really bad and the games website was so incredibly terrible that I learned how to make websites with Microsoft FrontPage to knock back games review website off. After I&#8217;d been doing that for about a year or two and started with HTML which is gross, someone taught me about PHP and I managed to grow the website to be big enough that I had, I think it was Acclaim and Konami, sending me free games review copies so I could review them and that&#8217;s awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When you&#8217;re 13 or 14 years old and you get sent a copy of Metal Gear Solid six months before it comes out in the shops, you&#8217;re a very popular kid for a very short amount of time. Since then, just doing more, learning more. Run my own company for a while. About failed in the recession. I got bigger and better job since then. Failing upwards, as I call it. I&#8217;ve been blogging about stuff the whole way and releasing a lot of open source code, teaching people how stuff works, turn in complicated topics into no nonsense like every man speak so people know how the hell these things work with Screencast, that sort of stuff. Now, I&#8217;m in New York, using my skills for good by day and then being a bike messenger in the evenings so it&#8217;s a good mix.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Since you&#8217;re in New York now though, you really need to tune any accent and start speaking American.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We don&#8217;t take [inaudible] around here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Not bad.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Would you say your superpower then is taking complicated concepts and translating them into simple language?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of my super powers is getting really confused about how advance topics work and then just spending ages churning through it until I understand it and regurgitating it mama bird style to people that aren&#8217;t necessary as computer science-y like myself. The reason I did a whole book about API was that all the content out there about these in APIs was so incredibly complex that I&#8217;d like fall asleep from I read it. After I powered my way through that enough and got a good understanding of how things work plus roadwork experience, I was then able to create a book that literally anyone can read and it just makes sense. Well, literally anyone can read as long as they read English or are okay with the translations I have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think the other superpower is dodging cars. Although, just like Superman, I&#8217;m not entirely invincible. Cider is my kryptonite and occasionally I gets snagged.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cider?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. It&#8217;s a British thing. When you&#8217;re riding a bike after drinking a whole pint of cider, you&#8217;re not quite &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The alcoholic cider.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. In the UK, all cider is alcoholics. We don&#8217;t mess around.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I speak fluent UK so I can confirm that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Let me go back and see if I have this correct. You have produced Screencast and books and various other educational things and you&#8217;re a programmer by day and you are a bike messenger in New York City at night? Have I got all that correct?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s correct.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, so if you need me, my impostor syndrome and I will be rocking back and forth over in the corner over there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I have done these things over the years. These days is more the cycling and less with this Screencast. I&#8217;m trying to work on a video series and I&#8217;ve been promising people that I&#8217;ll get it done for the last year. I think I&#8217;ve done like four practice videos. It is really hard to get these stuff done. When you list up all the things I&#8217;ve done, some people think it&#8217;s kind of impressive but it&#8217;s over a lot of time and I&#8217;ve done a lot of stuff with the help of a lot of people. Mostly, all open source stuff I&#8217;ve released is being a community effort with a lot of other people as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So it&#8217;s not just that you&#8217;re awesome, you&#8217;re also old.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think 28 is pretty old in development years, isn&#8217;t it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What brought you to being a bike messenger? That’s kind of an odd juxtaposition of careers, isn&#8217;t it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s a bit weird. I actually found out about the whole idea of it through a friend of mine. I&#8217;ve been cycling for a long time. I do a lot of charity bike rides, a lot of multi-day ride between cities: Boston, New York, that sort of thing. A friend of mine that I met on one of those rides, he was launching Instacart and it was really funny. It was just around the time that the first I was supposed working for went bankrupt and I just didn&#8217;t have any money coming in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> He said, &#8220;Hey, Phil, you should come on to Instacart. We want to get you help with something.&#8221; And I&#8217;m started there thinking, &#8220;He knows some developer. This is going to be great. He&#8217;s going to get me to do some contracting work. I&#8217;m going to make a whole pile of money.&#8221; And he was like, &#8220;You ride bikes, right? Do you want to help us ride bikes and delivering food for the day?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I felt like going from being a contractor and a developer who makes X reasonable money and now it&#8217;s like minimum wage job, kind of sucks but right now I don&#8217;t really have much else going on. Visa is really complicated. You&#8217;re not really meant to have anything that could be considered another job so when I had this whole two or three months’ worth of time where I wasn&#8217;t legally allowed to work but I still had this apartment that I couldn&#8217;t get rid of and I was stuck in the country, unable to leave or return, it was a really weird thing so when they said, &#8220;Do you want to use bike messengering on the side?&#8221; I was like, &#8220;Yeah, sounds cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Since then, I&#8217;ve got very into the sharing economy. Aside from being with my apartment, I was renting out some of my bike on Spinlister. I&#8217;ve been started riding for Uber. I normally try to ride like 100 or 150 miles a week and one good way of doing that is to get paid for it. Instead of paying to go to a spin class, I&#8217;ll actually ride my bike around New York City and then make $50 in the evening or whatever, just working out and dropping off pesto chicken for people too lazy to get it themselves.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Probably, not super relevant to your audience but I think it&#8217;s fun.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you specialize in delivering pesto chicken?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a lot pesto chicken going around. Also, a lot of fried chicken. A lot of chicken in general and sushi. I know who died delivering somebody cupcakes one time. That was pretty funny. That&#8217;s not the way I want to go out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I hope those cupcakes were appreciated.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Me too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And/or bloody.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Vampire cupcakes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Phil, one of the things that I like about the work that you do is you do a lot of long-form blogging.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, a lot of people like to call them rant. I don&#8217;t know if I call them rant. I just like to really outline everything. Because whatever you do a short post, people always misconstrue it and come up with their own. Like if there&#8217;s any context missing, people will just add their own context and then moment you go for a walk, they thought you meant. I like to really send my thoughts straight. It&#8217;s not always in the best form. It&#8217;s not necessary an essay. Some of it is a bit rant-y but I really like the feeling. It&#8217;s just kind of getting all the thoughts and stuff out there. Then whenever someone says, &#8220;Derp, derp, derp,&#8221; I can just kind of link them to the blog post and then they&#8217;ll fully understand what I&#8217;m trying to say.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or they won&#8217;t read it because it&#8217;s too long and then you&#8217;ll be like, &#8220;Oh, you didn&#8217;t read my posts so you can&#8217;t say anything.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Basically, yeah. Like if you can&#8217;t be bothered to read it and you want to continue arguing with me, then I&#8217;m happy to block you. That&#8217;s fine.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Phil, in terms of our history, I think I first became aware of you when the PHP community was considering adopting the Contributor Covenant and it was a hotly debated matter for, I think over six months and you did a lot of writing about codes of conduct in general and the Contributor Covenant, in particular. What was that period like?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was a hot mess. It was really complicated. To basically frame it, there was one contributor, one very well-known contributor, Anthony Ferrera who suggested the code of conduct to be added. He made a RFC on the PHP wiki, which is standards process for suggesting any new features or any new kind of anything. RFC is a request for comments and most of those comments were people screaming into their keyboard which was a bit nuts. He copy and pasted for [inaudible]. I think it was probably Contributor Covenant 1.2 or 1.3 and that was just a suggestion.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> He said, &#8220;We can use any code of conduct you like. I rather not make our own but this is a fairly good standard one. That&#8217;s been used by a lot of people. What do we think about going with this?&#8221; They also setup a vague outline of a mediation process like instead of just having a piece of text in there that just says, &#8220;We&#8217;re going to help,&#8221; you actually have to setup a process for how you actually help anything. Then it was all about private mediation and it was a lot of things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A lot of different people had a lot of different issues with various different parts. Most of these questions were okay. It was things like, &#8220;Are there any others we could use? I quite like this one from Drupal. I quite this one from Go.&#8221; A lot of different things are happening but there was a lot of really stupid people &#8212; not stupid people, there was a lot of stupid things being said by people that were otherwise very well respected in the community that was based around their lack of understanding about how code of conducts work, about how Contributor Covenant works and about what your roles would be in the process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s a lot of people who are just super scared, in general for misunderstanding previous situations. There are a lot of people that just jump to conclusions about how Contributor Covenant works and people just really scared about the SJWs trying to takeover. It was a lot of nonsense that I got involved with, trying to help unpick. It was super difficult. I was, right at the very start, at the whole process. I&#8217;d already kind of quit, I was already not really doing anything with PHP anymore. I had already step by my responsibilities. I sold a company that was writing PHP. I was nothing to do with PHP anymore. But I still had a sway, I guess.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I was going to talking about it a little bit but it started off with a completely jovial and just like one of the biggest &#8216;tossers&#8217; in PHP has got a massive problem with the code of conduct happening. In the UK, &#8216;tosser&#8217; is just like the word jerk. It doesn&#8217;t really mean anything particularly graphic. It&#8217;s just whatever kind of word. Of course, immediately at least do some jumping down my throat because they looked at the dictionary for definition which is a little bit more graphic.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Immediately, they&#8217;re start in saying, &#8220;Phil is actually harassing all these white dudes,&#8221; and &#8220;Phil is doing this and he wants [inaudible] him and [inaudible] somebody else. I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I have nothing to do with PHP anymore so even if I did call someone, even if I was saying something terrible, the code of conduct wouldn&#8217;t apply to me anyway but I was immediately somewhat invalidated so I have to take the backseat and I just hope everyone else would take it on. But a lot of the PHP community just banded together and start screaming at everybody and losing their minds. By the time I was ready to try and get back involved and suggest to what&#8217;s going on, there were already so many arguments that people would just fed up without even trying.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Key person checks the RFC has step down, somebody else step up, they gave up. After getting screamed at, like anyone who even try to help with the code of conduct, their sexuality and then motives and everything would get called into question. People would say things like, &#8220;Phil is just doing this to try and get attention from the ladies, if he even like ladies.&#8221; All these crazy, ridiculous stuff that I just don&#8217;t understand and it never really go anywhere. A third person try to push the RFC and that just scared of how much of a time sink it&#8217;s going to be and how it&#8217;s going to affect the jobs and careers and things. It&#8217;s a really weird scenario.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s the current setting of PHP.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Pretty much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have to point that Ruby didn&#8217;t do much better with the attempt at adopting code of conduct either so that kind of thing is rampant.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, we wound up with something that claims to be a code of conduct but basically says everybody be nice with no real definitions of what that means and no real process for mediation or remediation, which is something that you brought up earlier, Phil about how &#8212; I&#8217;m terrible with names, I&#8217;m sorry &#8212; but the person who propose this added a bit about having an actual mediation process. That gets to something really interesting about codes of conduct that I&#8217;ve been seeing in conversations about them for years, which it&#8217;s not enough to just copy-paste a code of conduct and magically, boom! Everybody will come and join your project. You actually have to believe in it and work and enforce it and actually make an effort to create a safer space, if not actually a safe space.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It plays in my mind that people don&#8217;t understand that. Just having a piece of text doesn&#8217;t do anything. People say things like, &#8220;Having a code of conduct doesn&#8217;t actually help anything. It doesn&#8217;t stop anything bad from happening.&#8221; I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Right but&#8211;&#8220;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; Process is for. We understand that. I put a coding style file in my repositories to let people know what coding style I would like. But then I also work it up to Travis so that if the coding style is broken, then like emails, even it fails the pull request saying, &#8220;This pull request contains invalid style.&#8221; A marked down file on the internet doesn&#8217;t do anything. No one thinks it does. We all know that. It&#8217;s part one, then you need part two and part three. I&#8217;m so confused that anyone thinks that anyone would suggest that a marked down file on the internet is going to change the world.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It is necessary but not sufficient.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, maybe that&#8217;s why people got so upset about it because they thought that if the marked down file was coming then, that meant that they might actually have to change their behavior.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s a slippery slope &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Are these people worried that they&#8217;re assholes?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; To actual justice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I heard a really funny quote from a friend of mine who&#8217;s had a lot of trouble with code of conduct as well. The cases against code of conduct are so full of slippery slope arguments, they can open a water slide park. It&#8217;s ludicrous. I can&#8217;t have a single conversation about it without somebody saying, &#8220;If we let people say, I don&#8217;t like this behavior and it kind of sucks when you call me this name, can you stop?&#8221; Then eventually, people would be getting fired for having political beliefs every time. I guess it&#8217;s this weird stamp of what if we do this more reasonable thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s like the arguments for gay marriage where we&#8217;re like, &#8220;If we let homosexuals get married, then all of a sudden people be marrying horses.&#8221; No! The first thing happens, it doesn&#8217;t mean the second thing will happen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wait a minute, I once fell in love with a horse, though I don&#8217;t appreciate that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, Philip actually means lover of horses so I do understand your concept.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Some of your blog post analyzing opposition to codes of conduct. You pointed out that part of the problems comes from individuals acting like there&#8217;s a conspiracy out to get them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. A lot of the time, there are people that are posting about certain things on their blog. They might have certain political views. It’s the same blog that they put a lot of their tech content on. These people will post about some technical thing and then the next post after will be something that&#8217;s kind of controversial, something a little bit of [inaudible], a little bit lifestyle. Then they&#8217;ll get back to posting about tech again. They kind of aid themselves [inaudible] between tech under political views and they think of it as politics. But really, a lot of it is about basic human rights and decencies with each other. The politics line is kind of a tricky thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Because these people post about tech one minute and then about something that&#8217;s pretty bad like super, super sexist or pretty misogynist or complaining about the crazy feminists, they&#8217;re at it again, in quotation marks of course, they will then get shouted at by a lot of people. If you have a tech following and then you start showing that you&#8217;re past of the problem in tech, then the tech people that read your blog post will then be like, &#8220;This isn&#8217;t cool.&#8221; The people that generally think there&#8217;s a conspiracy out to get them, a lot of it is because they post some outburst stuff and then people disagree with it strongly. Then one person might go too far and maybe report that person to their boss like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t agree with what this person says. I&#8217;m trying to get them fired,&#8221; which isn&#8217;t really what anyone&#8217;s trying to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s a lot of people who think the entire kind of social justice movement is about trying to get people fired or about trying to get people in trouble. There are people who think the phrase &#8216;social justice warrior&#8217; means using social media tools to fight against people that don&#8217;t like to get them fired. That&#8217;s not what it means at all. Social justice warrior, it means like fighting for social justice, which means like fighting for equality. Social justice warrior itself shouldn&#8217;t be an insult. It should be a complement.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I definitely take that as a compliment. I was talking to my daughter once about people using social justice warrior, the pejorative and she said, &#8220;Sounds like you&#8217;re a superhero,&#8221; whereas there&#8217;s a lot of &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, and that&#8217;s kind of a problem. Like two same groups have two different definitions for the same word, that&#8217;s pretty hard. That&#8217;s where a lot of the stuff stems from like the people who are against feminism don&#8217;t understand what feminism is about. They think it&#8217;s about taking power away from men to give it to women where really, it&#8217;s about making things equal for everybody. It&#8217;s just so confusing like men should totally support feminism. Feminism means that I don&#8217;t have to be a macho dude. I can just do what I want and I can wear something that is pink or purple without somebody questioning my sexuality. Feminism is awesome and social justice is awesome, like all these things are awesome and people don&#8217;t quite get it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The people that don&#8217;t quite get it, unfortunately get shouted at by a lot of people who just kind of tired of having to explain it to these people so without trying to tell them but there&#8217;s anyone, that totally understand how it can get frustrating to have to explain it. Like another white dude called Chad from Connecticut who doesn&#8217;t quite get what you&#8217;re talking about like &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because there is an endless supply of Chad out there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Millions of Chads. It&#8217;s really hard to keep on explaining it to these people, especially when they just pop up and say something dumb and it sounds like something else somebody said and you just give them a very curt response back like, &#8220;Feminist are terrible people,&#8221; and they run away. It shapes everything terribly. The more you talk against diversity or against any of these things, the more people shout at you and it kind of sends you on this downward spiral into becoming a men&#8217;s rights activist. There&#8217;s a lot of people in PHP community that are at the tip of sinking into that downward spiral or they&#8217;re on their way down into the pit and that&#8217;s kind of the problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They think there&#8217;s a conspiracy out to get them, really, it&#8217;s just a lot of people disagreeing with the stuff they&#8217;re say and some people take it a bit too far with trying to get people fired or try to shame people, when it&#8217;s really not about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a beautiful article the other day that explained this to me. The tolerance is not a moral imperative. It is a peace treaty that says, &#8220;We&#8217;re all going to be nice to each other and accept each other as we are.&#8221; If you violate the peace treaty by being intolerant, then it doesn&#8217;t apply to you anymore. We don&#8217;t have to be nice to you. We can kick you out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also, there&#8217;s the idea of proportionate response of if you write something I don&#8217;t like on the internet, trying to get you fired would be a disproportionate response. Blocking you on Twitter, would be quite proportionate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, we went through a thing in the Portland Ruby community a year or two ago and I&#8217;m probably going to get some hate tweets for this again but we did wind up asking somebody to leave the community for some behavior that we were pretty sure was well-beyond the pale. I got called literally, &#8216;Hitler&#8217; for that. That was a good time. But the meeting after we did that, several people showed up who were like, &#8220;I had stopped coming because these things were really not very welcoming to me,&#8221; but then I heard that you&#8217;d actually taken action on your COC and we got people who hadn&#8217;t been there for a year or more.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s something that open source, in particular is really bad about and that is when OpalGate fiasco went down &#8212; for those who don&#8217;t know, OpalGate is the term that is applied to something that happened with the Opal-Ruby-JavaScript transpiler. One of the maintainers was exhibiting very transphobic behavior on Twitter and I made the mistake of getting involved in it and opening an issue in the repository, asking for clarification from the maintainers, basically of trans-people who were welcome to participate in a project.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the other maintainers came out and said he didn&#8217;t care who someone was or what they believed in as long as they wrote a good code. After clarifying question said, he&#8217;d be happy to work with child molesters and white supremacists as long his code was good. I think it&#8217;s an important question like we have to have tolerance for other people&#8217;s political ideas but when they start to question people&#8217;s humanity, is that [inaudible] too far? Then that when consequences should be imposed.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If you want to talk politics, you can talk about how we should allocate our money as a country. You can about degrees of regulation we should have over businesses. You can even talk about trade agreements and maybe immigration policies. But I&#8217;m sorry, whether a specific person is a human and worthy of participating in the conversation, that&#8217;s not politics. That&#8217;s some is more other.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s not a political speech, it&#8217;s a hate speech at that point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One thing that people are kind of confuse, I think the recent Contributor Covenant 1.4 did a wonderful job with cleaning up any misapprehensions about it, is the people are allowed to talk about whatever they want to talk about on their own public platforms, without a project specific code of conduct getting in the way. Then there might be other ramifications like you saying stuff in public that people don&#8217;t like it, in general was could well lead to various ramifications. But they aren&#8217;t the ones that are necessarily enforced by a project that you happen to contribute to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The PHP RFC, I think all of us should contribute in covenant. It basically said there are other rules that may well be imposed by the project and in the later version, it more explicitly said, the PHP RFC did say this will be limited to &#8212; I cannot get the exact wording on the top of my head but basically, you have to be representing PHP when that happens. Now, if you go and put a contributor to PHP in your Twitter profile, that gets a little bit tricky. But generally speaking, if you want talking about PHP stuff and you just talking about your views on abortion or whatever, that all fine. It&#8217;s when you start bringing that stuff and that tone and being a jackass. If you&#8217;re being a jackass in pull requests and linking to PHP RFCs and then being like, &#8220;Look at this,&#8221; or whatever, being horrible in the context of the project, that&#8217;s when the rules would affect you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They even said you&#8217;re allowed to tweet about politics. It&#8217;s totally fine and this code of conduct cannot be used against you. One of the wonderful things about the mediation process that was at full PHP unlike many other people try and do is there&#8217;s actually a private reporting structure. To avoid OpalGate, all that needs to be done is if an initial issue was an email, then that would have been fine. But of course, it couldn&#8217;t be an email because they didn&#8217;t have a code of conduct set up to say, &#8220;We actually care about this.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If that project had shown that they care about people being discriminatory, then they would set up an email address. Now, email address would be used and if anybody else popped up and not using the email address, that thing can get locked immediately. The best way to avoid an OpalGate is to have a code of conduct. All the conversations, the Ruby issue that you mentioned earlier and a million different conversations that happened, all of those were an OpalGate by people trying to avoid OpalGate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It was completely ridiculous and I think everyone should just have a code of conduct to avoid having an argument on the internet. But I do think that they were so worried about creating drama, that they created more drama. All the people that are against code of conducts, they generally, like this one specific person that cause the most problem in the PHP, he has his own which is again being nice and being nice is the first thing that people will say when you start talking about code of conduct. They&#8217;ll say, &#8220;Why can&#8217;t we just have and be nice thing.&#8221; They&#8217;ll just says that they don&#8217;t talk about politics and be polite to each other.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You have to say what happens when you&#8217;re not nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Not even that &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You need to define nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; Exactly, Coraline. There&#8217;s no definition of nice. Not everyone knows what being nice constitutes and those that do know, don&#8217;t necessary care, like a lot of people would be like, &#8220;Oh, grow up. Why can&#8217;t you take feedback?&#8221; And feedback is cool but when you&#8217;re being an asshole, that&#8217;s not just feedback. People quit projects over how a nice this one guy is. He doesn&#8217;t use any rude words but he made 10 people give up on a certain project. Then we try to get rid of him because he was not being nice and he was like, &#8220;There&#8217;s no rules that say I should leave. There&#8217;s no rules about this stuff. I think I&#8217;m being nice and they don&#8217;t and saying as there&#8217;s no rules, you can&#8217;t get rid of me.&#8221; Right, that&#8217;s what a code of conduct would be. You can&#8217;t say that we don&#8217;t have rules because you stopped us from having rules. Ahh! What&#8217;s happening?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right and there&#8217;s a fundamental problem, I think with being nice which falls in my mind into that category of looking at intent. Be nice is saying something about who you are. But a code of conduct really should be about what you do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, great point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I tried really hard with Contributor Covenant 1.4. You pointed out to kind of corrupt some of these gray areas but you have recently released an open source guide. There&#8217;s a page in the open source guide about codes of conduct and why it&#8217;s important to adopt them and most importantly, tips on how to enforce them and be fair in that enforcement. One of the pieces of feedback I got was, &#8220;What if you do if someone makes a false report?&#8221; I think there&#8217;s this fear that some people have that a code of conduct is a tool for punishing them and just saying, &#8220;The code of conduct says this so I guess, you&#8217;re kicked off the project,&#8221; not understanding that a project maintainer is a person in charge of setting community standards and enforcing community standards in a fair and even handed way. People think that it&#8217;s passing a law that&#8217;s not subject to interpretation by a judge, which is kind of ridiculous.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that was one of the large problems we had in the PHP attempt. What I see it in various other conversations about code of conducts, the problem is it&#8217;s similar to the conspiracy theory thing. Because certain people have had this negative experience with people for getting fired, it&#8217;s framed that it&#8217;ll be use on any of these sort of stuff in a very negative paranoid way. The problem is they are more concerned about false reports than they are about genuine issues happening.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Whether that&#8217;s because they don&#8217;t think genuine issues are actually happening or there&#8217;s enough of them to feel to be warranted or whether they just don&#8217;t care. We can&#8217;t tell. But a lot of people are so super concerned about potential misreports that they&#8217;d rather just not have any structure for it or whatsoever and that is insulting. It&#8217;s ignorant and the trouble is it&#8217;s really hard to change somebody&#8217;s mind on that stuff because they&#8217;ll say, &#8220;These things don&#8217;t really happen,&#8221; and the second you say, &#8220;Here they do. Here&#8217;s an example.&#8221; They&#8217;ll just call that person a liar, like the reason Uber conversation. I forget which is truly embarrassing &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Susan Fowler.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, that&#8217;s right. She&#8217;s kind of talking about problems happening at Uber and HR failures and of course, everyone&#8217;s does immediately calling her a liar &#8212; not everyone but Chad. The problem is whenever people come forward and actually tell their stories to the public, people just call them a liar. Again, like they&#8217;ve gone from thinking this never happens to okay, occasionally people lie about it happening and nothing has changed so people don&#8217;t want to actually expose their stories because they&#8217;ll get called liars so you&#8217;re in the situation &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or worse.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or worse, yeah, like liars [inaudible]. You&#8217;re in a situation where there&#8217;s no real evidence to support the fact that these things are our problem so they just think they aren&#8217;t our problem and therefore, anyone who&#8217;s trying to enforce a code of conduct must just be doing it to get power because they want to takeover projects and get people fired. Some people are confused about and dedicated to that approach but they think that Coraline is coming to take their projects.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The idea that if you put a code of conduct in that, then anything that you disagree with, you can just get someone kicked off the project and takeover. People genuinely think this and it&#8217;s really hard to fight.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What&#8217;s the upside for me as somebody &#8212; I&#8217;m not even trying to get people to adopt the codes of conduct but me &#8212; as a notional person who is initiating this discussion. What really is the upside for me in trying to get somebody fired or trying to takeover their project? Doesn&#8217;t that just create way more work for me, in both cases? Why would I want that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I&#8217;m desperately trying to give away as many open source projects as I can so I can stop maintaining them. I definitely wouldn&#8217;t want to start picking up all of the projects on the internet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I&#8217;m well-positioned to just takeover the entire open source world. That&#8217;s my secret plan for world domination. I want to be in charge of all the open source.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Genius.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s all about my GitHub contribution.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like a lot of that defensive argument seems it might come from a place of cognitive dissonance. If you start talking about having a code of conduct, then perhaps it means that somebody is saying you have some issues that might have already benefited from having a code of conduct and that means that perhaps, you&#8217;re not the wonderful person that you believe yourself to be.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Facing that, this doesn&#8217;t even happen, I think at a conscious level. This all happens within a half a second and you see this conversation and you go, &#8220;This is an attack on me personally and I must defend against it.&#8221; By that time, there&#8217;s not even an argument anymore from the rhetorical perspective. There&#8217;s just a fight.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. A lot of this problem is just pointing out that like white dudes aren&#8217;t perfect and we really hate that. A lot of the time, these things that you&#8217;re doing are causing these problems. You know, men do this, men blame men do on whatever. They take that as an attack on men like if you want to call us, you shouldn&#8217;t be attacking men. But if you want a quality, you have to point out like if the scales are unbalanced, you have to actually look and see what&#8217;s happening with the scales to work out why they&#8217;re in balance so you can then correct it and make things more fair. The problem is if you ever suggest that straight, white dude is at fault, even slightly, then loads of straight, white dudes are going to come at you and start screaming at you about stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I used to be really ignorant. I used to live in a small rural town in the UK and think that attempts to make the women speak in a panel at conferences was certainly a positive affirmation. I still think it was like unfair and sexist to try and jam women into most speakers. Then I realized that&#8217;s so far from the case that it&#8217;s unreal and that&#8217;s why I became so involved in a lot of these conversations because as somebody who&#8217;s taken a stance, somebody who has made the 180 degree mental change from someone who was possibly coming towards being a men&#8217;s rights activist to like being a normal human being, the kind of understands how these things work and don&#8217;t see people are lying for attention, I hope that I could bring other people along on this journey and that&#8217;s what all these series of blog post are about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s so many words that are into the series that I put in. I&#8217;ve been talking about diversity and everyone is in no way is offended, the conspiracy theories and code of conduct not being so bad things like that. There&#8217;s so much work I put into those to try and help bring people along on my journey. Unfortunately, the second I started writing about it, everyone just start calling me a PC bro and SJW and then they just ignored everything I was trying to say.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In one of your blog post, though you talked about how empathy is at odds with our standard ideal of a programmer. Do you think that that is a factor in some of the stuff that you saw?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s dogmatic logic versus empathy. A lot of people that are incredibly logic minded just don&#8217;t really get humans. We know this is not that confusing. The same people that like to use statistical racism. Those are the things like, &#8220;Well, it makes sense that there&#8217;s more black people in prison because black people commit more crime so that&#8217;s the end of that conversation and that&#8217;s that.&#8221; That&#8217;s ludicrous. It&#8217;s a statistical racism just because they don&#8217;t understand the situation. They don&#8217;t understand that most of those crimes, if a white dude did it, there wouldn&#8217;t be the same outcome. They probably wouldn&#8217;t go to jail. Like having a tiny bit of drugs for a white dude is fine, then if you&#8217;re black, a tiny bit of crack, you have 10 years in jail.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A lot of these different things, the human element to it, lost on them because they look at the rules on paper. They look at the law that says, there cannot be gender discrimination at work and they think, &#8220;Great. It is illegal to have gender discrimination at work,&#8221; so anyone who&#8217;s complaining about gender discrimination is lying and doing it for attention because it&#8217;s illegal so it can&#8217;t happen. It says it on paper versus an acceptance of what reality is more likely to be.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s wrong every time and it&#8217;s really hard to reason with those people because they&#8217;ve decided that things are this way. If you start on picking at certain element, then the whole thing starts to fall apart. Their entire world view becomes different. I had my entire world view changed and it was bad. I have to think about lost stuff again and think about a lot of things, a lot different times over a couple of years like it was morphing and changing in front of me. But once you start to realize that most minorities who are complaining about things aren&#8217;t doing it because they&#8217;re lying or lazy or want attention or anything else because they genuinely have problems and once you realized that, everything changes for you. Most people don&#8217;t have the time or mental capacity to re-evaluate their entire life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s so true. I think sometimes those of us who do have time to think about things don&#8217;t appreciate that people without leisure time, they don&#8217;t have that same luxury.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I spend a lot of time doing a 10-hour bike ride and it made me think about a lot of stuff on that ride because nothing else to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have to ask you, Jessica, is it a luxury or is it a moral imperative?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really think that it&#8217;s not something everyone has the ability or opportunity to do, to think about things and make choices. Choices are expensive. We figuring out how the world works and changing your model is expensive and if people are working three jobs to put food on the table for their kids and just trying to have four hours of sleep and get up and go to work again and say hello to their kids once a day, no you don&#8217;t have time to think through everything. However &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Those are not the people &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>People don&#8217;t have that excuse.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; Yeah, exactly, Chad doesn&#8217;t have that excuse.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Chad does not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m really sorry for picking on Chad.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re going to hear from Chad fellow later on this one. Chad comes from a place where he doesn&#8217;t have to experience all of those things so it is probably pretty natural for him to assume that his experience applies to everybody else. If that is the case, then sure, maybe it makes sense to think that, well if somebody is complaining about this thing, they must be lying because I don&#8217;t see it, therefore it must not exist.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But you&#8217;re right, having that realization and doing the work to understand that one&#8217;s own experience is not universally applicable, that burden definitely falls on the person who has the ability to shoulder it: i.e. Chad.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I did a thing about basically trying to explain marginalization to somebody using a bike [inaudible] for which is incredibly like me. It came to me as there were a charity ride and we&#8217;re all cycling along and I have a busted bike. It was the same bike. We all have the same rentals from the same company, everything&#8217;s the same about them. But mine was really having some problems and struggling through. I didn&#8217;t want to hold anyone up by trying to get it fixed or find a mechanic. I feel it would be okay but it was a non-stop battle.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It was after 40, 50 miles, my legs are really hurting because I couldn&#8217;t get out of the middle cranking. It was a real pain and eventually, I had to stop and say, &#8220;I&#8217;m really struggling here. I really need some help with my bike. Can we stop and find a mechanic.&#8221; A couple of people joke about it like, &#8220;Oh, Phil, there&#8217;s always some excuse. Just put more effort in. Stop complaining about it.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Yes, we&#8217;re all tired and a few people were joking with things like that but then eventually, they said, &#8220;Yes, let&#8217;s definitely help you out.&#8221; If my friends said anything other than, &#8220;Yes, of course. We understand your problems. Let&#8217;s help you out,&#8221; then I wouldn&#8217;t leave it. If they genuinely didn&#8217;t believe me and they genuinely thought I was lying for attention, why would you see I&#8217;m lying? &#8220;There&#8217;s always some excuse, Phil.&#8221; If they didn&#8217;t believe me, I would have been so mad. That&#8217;s generally what marginalization is that people talk about their issues and that other people just assume they&#8217;re lying for attention or for power or for whatever it is. People need to just stop doing that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Which means as someone who wants to help, step one is just believe the other person. Really, what does it cost you? Does it cost you your world view? Good!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Step zero is listen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s the thing. Listen is important. It’s really how do you want to [inaudible] but you don&#8217;t need to believe every word they&#8217;re saying. One of the responses with, as I mentioned with Susan was writing about, Uber, there&#8217;s a lot people who instantly believe everything she says or just call her a liar. Now, if you instantly believe anything that somebody says on the internet and you don&#8217;t know who they are, that&#8217;s a bit strange. You shouldn&#8217;t necessarily instantly believe every single word with no evidence but definitely calling her a liar is completely ludicrous.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The problem is that belief is something could be possible. I think, it&#8217;s highly, highly probable that everything she&#8217;s written about is true but I can&#8217;t say for sure, it is definitely true. You know what I mean?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s constant with other stories and others like I personally observed. Let&#8217;s just go with that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, the more you listen, the more these stories that you do understand and you do believe, the more it plays into a very realistic picture. I&#8217;m 99% confident that happened. But without the evidence, it is hard. It&#8217;s a case of don&#8217;t assume someone&#8217;s lying just because feminists stories are making stuff up. Don&#8217;t assume someone is lying but also don&#8217;t necessarily see it that it&#8217;s completely 100% true every time. There&#8217;s going to be trick that you wants to get. Listening is really important. Support is important and just why do you assume people are lying?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Phil, you mentioned this transition for you, from believing that the stuff didn&#8217;t happen and didn&#8217;t matter to caring about the world, did that happened like four years ago when you move to New York?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, before that, I was living in Bristol, two cities in the Southwest where I spent pretty much my entire life. I occasionally go to the [inaudible] conference and meetup but just hanging out with my developer friends was most of the developer-y interactions I had and they were mostly dudes so it&#8217;s very easy to fall into a headspace where the reason that most conferences is a panel of dudes is most developers I know are men and most companies I go to are men. Even when I start traveling around the States a bit more, I get to a lot of startups and it would be mostly men. This is a positive feedback loop and there&#8217;s various problems that are affecting the gender balance in tech so you wonder about it and you just see a bunch of men and you just think, &#8220;There aren&#8217;t that many women in tech. I wish I kind of reinforce the loop.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then you start thinking, &#8220;Women just aren&#8217;t interested so anyone who complains about problems that are affecting women, they&#8217;re exaggerating the situation or maybe they&#8217;re making it out because really, women just are not that interested.&#8221; When I came to New York, I completely escaped that whole mindset. There were a lot of women developers here for start so talking to women developers and talking to other women in the work, in these techie startups, listening to them talk about their problems blew my mind.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I believe [inaudible] that my friends. They&#8217;ve shown me things that happened. They&#8217;ve shown me the emails and screenshots. They&#8217;ve heard about as they evolve and the amount of things that were going on was terrible. One example of a friend who was working for a small eight-person startup. As an Asian woman developer, she was getting a lot of Asian and female jokes. She didn&#8217;t necessarily enjoy it and she didn&#8217;t feel like tackling it herself because that would be seen as aggressive and that would be a problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> She kind of mentioned it to that one person who&#8217;s half of that job is HR. After a bit backwards and forwards, they&#8217;re just like, &#8220;Well, we don&#8217;t actually know how to address this issue but if you like to work somewhere else, then that would be easy than us changing our culture.&#8221; That&#8217;s pretty much what they said so the more that you hear this stuff from your friends, the more that you&#8217;re kind of understand that it happens. Like I said before, some people are scared to talk about it. Some people do talk about it and you don&#8217;t necessary know who they are so they get called a liar and you&#8217;re like, &#8220;Maybe they&#8217;re a liar,&#8221; because you see other people calling them liars.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Some people don&#8217;t talk about it to you because they don&#8217;t trust you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, so how do you earn that trust?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sarah Sharp had a great Twitterstorm about this. Her canary in a coal mine was if a woman complains about they don&#8217;t have t-shirts in her size and you don&#8217;t care, you&#8217;re not going to hear any of her harassment stories.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, the thing is once they started posting about code of conduct and about diversity and about women in tech, I&#8217;ve done a few blog post over the last couple of years, the more I started to post about this stuff, the more people were [inaudible] and sending me emails and contacting me however they could and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;I&#8217;m so glad you&#8217;re talking about this,&#8221; and then I start to hear more stories that of course really bolsters my position on the situation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s really hard to be a good ally because a lot of the things in the past where I thought I was being a good ally, I was actually being a jerk and I&#8217;m embarrassed about that. There&#8217;s a few podcast where there&#8217;s two different feminists or two different views on things and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;That&#8217;s anti-feminist,&#8221; and I&#8217;m saying silly things and I don&#8217;t know I&#8217;m talking about. It&#8217;s really hard to be good ally but once you start showing that you can be a helpful person and you do understand some of the problems, people often then start to hope you further.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;ve had a lot of free advice and coaching and training from my friends that are suffering these problems, which has really helped. Again, it&#8217;s not the sort of stuff like understanding the topic of diversity and equality in the workplace and gender issues for tech and issues of people of color. That&#8217;s a lot of stuff to learn. It&#8217;s like learning how Git works or learning how certain piece of tech works. It&#8217;s much bigger and more important than that but as part of your job, you need to understand diversity and inclusivity and all these various connected topics to be, not only a good developer but a good human being. There&#8217;s a lot of people that just think that it&#8217;s people making things up. It&#8217;s really hard to make it part of the curriculum, being a good developer. I don&#8217;t know how we do it but it needs to change somehow.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think you made an interesting point about allies too. Allies in a badge that you earn, being an ally is a process and you&#8217;re going to fuck it up. Everyone&#8217;s going to fuck it up. I have fucked it up. Everyone fucks it up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have fucked it up many, many times. I&#8217;m glad you said that because I wanted to jump in as well and say that allyship is not a thing that you are. Again, it&#8217;s a thing that you do and you have to keep doing it. It&#8217;s a work and it&#8217;s hard and it&#8217;s worth it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The point that I wanted to get back to about your story was that this happened fairly recently. How old were you when you moved to New York?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Twenty-four.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, you&#8217;re not old at all.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, but to say, below 25, you&#8217;re allowed to have a lot of stupid opinions about everything.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, especially &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was hoping to make the point that even when you&#8217;re in your late 30s and 40s, you too can change but maybe this story doesn&#8217;t help.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, that happen to me quite a bit, Jessica because I was a pretty terrible person before my transition and what I see now is very problematic ideas. I wasn&#8217;t by any stretch to the imagination, a feminist and it wasn&#8217;t until I started paying attention and started practicing empathy that I discovered that there was this whole other world of truths that I had never opened my eyes to before. That started as part of a deliberate process of sort of reinventing myself and that happened when I was 40 so that can definitely happen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah. Just Phil&#8217;s story doesn&#8217;t work as an example.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It doesn&#8217;t provide us [inaudible] data for that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And I&#8217;m just a woman to my opinion. It doesn&#8217;t matter on that topic.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that was about four years ago for me that I started recognizing that just because I had a good experience in tech, it doesn&#8217;t mean every women did.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a lot of problem. There&#8217;s a lot different approaches to feminism and I know a lot of developers that will say &#8212; I don&#8217;t know why specifically developers but &#8212; I know a fair few people that will say things like, &#8220;Until feminist could agree, then why should we listen to anything they have to say?&#8221; That&#8217;s obviously ridiculous. I give you ask half the population about anything and they going to have a lot of different ideas. When they say half the population, that&#8217;s because woman are feminist. Some women aren&#8217;t feminists.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s so many different people that have so many different views on so many different things, a lot of people think that feminism is something that is very much not and there are different people who describe themselves as feminists that have different views on how to achieve equality. People need to recognize the fact that a diverse group of people will have a diverse set of opinions and be respectful of them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;ll often say if you&#8217;re either a feminist or misogynist, there is no overlap. There is no, &#8220;I’m just neutral.&#8221; You either believe that all gender should have equality or you don&#8217;t. In the slide of feminist end of the scale, there&#8217;s a million different views. There&#8217;s a lot of different definitions of equality: subsistence equality and I forget the name of the other one but it&#8217;s about removing the blockers that will allow us at some point become equal versus making that process a bit quicker like give me that job that I should have because you&#8217;re always getting jobs to the people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s kind of different approaches to equality and different approaches to everything so instead of mocking a diverse set of opinions for not being all exactly the same, people&#8217;s needs to except the different people have different views and you can agree with some of them and then disagree with others without that person being stupid or that anti-movement being stupid, you know?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, we all see a different piece of the world. Of course, we all have a different model. How about Ruby?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, you made a transition from the PHP community to the Ruby community and I&#8217;m very, very interested in your perspective. Hearing what those like for you and maybe hearing about not just from a techno perspective but how the PHP and Ruby communities differed. There&#8217;s a lot of animosity toward PHP and the Ruby community. A lot of contempt for PHP which I think is very unwarranted and very unprofessional. What sort of things have you seen moving between those two communities?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s really interesting. I&#8217;ve been using Ruby exclusively for the last four years and on and off since 2010. I was playing around with Rails quite a while ago. We have a different point now with younger developers of don&#8217;t necessarily have any experience with PHP. This thing is becoming less and less true but for a long time, most of the Ruby developers used to do PHP. PHP was the first language for all people to go to and they went somewhere else and some people went to Node but a lot of people were going to Ruby because of Rails.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Unfortunately, a lot of people didn&#8217;t really keep up with what was happening in PHP and it kind of assumed the PHP is still PHP 4 which was pretty bad. PHP 5 and all of them minor releases since then, added a lot of functionality that&#8217;s proper [inaudible]. PHP 4 was meant to be PHP 6 so it&#8217;s kind of a major version all in itself. Then PHP 7, skipped 6 &#8212; don&#8217;t ask &#8212; PHP 7 is kind of a fundamental rewrite of a lot of aspects of the language, including the lexer, the parser, the tokenizer, a lot of memory management like most of the language apart from the standard library, unfortunately was rewritten in PHP 7.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> These days when people talk nonsense about PHP, they&#8217;re talking about a false memory of when they were an experienced programmer using a fairly young and not very well-built language that has since changed drastically. For Ruby developer these days to poop on PHP is usually pretty far from the truth.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s what Aurynn Shaw cause contempt culture and it&#8217;s very damaging.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. I saw it, I go to conferences and people will be like, &#8220;What language do you use?&#8221; And if I say Ruby, they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Okay.&#8221; If I say PHP, they&#8217;d be like, &#8220;Really?&#8221; That makes you feel very bad. I don&#8217;t mind it personally except to be like, &#8220;I was contributing to PHP. I was going to help and make that place better. I was top-level PHP guy,&#8221; and they&#8217;d be like, &#8220;Ehhh&#8230;&#8221; They&#8217;ll still going to make fun. But I just say, &#8220;I wrote Golang,&#8221; and they&#8217;re be like, &#8220;You&#8217;re clever, cool.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This is really weird thing where the language you use dictates your intelligence level not market forces or the job you&#8217;re at or anything else. It is strange. Contempt culture is pretty damaging in people&#8217;s moods and happiness. Again, these developers are thinking, &#8220;I don&#8217;t have to change languages because people&#8217;s think I&#8217;m stupid or my career&#8217;s going to be in trouble,&#8221; and they were like spend a lot of time learning a different language or look for a different job or maybe move house because there&#8217;s no people offering a job in a certain area, with a certain language so they will change their entire life just so people on being mean and their boss that might not be conscious to them. That&#8217;s the case. That&#8217;s all of the subconscious stuff that is being pushed into the back of the head that then informs their decisions. It pretty silly, especially when most of the language are basically the same.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For listeners who might be newer to the show, there&#8217;s another interesting take on this back in Episode 2 with Avdi Grimm, where about 30 minutes into the show, he talks about his take on PHP as somebody who came to it from Ruby. You might like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For sure, I&#8217;ll check that out. That sounds good. There&#8217;s a lot of things in that Ruby developers will recognize. There&#8217;s a build-in web server these days. You just type &#8216;PHP -s&#8217; and it&#8217;s the same as Vim or whatever. There&#8217;s an aspect equivalent. There’s webmark port. There&#8217;s a VCR port. If you can think of the tool that you like, there is a port of it. In the past, when you use to search for most things in PHP like how do I do this, then you end up on WFREE schools and there was some nonsense from early 2000 and it was terrible and insecure and get you hacked if you did it so a few other developers put together PHP the right way and that shows you a good up-to-date, constantly evolving information on best practices and standards and things like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It used to be no code style so we made one, the PHP Fake came up together and made PSR-2. There was no real package management apart from PEAR where people really didn&#8217;t like. Now, there&#8217;s composer which is based off of Bundler and it&#8217;s almost exactly the same and just as good. It kind of sounds like PHP just copy and [inaudible] and in some respects, they are. There&#8217;s lots of developers like me that use other languages then kind of send information back or work on these features, put them back into the language and &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because in Ruby it doesn&#8217;t copy from anybody else ever.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. Everyone&#8217;s copying from everyone. Developers are sharing ideas like polyglot developers just pass around ideas and information in years of conferences and you start talking to Alexa developers and you realize they&#8217;re copying stuff from other languages too. Instead of making fun of each other for the choice or for the language that you&#8217;re currently using, you should be sharing information about the struggles that you have, in the ways that they resolve and the tooling that you like and how it helps at certain situations.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Instead of feeling smug about yourself that you obviously made the right choice because other language developers are stupid, you get to be happy that you come up with this really cool idea for a tool that could totally help out in your community, then people would be singing your praises as a hero for raising this amazing thing. It&#8217;s a totally different mindset and it&#8217;s hard to change for some people. But just don&#8217;t be a jerk about languages.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Technical differences aside, how&#8217;s your experience of Ruby community been different from your experience with the PHP community?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve been enjoying taking very much a backseat in the Ruby community. I feel like in a lot of ways, Ruby community isn&#8217;t perfect like when I turned up there, I felt like things are pretty much under control. I was thinking about being part of a community such as a programming community, as like living in a neighborhood. If you live in a neighborhood and you starts to know there&#8217;s a few problems, you might start joining some local boards or commissions that will help out in certain ways. You might start helping out around the neighborhood to fix those problems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When I got to Ruby I was like, &#8220;Oh, it was pretty cool.&#8221; If there are problems, I&#8217;m the one that&#8217;ve noticed so I&#8217;m sure this thought leaders in the community, they&#8217;re shouting at each other and DHH occasionally post some interesting stuff and people end up getting very upset.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, so I just ignore those stuff and I always do it again or whatever and it&#8217;s fine. Whereas in the PHP community, I felt like there was a lot of things that needed to be worked on so I got super involved working on a lot of different things. It was slow and there needs to be PHP the right way for information, PHP Fake for standards bodies, PHP League of Extraordinary Packages for creating some of these gaps that left between frameworks building everything and the diagnostic stuff that exists too. All of these things over time, I got more and more stuff and I got more and more stuff. just going to Ruby and seeing like a really good tool for this and they really get standard for that and seeing it already be there, I was just like, &#8220;I can ride my bike now.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So you help PHP grow up as a language. At Ruby, it was already mature when you got there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I guess. I have a bit of a theory on how this works and it&#8217;s hard to prove anything but the PHP community is only recently, over the last couple of years, come together to knock down the barriers between different silos. The Ruby community is pretty much just Rails like there&#8217;s other tools &#8212; the Sinatra &#8212; but the bulk of people using Ruby really are using Rails a lot of the time. That was the one framework people would use, therefore if you had to build a gem, it would usually work by itself and with Ruby, there would be bridge packages but Ruby was always the center of people&#8217;s minds.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Where in the PHP community, which I think is much, much larger. PHP community is huge. They saw it being broken down by the specific framework. There&#8217;s Cake, there&#8217;s [inaudible], there&#8217;s [inaudible] these days is the new and kind of biggest one but there&#8217;s lots and lots and lots of different frameworks and people for the longest time would be just building things to work for their framework. It is hard coded and the framework is in the name of the package. It&#8217;s really that and it is only recently, like a lot of effort for myself and a lot of other individuals and the PHP-FIG and things like that, the framework are mostly packages. The start has becoming more of a thing and there&#8217;s standards that helping to define interfaces that various different frameworks can then latch onto to make sure the code works was in various places and stuff like that have started to bring people together to focus on PHP more than focusing on the specific framework or the specific CMS or a specific whatever.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In a couple of years about that, that&#8217;s start happening in 2011, 2012 and that&#8217;s really helped PHP grow up because when you have all of your efforts being separated into 10 almost identical communities and everyone is working on the same stuff and they&#8217;re all working on style guides, never working on whatever. Caching packages that would only work for their system, there&#8217;s so much effort being wasted. Instead of 10 different teams, which might be 20 people working on caching, you could have maybe four or five people making this one package and maintaining this one package that everyone can use and there&#8217;s other people can go and build something really cool. Instead of just constantly redeveloping the same way over and over and over again, you can start to build more, new work, greater stuff or ideas that people never even thought to make developing easier for people they&#8217;re just getting into it by removing some of the stuff they&#8217;d have to code and making a gem for that so &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is if they can all get along.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If they can all get along. If you can get along, if you can use some teamwork and you can have a code of conduct to help with people being jerks, then you can do really cool stuff. But if you just want to scream at each other and just code the same stuff over and over again and release the 12,000 PHP routing library because you think you&#8217;re so much smarter than everyone else, then coding just sucks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think, that&#8217;s what it&#8217;s all about. We want to make coding suck less.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, please.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For everybody. This has been a great conversation, Phil. We&#8217;ve really enjoyed having you on the show. We end every show with reflections, where we think about the conversations that we&#8217;ve had and while there&#8217;s some of the most salient points of the conversation and maybe some things that we want to do differently or think about a little bit more as a result of the conversation. Who would like to reflect first?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Me. Phil, you made a point pretty early in the show. There&#8217;s two actually that I think maybe go together. One was that one of your superpowers was in fact being confused by a book and not understanding it. You did what you had to do to understand it and then you brought that to people in a way that they could understand.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mama bird style.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, that&#8217;s beautiful. When you have the time and put in the effort to turn your confusion into something that as washes everyone else&#8217;s. I wonder if this has something to do with another phrase that you used. You said you had a habit of failing upward. I interpret that as when something doesn&#8217;t work out, something better will.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, basically.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And when you put your energy out there into the community, that totally happens.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, failing upwards is all about learning from your mistakes and then working hard. Failing upward for me was like I got fired from a cinema for just being a lazy, rubbish employee. Then after getting fired from a cinema, I realized no one would have ever hire me so I started my own company and that went crap in the recession and I got a job at a bigger firm and things like that. Part of that is luck, obviously and part of it is just kind of, &#8220;Okay, I did a bad thing here. Let&#8217;s try and make this better,&#8221; which people should focus on instead of, &#8220;Okay, I did a bad thing. Let&#8217;s argue with everyone before I did a bad thing.&#8221; Then just make sure I can really explain to myself that I did a good thing really. It&#8217;s about accepting your failures and trying to be better next time, in all of the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s not about, &#8220;No, past me was okay.&#8221; It&#8217;s about, &#8220;Future me is going to be better.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, for sure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That sounds like a perfect time for me to jump in. One of the things, looking back that really struck me about this is that we talked about a bunch of little cases and almost throw away comments that when I unpack them, they seemed we&#8217;re talking about people who have a very superficial understanding of the opposing position in whatever argument they&#8217;re in and they take that superficial understanding and then it&#8217;s just run and scream with that. I commented on this in the chat earlier about how I find it sort of hilariously sad that in tech, we have tools for doing root cause analysis.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The most prominent of which I can think of is the five whys technique. At least, some of us are really used to using those to figure out what&#8217;s going on with technical issues but those very same tools can work for social issues as well. If you just take some of the your initial understanding of some problem, like I think you mentioned there just aren&#8217;t as many women in tech as there are men, if you ask, &#8220;Why is that?&#8221; and then why is that, then why is that? You might actually get somewhere. It&#8217;s going to be harder for you to maybe have those answers right away because as a technologist, you&#8217;re probably more used to thinking about, &#8220;I know that there are problems with possibly cache misses or something,&#8221; and it&#8217;s going to be harder to think about complicated human behavior but it can be done. People do it and there is literature, lots and lots and lots of literature on all of that stuff. You just have to be willing to do a little bit of work. That, I guess sort of a combination of reflection and call to action is to try five whys on something that isn&#8217;t technical.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think for me, I&#8217;ve been reflecting a lot on the conversation and thinking back on maybe things that haven&#8217;t thought about for a while. I really like the idea of how empathy is somehow and very often, pitted against pure reason. I think I&#8217;m one of those people who gets really frustrated with that sort of dichotomy and I think that frustration probably manifest as me being aggressive or doesn&#8217;t really lend itself to having a productive conversation with someone.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">I&#8217;ve definitely changed my approach to things over the past couple of years based on experiences I&#8217;ve had but I need to do a better job of thinking about how to get past people&#8217;s visceral reaction to social justice issues and think about how to create better allies because I can&#8217;t do it alone. I&#8217;m going to give that some more thought. Phil, what do you think of our conversation we had today?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s really hard to talk about any of this stuff and I do hope that my thoughts came across as I intended them. I think one thing that I definitely takeaway from this conversation is that I really need to start bookmarking things that I find. You folks have been talking about various different articles that helped understand various different parts. So many times that I&#8217;ve been like, &#8220;This article is amazing. If more people can read this one article, then that might set them on their path,&#8221; especially with these other kind of five things that I went to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think it&#8217;s really important to kind of bookmark these things and save them and back them up so that you can help show people your path of thinking and your path of reasoning. Also, when I came to talk about something, I mentioned things like lending your privilege. I can&#8217;t remember who came up with that phrase so I&#8217;m talking about stuff without attribution, which is tough. I love to be the person that just kind of points people to other smart people and others smart things, instead of becoming this like, &#8220;Looks like that person got some great ideas,&#8221; because I&#8217;m just regurgitating things that I&#8217;d like to learn and heard and thought but a lot of the time these thoughts come from somebody first. Without being able to kind of channel people in the right directions, it just kind of sounds like I&#8217;m hogging stuff. This conversation made me realize that I need to do a much better job of bookmarking my sources and linking to things so that it&#8217;s more fair for everyone.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Before we end the show, we would like to point out that Greater Than Code is entirely listener supported. If you would like to join our community Slack, you can do so by contributing any amount to us at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. At increasing levels of donation, there are a few extra perks but basically we just want you to hang around and chat with us and feel like you are contributing to the show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also, as happened a few weeks ago, if you are hanging out in the flak at exactly the right time you might find yourself on the show randomly. With that, it&#8217;s been a really wonderful conversation and I feel like I could take another hour or two to just keep enjoying and digesting it but it&#8217;s time for us all to go and do work. Thank you very much everyone and listeners, we&#8217;ll catch you next week.</span></p>
</div>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The role of Jenn Schiffer today will be played by Phil Sturgeon.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m happy to play that role. I am a lizard made entirely of CSS and HTML.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to Episode 21 of Greater Than Code: The SJW Takeover. I&#8217;m Coraline Ada Ehmke and with me today is Sam Livingston-Gray.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning, Coraline and I just have a clarifying question. Are you perhaps suggesting that this is not always been an SJW takeover point. Anyway, with that out of the way, I would like to welcome to the show, Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Sam and I get to welcome our guests today. Hello, Phil Sturgeon. Phil used to contribute to the PHP-FIG, the League of Extraordinary Packages, PHP The Right Way, CodeIgniter, FuelPHP, PyroCMS and a bunch of other stuff but he gave it all up to join the circus. Phil, I hear you&#8217;re in the Ruby these days.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Last couple of years, I&#8217;ve been doing a bit of Ruby. The companies I work for just happen to use Ruby and I&#8217;ve been doing PHP for 15 years before that. Luckily, they didn&#8217;t mind me swapping over and kind of learning how it all work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Are you saying that Ruby is a circus, Phil?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[Laughs] Uhmmm&#8230;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I believe it was Jessica who implied that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Things over there actually seem a little bit more sane a lot of the time but I don&#8217;t get as involved as I used to in PHP. Maybe the nonsense is happening. I just don&#8217;t see it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;d like to start off the show with every guest, explaining their background story, how they discovered their superpowers and whether or not they use their superpowers for good or for awesome. Phil, how did you get started in the circus?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I started in the world of programming, in general when I was at school. There was an online magazine that there&#8217;s a games review section and there&#8217;s a cooking thing and these are all different things that people contributed when we were like 11 or 12 years old. Most of them were done with self-publisher and mostly they were really bad and the games website was so incredibly terrible that I learned how to make websites with Microsoft FrontPage to knock back games review website off. After I&#8217;d been doing that for about a year or two and started with HTML which is gross, someone taught me about PHP and I managed to grow the website to be big enough that I had, I think it was Acclaim and Konami, sending me free games review copies so I could review them and that&#8217;s awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When you&#8217;re 13 or 14 years old and you get sent a copy of Metal Gear Solid six months before it comes out in the shops, you&#8217;re a very popular kid for a very short amount of time. Since then, just doing more, learning more. Run my own company for a while. About failed in the recession. I got bigger and better job since then. Failing upwards, as I call it. I&#8217;ve been blogging about stuff the whole way and releasing a lot of open source code, teaching people how stuff works, turn in complicated topics into no nonsense like every man speak so people know how the hell these things work with Screencast, that sort of stuff. Now, I&#8217;m in New York, using my skills for good by day and then being a bike messenger in the evenings so it&#8217;s a good mix.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Since you&#8217;re in New York now though, you really need to tune any accent and start speaking American.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We don&#8217;t take [inaudible] around here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Not bad.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Would you say your superpower then is taking complicated concepts and translating them into simple language?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of my super powers is getting really confused about how advance topics work and then just spending ages churning through it until I understand it and regurgitating it mama bird style to people that aren&#8217;t necessary as computer science-y like myself. The reason I did a whole book about API was that all the content out there about these in APIs was so incredibly complex that I&#8217;d like fall asleep from I read it. After I powered my way through that enough and got a good understanding of how things work plus roadwork experience, I was then able to create a book that literally anyone can read and it just makes sense. Well, literally anyone can read as long as they read English or are okay with the translations I have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think the other superpower is dodging cars. Although, just like Superman, I&#8217;m not entirely invincible. Cider is my kryptonite and occasionally I gets snagged.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cider?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. It&#8217;s a British thing. When you&#8217;re riding a bike after drinking a whole pint of cider, you&#8217;re not quite &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The alcoholic cider.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. In the UK, all cider is alcoholics. We don&#8217;t mess around.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I speak fluent UK so I can confirm that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Let me go back and see if I have this correct. You have produced Screencast and books and various other educational things and you&#8217;re a programmer by day and you are a bike messenger in New York City at night? Have I got all that correct?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s correct.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, so if you need me, my impostor syndrome and I will be rocking back and forth over in the corner over there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I have done these things over the years. These days is more the cycling and less with this Screencast. I&#8217;m trying to work on a video series and I&#8217;ve been promising people that I&#8217;ll get it done for the last year. I think I&#8217;ve done like four practice videos. It is really hard to get these stuff done. When you list up all the things I&#8217;ve done, some people think it&#8217;s kind of impressive but it&#8217;s over a lot of time and I&#8217;ve done a lot of stuff with the help of a lot of people. Mostly, all open source stuff I&#8217;ve released is being a community effort with a lot of other people as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So it&#8217;s not just that you&#8217;re awesome, you&#8217;re also old.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think 28 is pretty old in development years, isn&#8217;t it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What brought you to being a bike messenger? That’s kind of an odd juxtaposition of careers, isn&#8217;t it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s a bit weird. I actually found out about the whole idea of it through a friend of mine. I&#8217;ve been cycling for a long time. I do a lot of charity bike rides, a lot of multi-day ride between cities: Boston, New York, that sort of thing. A friend of mine that I met on one of those rides, he was launching Instacart and it was really funny. It was just around the time that the first I was supposed working for went bankrupt and I just didn&#8217;t have any money coming in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> He said, &#8220;Hey, Phil, you should come on to Instacart. We want to get you help with something.&#8221; And I&#8217;m started there thinking, &#8220;He knows some developer. This is going to be great. He&#8217;s going to get me to do some contracting work. I&#8217;m going to make a whole pile of money.&#8221; And he was like, &#8220;You ride bikes, right? Do you want to help us ride bikes and delivering food for the day?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I felt like going from being a contractor and a developer who makes X reasonable money and now it&#8217;s like minimum wage job, kind of sucks but right now I don&#8217;t really have much else going on. Visa is really complicated. You&#8217;re not really meant to have anything that could be considered another job so when I had this whole two or three months’ worth of time where I wasn&#8217;t legally allowed to work but I still had this apartment that I couldn&#8217;t get rid of and I was stuck in the country, unable to leave or return, it was a really weird thing so when they said, &#8220;Do you want to use bike messengering on the side?&#8221; I was like, &#8220;Yeah, sounds cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Since then, I&#8217;ve got very into the sharing economy. Aside from being with my apartment, I was renting out some of my bike on Spinlister. I&#8217;ve been started riding for Uber. I normally try to ride like 100 or 150 miles a week and one good way of doing that is to get paid for it. Instead of paying to go to a spin class, I&#8217;ll actually ride my bike around New York City and then make $50 in the evening or whatever, just working out and dropping off pesto chicken for people too lazy to get it themselves.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Probably, not super relevant to your audience but I think it&#8217;s fun.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you specialize in delivering pesto chicken?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a lot pesto chicken going around. Also, a lot of fried chicken. A lot of chicken in general and sushi. I know who died delivering somebody cupcakes one time. That was pretty funny. That&#8217;s not the way I want to go out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I hope those cupcakes were appreciated.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Me too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And/or bloody.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Vampire cupcakes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Phil, one of the things that I like about the work that you do is you do a lot of long-form blogging.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, a lot of people like to call them rant. I don&#8217;t know if I call them rant. I just like to really outline everything. Because whatever you do a short post, people always misconstrue it and come up with their own. Like if there&#8217;s any context missing, people will just add their own context and then moment you go for a walk, they thought you meant. I like to really send my thoughts straight. It&#8217;s not always in the best form. It&#8217;s not necessary an essay. Some of it is a bit rant-y but I really like the feeling. It&#8217;s just kind of getting all the thoughts and stuff out there. Then whenever someone says, &#8220;Derp, derp, derp,&#8221; I can just kind of link them to the blog post and then they&#8217;ll fully understand what I&#8217;m trying to say.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or they won&#8217;t read it because it&#8217;s too long and then you&#8217;ll be like, &#8220;Oh, you didn&#8217;t read my posts so you can&#8217;t say anything.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Basically, yeah. Like if you can&#8217;t be bothered to read it and you want to continue arguing with me, then I&#8217;m happy to block you. That&#8217;s fine.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Phil, in terms of our history, I think I first became aware of you when the PHP community was considering adopting the Contributor Covenant and it was a hotly debated matter for, I think over six months and you did a lot of writing about codes of conduct in general and the Contributor Covenant, in particular. What was that period like?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was a hot mess. It was really complicated. To basically frame it, there was one contributor, one very well-known contributor, Anthony Ferrera who suggested the code of conduct to be added. He made a RFC on the PHP wiki, which is standards process for suggesting any new features or any new kind of anything. RFC is a request for comments and most of those comments were people screaming into their keyboard which was a bit nuts. He copy and pasted for [inaudible]. I think it was probably Contributor Covenant 1.2 or 1.3 and that was just a suggestion.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> He said, &#8220;We can use any code of conduct you like. I rather not make our own but this is a fairly good standard one. That&#8217;s been used by a lot of people. What do we think about going with this?&#8221; They also setup a vague outline of a mediation process like instead of just having a piece of text in there that just says, &#8220;We&#8217;re going to help,&#8221; you actually have to setup a process for how you actually help anything. Then it was all about private mediation and it was a lot of things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A lot of different people had a lot of different issues with various different parts. Most of these questions were okay. It was things like, &#8220;Are there any others we could use? I quite like this one from Drupal. I quite this one from Go.&#8221; A lot of different things are happening but there was a lot of really stupid people &#8212; not stupid people, there was a lot of stupid things being said by people that were otherwise very well respected in the community that was based around their lack of understanding about how code of conducts work, about how Contributor Covenant works and about what your roles would be in the process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s a lot of people who are just super scared, in general for misunderstanding previous situations. There are a lot of people that just jump to conclusions about how Contributor Covenant works and people just really scared about the SJWs trying to takeover. It was a lot of nonsense that I got involved with, trying to help unpick. It was super difficult. I was, right at the very start, at the whole process. I&#8217;d already kind of quit, I was already not really doing anything with PHP anymore. I had already step by my responsibilities. I sold a company that was writing PHP. I was nothing to do with PHP anymore. But I still had a sway, I guess.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I was going to talking about it a little bit but it started off with a completely jovial and just like one of the biggest &#8216;tossers&#8217; in PHP has got a massive problem with the code of conduct happening. In the UK, &#8216;tosser&#8217; is just like the word jerk. It doesn&#8217;t really mean anything particularly graphic. It&#8217;s just whatever kind of word. Of course, immediately at least do some jumping down my throat because they looked at the dictionary for definition which is a little bit more graphic.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Immediately, they&#8217;re start in saying, &#8220;Phil is actually harassing all these white dudes,&#8221; and &#8220;Phil is doing this and he wants [inaudible] him and [inaudible] somebody else. I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I have nothing to do with PHP anymore so even if I did call someone, even if I was saying something terrible, the code of conduct wouldn&#8217;t apply to me anyway but I was immediately somewhat invalidated so I have to take the backseat and I just hope everyone else would take it on. But a lot of the PHP community just banded together and start screaming at everybody and losing their minds. By the time I was ready to try and get back involved and suggest to what&#8217;s going on, there were already so many arguments that people would just fed up without even trying.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Key person checks the RFC has step down, somebody else step up, they gave up. After getting screamed at, like anyone who even try to help with the code of conduct, their sexuality and then motives and everything would get called into question. People would say things like, &#8220;Phil is just doing this to try and get attention from the ladies, if he even like ladies.&#8221; All these crazy, ridiculous stuff that I just don&#8217;t understand and it never really go anywhere. A third person try to push the RFC and that just scared of how much of a time sink it&#8217;s going to be and how it&#8217;s going to affect the jobs and careers and things. It&#8217;s a really weird scenario.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s the current setting of PHP.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Pretty much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have to point that Ruby didn&#8217;t do much better with the attempt at adopting code of conduct either so that kind of thing is rampant.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, we wound up with something that claims to be a code of conduct but basically says everybody be nice with no real definitions of what that means and no real process for mediation or remediation, which is something that you brought up earlier, Phil about how &#8212; I&#8217;m terrible with names, I&#8217;m sorry &#8212; but the person who propose this added a bit about having an actual mediation process. That gets to something really interesting about codes of conduct that I&#8217;ve been seeing in conversations about them for years, which it&#8217;s not enough to just copy-paste a code of conduct and magically, boom! Everybody will come and join your project. You actually have to believe in it and work and enforce it and actually make an effort to create a safer space, if not actually a safe space.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It plays in my mind that people don&#8217;t understand that. Just having a piece of text doesn&#8217;t do anything. People say things like, &#8220;Having a code of conduct doesn&#8217;t actually help anything. It doesn&#8217;t stop anything bad from happening.&#8221; I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Right but&#8211;&#8220;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; Process is for. We understand that. I put a coding style file in my repositories to let people know what coding style I would like. But then I also work it up to Travis so that if the coding style is broken, then like emails, even it fails the pull request saying, &#8220;This pull request contains invalid style.&#8221; A marked down file on the internet doesn&#8217;t do anything. No one thinks it does. We all know that. It&#8217;s part one, then you need part two and part three. I&#8217;m so confused that anyone thinks that anyone would suggest that a marked down file on the internet is going to change the world.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It is necessary but not sufficient.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, maybe that&#8217;s why people got so upset about it because they thought that if the marked down file was coming then, that meant that they might actually have to change their behavior.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s a slippery slope &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Are these people worried that they&#8217;re assholes?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; To actual justice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I heard a really funny quote from a friend of mine who&#8217;s had a lot of trouble with code of conduct as well. The cases against code of conduct are so full of slippery slope arguments, they can open a water slide park. It&#8217;s ludicrous. I can&#8217;t have a single conversation about it without somebody saying, &#8220;If we let people say, I don&#8217;t like this behavior and it kind of sucks when you call me this name, can you stop?&#8221; Then eventually, people would be getting fired for having political beliefs every time. I guess it&#8217;s this weird stamp of what if we do this more reasonable thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s like the arguments for gay marriage where we&#8217;re like, &#8220;If we let homosexuals get married, then all of a sudden people be marrying horses.&#8221; No! The first thing happens, it doesn&#8217;t mean the second thing will happen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wait a minute, I once fell in love with a horse, though I don&#8217;t appreciate that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, Philip actually means lover of horses so I do understand your concept.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Some of your blog post analyzing opposition to codes of conduct. You pointed out that part of the problems comes from individuals acting like there&#8217;s a conspiracy out to get them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. A lot of the time, there are people that are posting about certain things on their blog. They might have certain political views. It’s the same blog that they put a lot of their tech content on. These people will post about some technical thing and then the next post after will be something that&#8217;s kind of controversial, something a little bit of [inaudible], a little bit lifestyle. Then they&#8217;ll get back to posting about tech again. They kind of aid themselves [inaudible] between tech under political views and they think of it as politics. But really, a lot of it is about basic human rights and decencies with each other. The politics line is kind of a tricky thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Because these people post about tech one minute and then about something that&#8217;s pretty bad like super, super sexist or pretty misogynist or complaining about the crazy feminists, they&#8217;re at it again, in quotation marks of course, they will then get shouted at by a lot of people. If you have a tech following and then you start showing that you&#8217;re past of the problem in tech, then the tech people that read your blog post will then be like, &#8220;This isn&#8217;t cool.&#8221; The people that generally think there&#8217;s a conspiracy out to get them, a lot of it is because they post some outburst stuff and then people disagree with it strongly. Then one person might go too far and maybe report that person to their boss like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t agree with what this person says. I&#8217;m trying to get them fired,&#8221; which isn&#8217;t really what anyone&#8217;s trying to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s a lot of people who think the entire kind of social justice movement is about trying to get people fired or about trying to get people in trouble. There are people who think the phrase &#8216;social justice warrior&#8217; means using social media tools to fight against people that don&#8217;t like to get them fired. That&#8217;s not what it means at all. Social justice warrior, it means like fighting for social justice, which means like fighting for equality. Social justice warrior itself shouldn&#8217;t be an insult. It should be a complement.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I definitely take that as a compliment. I was talking to my daughter once about people using social justice warrior, the pejorative and she said, &#8220;Sounds like you&#8217;re a superhero,&#8221; whereas there&#8217;s a lot of &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, and that&#8217;s kind of a problem. Like two same groups have two different definitions for the same word, that&#8217;s pretty hard. That&#8217;s where a lot of the stuff stems from like the people who are against feminism don&#8217;t understand what feminism is about. They think it&#8217;s about taking power away from men to give it to women where really, it&#8217;s about making things equal for everybody. It&#8217;s just so confusing like men should totally support feminism. Feminism means that I don&#8217;t have to be a macho dude. I can just do what I want and I can wear something that is pink or purple without somebody questioning my sexuality. Feminism is awesome and social justice is awesome, like all these things are awesome and people don&#8217;t quite get it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The people that don&#8217;t quite get it, unfortunately get shouted at by a lot of people who just kind of tired of having to explain it to these people so without trying to tell them but there&#8217;s anyone, that totally understand how it can get frustrating to have to explain it. Like another white dude called Chad from Connecticut who doesn&#8217;t quite get what you&#8217;re talking about like &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because there is an endless supply of Chad out there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Millions of Chads. It&#8217;s really hard to keep on explaining it to these people, especially when they just pop up and say something dumb and it sounds like something else somebody said and you just give them a very curt response back like, &#8220;Feminist are terrible people,&#8221; and they run away. It shapes everything terribly. The more you talk against diversity or against any of these things, the more people shout at you and it kind of sends you on this downward spiral into becoming a men&#8217;s rights activist. There&#8217;s a lot of people in PHP community that are at the tip of sinking into that downward spiral or they&#8217;re on their way down into the pit and that&#8217;s kind of the problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They think there&#8217;s a conspiracy out to get them, really, it&#8217;s just a lot of people disagreeing with the stuff they&#8217;re say and some people take it a bit too far with trying to get people fired or try to shame people, when it&#8217;s really not about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a beautiful article the other day that explained this to me. The tolerance is not a moral imperative. It is a peace treaty that says, &#8220;We&#8217;re all going to be nice to each other and accept each other as we are.&#8221; If you violate the peace treaty by being intolerant, then it doesn&#8217;t apply to you anymore. We don&#8217;t have to be nice to you. We can kick you out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also, there&#8217;s the idea of proportionate response of if you write something I don&#8217;t like on the internet, trying to get you fired would be a disproportionate response. Blocking you on Twitter, would be quite proportionate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, we went through a thing in the Portland Ruby community a year or two ago and I&#8217;m probably going to get some hate tweets for this again but we did wind up asking somebody to leave the community for some behavior that we were pretty sure was well-beyond the pale. I got called literally, &#8216;Hitler&#8217; for that. That was a good time. But the meeting after we did that, several people showed up who were like, &#8220;I had stopped coming because these things were really not very welcoming to me,&#8221; but then I heard that you&#8217;d actually taken action on your COC and we got people who hadn&#8217;t been there for a year or more.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s something that open source, in particular is really bad about and that is when OpalGate fiasco went down &#8212; for those who don&#8217;t know, OpalGate is the term that is applied to something that happened with the Opal-Ruby-JavaScript transpiler. One of the maintainers was exhibiting very transphobic behavior on Twitter and I made the mistake of getting involved in it and opening an issue in the repository, asking for clarification from the maintainers, basically of trans-people who were welcome to participate in a project.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the other maintainers came out and said he didn&#8217;t care who someone was or what they believed in as long as they wrote a good code. After clarifying question said, he&#8217;d be happy to work with child molesters and white supremacists as long his code was good. I think it&#8217;s an important question like we have to have tolerance for other people&#8217;s political ideas but when they start to question people&#8217;s humanity, is that [inaudible] too far? Then that when consequences should be imposed.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If you want to talk politics, you can talk about how we should allocate our money as a country. You can about degrees of regulation we should have over businesses. You can even talk about trade agreements and maybe immigration policies. But I&#8217;m sorry, whether a specific person is a human and worthy of participating in the conversation, that&#8217;s not politics. That&#8217;s some is more other.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s not a political speech, it&#8217;s a hate speech at that point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One thing that people are kind of confuse, I think the recent Contributor Covenant 1.4 did a wonderful job with cleaning up any misapprehensions about it, is the people are allowed to talk about whatever they want to talk about on their own public platforms, without a project specific code of conduct getting in the way. Then there might be other ramifications like you saying stuff in public that people don&#8217;t like it, in general was could well lead to various ramifications. But they aren&#8217;t the ones that are necessarily enforced by a project that you happen to contribute to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The PHP RFC, I think all of us should contribute in covenant. It basically said there are other rules that may well be imposed by the project and in the later version, it more explicitly said, the PHP RFC did say this will be limited to &#8212; I cannot get the exact wording on the top of my head but basically, you have to be representing PHP when that happens. Now, if you go and put a contributor to PHP in your Twitter profile, that gets a little bit tricky. But generally speaking, if you want talking about PHP stuff and you just talking about your views on abortion or whatever, that all fine. It&#8217;s when you start bringing that stuff and that tone and being a jackass. If you&#8217;re being a jackass in pull requests and linking to PHP RFCs and then being like, &#8220;Look at this,&#8221; or whatever, being horrible in the context of the project, that&#8217;s when the rules would affect you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They even said you&#8217;re allowed to tweet about politics. It&#8217;s totally fine and this code of conduct cannot be used against you. One of the wonderful things about the mediation process that was at full PHP unlike many other people try and do is there&#8217;s actually a private reporting structure. To avoid OpalGate, all that needs to be done is if an initial issue was an email, then that would have been fine. But of course, it couldn&#8217;t be an email because they didn&#8217;t have a code of conduct set up to say, &#8220;We actually care about this.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If that project had shown that they care about people being discriminatory, then they would set up an email address. Now, email address would be used and if anybody else popped up and not using the email address, that thing can get locked immediately. The best way to avoid an OpalGate is to have a code of conduct. All the conversations, the Ruby issue that you mentioned earlier and a million different conversations that happened, all of those were an OpalGate by people trying to avoid OpalGate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It was completely ridiculous and I think everyone should just have a code of conduct to avoid having an argument on the internet. But I do think that they were so worried about creating drama, that they created more drama. All the people that are against code of conducts, they generally, like this one specific person that cause the most problem in the PHP, he has his own which is again being nice and being nice is the first thing that people will say when you start talking about code of conduct. They&#8217;ll say, &#8220;Why can&#8217;t we just have and be nice thing.&#8221; They&#8217;ll just says that they don&#8217;t talk about politics and be polite to each other.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You have to say what happens when you&#8217;re not nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Not even that &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You need to define nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; Exactly, Coraline. There&#8217;s no definition of nice. Not everyone knows what being nice constitutes and those that do know, don&#8217;t necessary care, like a lot of people would be like, &#8220;Oh, grow up. Why can&#8217;t you take feedback?&#8221; And feedback is cool but when you&#8217;re being an asshole, that&#8217;s not just feedback. People quit projects over how a nice this one guy is. He doesn&#8217;t use any rude words but he made 10 people give up on a certain project. Then we try to get rid of him because he was not being nice and he was like, &#8220;There&#8217;s no rules that say I should leave. There&#8217;s no rules about this stuff. I think I&#8217;m being nice and they don&#8217;t and saying as there&#8217;s no rules, you can&#8217;t get rid of me.&#8221; Right, that&#8217;s what a code of conduct would be. You can&#8217;t say that we don&#8217;t have rules because you stopped us from having rules. Ahh! What&#8217;s happening?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right and there&#8217;s a fundamental problem, I think with being nice which falls in my mind into that category of looking at intent. Be nice is saying something about who you are. But a code of conduct really should be about what you do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, great point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I tried really hard with Contributor Covenant 1.4. You pointed out to kind of corrupt some of these gray areas but you have recently released an open source guide. There&#8217;s a page in the open source guide about codes of conduct and why it&#8217;s important to adopt them and most importantly, tips on how to enforce them and be fair in that enforcement. One of the pieces of feedback I got was, &#8220;What if you do if someone makes a false report?&#8221; I think there&#8217;s this fear that some people have that a code of conduct is a tool for punishing them and just saying, &#8220;The code of conduct says this so I guess, you&#8217;re kicked off the project,&#8221; not understanding that a project maintainer is a person in charge of setting community standards and enforcing community standards in a fair and even handed way. People think that it&#8217;s passing a law that&#8217;s not subject to interpretation by a judge, which is kind of ridiculous.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that was one of the large problems we had in the PHP attempt. What I see it in various other conversations about code of conducts, the problem is it&#8217;s similar to the conspiracy theory thing. Because certain people have had this negative experience with people for getting fired, it&#8217;s framed that it&#8217;ll be use on any of these sort of stuff in a very negative paranoid way. The problem is they are more concerned about false reports than they are about genuine issues happening.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Whether that&#8217;s because they don&#8217;t think genuine issues are actually happening or there&#8217;s enough of them to feel to be warranted or whether they just don&#8217;t care. We can&#8217;t tell. But a lot of people are so super concerned about potential misreports that they&#8217;d rather just not have any structure for it or whatsoever and that is insulting. It&#8217;s ignorant and the trouble is it&#8217;s really hard to change somebody&#8217;s mind on that stuff because they&#8217;ll say, &#8220;These things don&#8217;t really happen,&#8221; and the second you say, &#8220;Here they do. Here&#8217;s an example.&#8221; They&#8217;ll just call that person a liar, like the reason Uber conversation. I forget which is truly embarrassing &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Susan Fowler.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, that&#8217;s right. She&#8217;s kind of talking about problems happening at Uber and HR failures and of course, everyone&#8217;s does immediately calling her a liar &#8212; not everyone but Chad. The problem is whenever people come forward and actually tell their stories to the public, people just call them a liar. Again, like they&#8217;ve gone from thinking this never happens to okay, occasionally people lie about it happening and nothing has changed so people don&#8217;t want to actually expose their stories because they&#8217;ll get called liars so you&#8217;re in the situation &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or worse.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or worse, yeah, like liars [inaudible]. You&#8217;re in a situation where there&#8217;s no real evidence to support the fact that these things are our problem so they just think they aren&#8217;t our problem and therefore, anyone who&#8217;s trying to enforce a code of conduct must just be doing it to get power because they want to takeover projects and get people fired. Some people are confused about and dedicated to that approach but they think that Coraline is coming to take their projects.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The idea that if you put a code of conduct in that, then anything that you disagree with, you can just get someone kicked off the project and takeover. People genuinely think this and it&#8217;s really hard to fight.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What&#8217;s the upside for me as somebody &#8212; I&#8217;m not even trying to get people to adopt the codes of conduct but me &#8212; as a notional person who is initiating this discussion. What really is the upside for me in trying to get somebody fired or trying to takeover their project? Doesn&#8217;t that just create way more work for me, in both cases? Why would I want that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I&#8217;m desperately trying to give away as many open source projects as I can so I can stop maintaining them. I definitely wouldn&#8217;t want to start picking up all of the projects on the internet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I&#8217;m well-positioned to just takeover the entire open source world. That&#8217;s my secret plan for world domination. I want to be in charge of all the open source.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Genius.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s all about my GitHub contribution.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like a lot of that defensive argument seems it might come from a place of cognitive dissonance. If you start talking about having a code of conduct, then perhaps it means that somebody is saying you have some issues that might have already benefited from having a code of conduct and that means that perhaps, you&#8217;re not the wonderful person that you believe yourself to be.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Facing that, this doesn&#8217;t even happen, I think at a conscious level. This all happens within a half a second and you see this conversation and you go, &#8220;This is an attack on me personally and I must defend against it.&#8221; By that time, there&#8217;s not even an argument anymore from the rhetorical perspective. There&#8217;s just a fight.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. A lot of this problem is just pointing out that like white dudes aren&#8217;t perfect and we really hate that. A lot of the time, these things that you&#8217;re doing are causing these problems. You know, men do this, men blame men do on whatever. They take that as an attack on men like if you want to call us, you shouldn&#8217;t be attacking men. But if you want a quality, you have to point out like if the scales are unbalanced, you have to actually look and see what&#8217;s happening with the scales to work out why they&#8217;re in balance so you can then correct it and make things more fair. The problem is if you ever suggest that straight, white dude is at fault, even slightly, then loads of straight, white dudes are going to come at you and start screaming at you about stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I used to be really ignorant. I used to live in a small rural town in the UK and think that attempts to make the women speak in a panel at conferences was certainly a positive affirmation. I still think it was like unfair and sexist to try and jam women into most speakers. Then I realized that&#8217;s so far from the case that it&#8217;s unreal and that&#8217;s why I became so involved in a lot of these conversations because as somebody who&#8217;s taken a stance, somebody who has made the 180 degree mental change from someone who was possibly coming towards being a men&#8217;s rights activist to like being a normal human being, the kind of understands how these things work and don&#8217;t see people are lying for attention, I hope that I could bring other people along on this journey and that&#8217;s what all these series of blog post are about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s so many words that are into the series that I put in. I&#8217;ve been talking about diversity and everyone is in no way is offended, the conspiracy theories and code of conduct not being so bad things like that. There&#8217;s so much work I put into those to try and help bring people along on my journey. Unfortunately, the second I started writing about it, everyone just start calling me a PC bro and SJW and then they just ignored everything I was trying to say.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In one of your blog post, though you talked about how empathy is at odds with our standard ideal of a programmer. Do you think that that is a factor in some of the stuff that you saw?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s dogmatic logic versus empathy. A lot of people that are incredibly logic minded just don&#8217;t really get humans. We know this is not that confusing. The same people that like to use statistical racism. Those are the things like, &#8220;Well, it makes sense that there&#8217;s more black people in prison because black people commit more crime so that&#8217;s the end of that conversation and that&#8217;s that.&#8221; That&#8217;s ludicrous. It&#8217;s a statistical racism just because they don&#8217;t understand the situation. They don&#8217;t understand that most of those crimes, if a white dude did it, there wouldn&#8217;t be the same outcome. They probably wouldn&#8217;t go to jail. Like having a tiny bit of drugs for a white dude is fine, then if you&#8217;re black, a tiny bit of crack, you have 10 years in jail.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A lot of these different things, the human element to it, lost on them because they look at the rules on paper. They look at the law that says, there cannot be gender discrimination at work and they think, &#8220;Great. It is illegal to have gender discrimination at work,&#8221; so anyone who&#8217;s complaining about gender discrimination is lying and doing it for attention because it&#8217;s illegal so it can&#8217;t happen. It says it on paper versus an acceptance of what reality is more likely to be.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s wrong every time and it&#8217;s really hard to reason with those people because they&#8217;ve decided that things are this way. If you start on picking at certain element, then the whole thing starts to fall apart. Their entire world view becomes different. I had my entire world view changed and it was bad. I have to think about lost stuff again and think about a lot of things, a lot different times over a couple of years like it was morphing and changing in front of me. But once you start to realize that most minorities who are complaining about things aren&#8217;t doing it because they&#8217;re lying or lazy or want attention or anything else because they genuinely have problems and once you realized that, everything changes for you. Most people don&#8217;t have the time or mental capacity to re-evaluate their entire life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s so true. I think sometimes those of us who do have time to think about things don&#8217;t appreciate that people without leisure time, they don&#8217;t have that same luxury.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I spend a lot of time doing a 10-hour bike ride and it made me think about a lot of stuff on that ride because nothing else to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have to ask you, Jessica, is it a luxury or is it a moral imperative?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really think that it&#8217;s not something everyone has the ability or opportunity to do, to think about things and make choices. Choices are expensive. We figuring out how the world works and changing your model is expensive and if people are working three jobs to put food on the table for their kids and just trying to have four hours of sleep and get up and go to work again and say hello to their kids once a day, no you don&#8217;t have time to think through everything. However &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Those are not the people &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>People don&#8217;t have that excuse.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; Yeah, exactly, Chad doesn&#8217;t have that excuse.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Chad does not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m really sorry for picking on Chad.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re going to hear from Chad fellow later on this one. Chad comes from a place where he doesn&#8217;t have to experience all of those things so it is probably pretty natural for him to assume that his experience applies to everybody else. If that is the case, then sure, maybe it makes sense to think that, well if somebody is complaining about this thing, they must be lying because I don&#8217;t see it, therefore it must not exist.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But you&#8217;re right, having that realization and doing the work to understand that one&#8217;s own experience is not universally applicable, that burden definitely falls on the person who has the ability to shoulder it: i.e. Chad.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I did a thing about basically trying to explain marginalization to somebody using a bike [inaudible] for which is incredibly like me. It came to me as there were a charity ride and we&#8217;re all cycling along and I have a busted bike. It was the same bike. We all have the same rentals from the same company, everything&#8217;s the same about them. But mine was really having some problems and struggling through. I didn&#8217;t want to hold anyone up by trying to get it fixed or find a mechanic. I feel it would be okay but it was a non-stop battle.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It was after 40, 50 miles, my legs are really hurting because I couldn&#8217;t get out of the middle cranking. It was a real pain and eventually, I had to stop and say, &#8220;I&#8217;m really struggling here. I really need some help with my bike. Can we stop and find a mechanic.&#8221; A couple of people joke about it like, &#8220;Oh, Phil, there&#8217;s always some excuse. Just put more effort in. Stop complaining about it.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Yes, we&#8217;re all tired and a few people were joking with things like that but then eventually, they said, &#8220;Yes, let&#8217;s definitely help you out.&#8221; If my friends said anything other than, &#8220;Yes, of course. We understand your problems. Let&#8217;s help you out,&#8221; then I wouldn&#8217;t leave it. If they genuinely didn&#8217;t believe me and they genuinely thought I was lying for attention, why would you see I&#8217;m lying? &#8220;There&#8217;s always some excuse, Phil.&#8221; If they didn&#8217;t believe me, I would have been so mad. That&#8217;s generally what marginalization is that people talk about their issues and that other people just assume they&#8217;re lying for attention or for power or for whatever it is. People need to just stop doing that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Which means as someone who wants to help, step one is just believe the other person. Really, what does it cost you? Does it cost you your world view? Good!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Step zero is listen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s the thing. Listen is important. It’s really how do you want to [inaudible] but you don&#8217;t need to believe every word they&#8217;re saying. One of the responses with, as I mentioned with Susan was writing about, Uber, there&#8217;s a lot people who instantly believe everything she says or just call her a liar. Now, if you instantly believe anything that somebody says on the internet and you don&#8217;t know who they are, that&#8217;s a bit strange. You shouldn&#8217;t necessarily instantly believe every single word with no evidence but definitely calling her a liar is completely ludicrous.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The problem is that belief is something could be possible. I think, it&#8217;s highly, highly probable that everything she&#8217;s written about is true but I can&#8217;t say for sure, it is definitely true. You know what I mean?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s constant with other stories and others like I personally observed. Let&#8217;s just go with that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, the more you listen, the more these stories that you do understand and you do believe, the more it plays into a very realistic picture. I&#8217;m 99% confident that happened. But without the evidence, it is hard. It&#8217;s a case of don&#8217;t assume someone&#8217;s lying just because feminists stories are making stuff up. Don&#8217;t assume someone is lying but also don&#8217;t necessarily see it that it&#8217;s completely 100% true every time. There&#8217;s going to be trick that you wants to get. Listening is really important. Support is important and just why do you assume people are lying?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Phil, you mentioned this transition for you, from believing that the stuff didn&#8217;t happen and didn&#8217;t matter to caring about the world, did that happened like four years ago when you move to New York?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, before that, I was living in Bristol, two cities in the Southwest where I spent pretty much my entire life. I occasionally go to the [inaudible] conference and meetup but just hanging out with my developer friends was most of the developer-y interactions I had and they were mostly dudes so it&#8217;s very easy to fall into a headspace where the reason that most conferences is a panel of dudes is most developers I know are men and most companies I go to are men. Even when I start traveling around the States a bit more, I get to a lot of startups and it would be mostly men. This is a positive feedback loop and there&#8217;s various problems that are affecting the gender balance in tech so you wonder about it and you just see a bunch of men and you just think, &#8220;There aren&#8217;t that many women in tech. I wish I kind of reinforce the loop.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then you start thinking, &#8220;Women just aren&#8217;t interested so anyone who complains about problems that are affecting women, they&#8217;re exaggerating the situation or maybe they&#8217;re making it out because really, women just are not that interested.&#8221; When I came to New York, I completely escaped that whole mindset. There were a lot of women developers here for start so talking to women developers and talking to other women in the work, in these techie startups, listening to them talk about their problems blew my mind.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I believe [inaudible] that my friends. They&#8217;ve shown me things that happened. They&#8217;ve shown me the emails and screenshots. They&#8217;ve heard about as they evolve and the amount of things that were going on was terrible. One example of a friend who was working for a small eight-person startup. As an Asian woman developer, she was getting a lot of Asian and female jokes. She didn&#8217;t necessarily enjoy it and she didn&#8217;t feel like tackling it herself because that would be seen as aggressive and that would be a problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> She kind of mentioned it to that one person who&#8217;s half of that job is HR. After a bit backwards and forwards, they&#8217;re just like, &#8220;Well, we don&#8217;t actually know how to address this issue but if you like to work somewhere else, then that would be easy than us changing our culture.&#8221; That&#8217;s pretty much what they said so the more that you hear this stuff from your friends, the more that you&#8217;re kind of understand that it happens. Like I said before, some people are scared to talk about it. Some people do talk about it and you don&#8217;t necessary know who they are so they get called a liar and you&#8217;re like, &#8220;Maybe they&#8217;re a liar,&#8221; because you see other people calling them liars.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Some people don&#8217;t talk about it to you because they don&#8217;t trust you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, so how do you earn that trust?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sarah Sharp had a great Twitterstorm about this. Her canary in a coal mine was if a woman complains about they don&#8217;t have t-shirts in her size and you don&#8217;t care, you&#8217;re not going to hear any of her harassment stories.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, the thing is once they started posting about code of conduct and about diversity and about women in tech, I&#8217;ve done a few blog post over the last couple of years, the more I started to post about this stuff, the more people were [inaudible] and sending me emails and contacting me however they could and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;I&#8217;m so glad you&#8217;re talking about this,&#8221; and then I start to hear more stories that of course really bolsters my position on the situation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s really hard to be a good ally because a lot of the things in the past where I thought I was being a good ally, I was actually being a jerk and I&#8217;m embarrassed about that. There&#8217;s a few podcast where there&#8217;s two different feminists or two different views on things and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;That&#8217;s anti-feminist,&#8221; and I&#8217;m saying silly things and I don&#8217;t know I&#8217;m talking about. It&#8217;s really hard to be good ally but once you start showing that you can be a helpful person and you do understand some of the problems, people often then start to hope you further.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;ve had a lot of free advice and coaching and training from my friends that are suffering these problems, which has really helped. Again, it&#8217;s not the sort of stuff like understanding the topic of diversity and equality in the workplace and gender issues for tech and issues of people of color. That&#8217;s a lot of stuff to learn. It&#8217;s like learning how Git works or learning how certain piece of tech works. It&#8217;s much bigger and more important than that but as part of your job, you need to understand diversity and inclusivity and all these various connected topics to be, not only a good developer but a good human being. There&#8217;s a lot of people that just think that it&#8217;s people making things up. It&#8217;s really hard to make it part of the curriculum, being a good developer. I don&#8217;t know how we do it but it needs to change somehow.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think you made an interesting point about allies too. Allies in a badge that you earn, being an ally is a process and you&#8217;re going to fuck it up. Everyone&#8217;s going to fuck it up. I have fucked it up. Everyone fucks it up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have fucked it up many, many times. I&#8217;m glad you said that because I wanted to jump in as well and say that allyship is not a thing that you are. Again, it&#8217;s a thing that you do and you have to keep doing it. It&#8217;s a work and it&#8217;s hard and it&#8217;s worth it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The point that I wanted to get back to about your story was that this happened fairly recently. How old were you when you moved to New York?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Twenty-four.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, you&#8217;re not old at all.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, but to say, below 25, you&#8217;re allowed to have a lot of stupid opinions about everything.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, especially &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was hoping to make the point that even when you&#8217;re in your late 30s and 40s, you too can change but maybe this story doesn&#8217;t help.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, that happen to me quite a bit, Jessica because I was a pretty terrible person before my transition and what I see now is very problematic ideas. I wasn&#8217;t by any stretch to the imagination, a feminist and it wasn&#8217;t until I started paying attention and started practicing empathy that I discovered that there was this whole other world of truths that I had never opened my eyes to before. That started as part of a deliberate process of sort of reinventing myself and that happened when I was 40 so that can definitely happen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah. Just Phil&#8217;s story doesn&#8217;t work as an example.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It doesn&#8217;t provide us [inaudible] data for that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And I&#8217;m just a woman to my opinion. It doesn&#8217;t matter on that topic.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that was about four years ago for me that I started recognizing that just because I had a good experience in tech, it doesn&#8217;t mean every women did.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a lot of problem. There&#8217;s a lot different approaches to feminism and I know a lot of developers that will say &#8212; I don&#8217;t know why specifically developers but &#8212; I know a fair few people that will say things like, &#8220;Until feminist could agree, then why should we listen to anything they have to say?&#8221; That&#8217;s obviously ridiculous. I give you ask half the population about anything and they going to have a lot of different ideas. When they say half the population, that&#8217;s because woman are feminist. Some women aren&#8217;t feminists.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s so many different people that have so many different views on so many different things, a lot of people think that feminism is something that is very much not and there are different people who describe themselves as feminists that have different views on how to achieve equality. People need to recognize the fact that a diverse group of people will have a diverse set of opinions and be respectful of them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;ll often say if you&#8217;re either a feminist or misogynist, there is no overlap. There is no, &#8220;I’m just neutral.&#8221; You either believe that all gender should have equality or you don&#8217;t. In the slide of feminist end of the scale, there&#8217;s a million different views. There&#8217;s a lot of different definitions of equality: subsistence equality and I forget the name of the other one but it&#8217;s about removing the blockers that will allow us at some point become equal versus making that process a bit quicker like give me that job that I should have because you&#8217;re always getting jobs to the people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s kind of different approaches to equality and different approaches to everything so instead of mocking a diverse set of opinions for not being all exactly the same, people&#8217;s needs to except the different people have different views and you can agree with some of them and then disagree with others without that person being stupid or that anti-movement being stupid, you know?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, we all see a different piece of the world. Of course, we all have a different model. How about Ruby?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, you made a transition from the PHP community to the Ruby community and I&#8217;m very, very interested in your perspective. Hearing what those like for you and maybe hearing about not just from a techno perspective but how the PHP and Ruby communities differed. There&#8217;s a lot of animosity toward PHP and the Ruby community. A lot of contempt for PHP which I think is very unwarranted and very unprofessional. What sort of things have you seen moving between those two communities?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s really interesting. I&#8217;ve been using Ruby exclusively for the last four years and on and off since 2010. I was playing around with Rails quite a while ago. We have a different point now with younger developers of don&#8217;t necessarily have any experience with PHP. This thing is becoming less and less true but for a long time, most of the Ruby developers used to do PHP. PHP was the first language for all people to go to and they went somewhere else and some people went to Node but a lot of people were going to Ruby because of Rails.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Unfortunately, a lot of people didn&#8217;t really keep up with what was happening in PHP and it kind of assumed the PHP is still PHP 4 which was pretty bad. PHP 5 and all of them minor releases since then, added a lot of functionality that&#8217;s proper [inaudible]. PHP 4 was meant to be PHP 6 so it&#8217;s kind of a major version all in itself. Then PHP 7, skipped 6 &#8212; don&#8217;t ask &#8212; PHP 7 is kind of a fundamental rewrite of a lot of aspects of the language, including the lexer, the parser, the tokenizer, a lot of memory management like most of the language apart from the standard library, unfortunately was rewritten in PHP 7.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> These days when people talk nonsense about PHP, they&#8217;re talking about a false memory of when they were an experienced programmer using a fairly young and not very well-built language that has since changed drastically. For Ruby developer these days to poop on PHP is usually pretty far from the truth.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s what Aurynn Shaw cause contempt culture and it&#8217;s very damaging.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. I saw it, I go to conferences and people will be like, &#8220;What language do you use?&#8221; And if I say Ruby, they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Okay.&#8221; If I say PHP, they&#8217;d be like, &#8220;Really?&#8221; That makes you feel very bad. I don&#8217;t mind it personally except to be like, &#8220;I was contributing to PHP. I was going to help and make that place better. I was top-level PHP guy,&#8221; and they&#8217;d be like, &#8220;Ehhh&#8230;&#8221; They&#8217;ll still going to make fun. But I just say, &#8220;I wrote Golang,&#8221; and they&#8217;re be like, &#8220;You&#8217;re clever, cool.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This is really weird thing where the language you use dictates your intelligence level not market forces or the job you&#8217;re at or anything else. It is strange. Contempt culture is pretty damaging in people&#8217;s moods and happiness. Again, these developers are thinking, &#8220;I don&#8217;t have to change languages because people&#8217;s think I&#8217;m stupid or my career&#8217;s going to be in trouble,&#8221; and they were like spend a lot of time learning a different language or look for a different job or maybe move house because there&#8217;s no people offering a job in a certain area, with a certain language so they will change their entire life just so people on being mean and their boss that might not be conscious to them. That&#8217;s the case. That&#8217;s all of the subconscious stuff that is being pushed into the back of the head that then informs their decisions. It pretty silly, especially when most of the language are basically the same.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For listeners who might be newer to the show, there&#8217;s another interesting take on this back in Episode 2 with Avdi Grimm, where about 30 minutes into the show, he talks about his take on PHP as somebody who came to it from Ruby. You might like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For sure, I&#8217;ll check that out. That sounds good. There&#8217;s a lot of things in that Ruby developers will recognize. There&#8217;s a build-in web server these days. You just type &#8216;PHP -s&#8217; and it&#8217;s the same as Vim or whatever. There&#8217;s an aspect equivalent. There’s webmark port. There&#8217;s a VCR port. If you can think of the tool that you like, there is a port of it. In the past, when you use to search for most things in PHP like how do I do this, then you end up on WFREE schools and there was some nonsense from early 2000 and it was terrible and insecure and get you hacked if you did it so a few other developers put together PHP the right way and that shows you a good up-to-date, constantly evolving information on best practices and standards and things like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It used to be no code style so we made one, the PHP Fake came up together and made PSR-2. There was no real package management apart from PEAR where people really didn&#8217;t like. Now, there&#8217;s composer which is based off of Bundler and it&#8217;s almost exactly the same and just as good. It kind of sounds like PHP just copy and [inaudible] and in some respects, they are. There&#8217;s lots of developers like me that use other languages then kind of send information back or work on these features, put them back into the language and &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because in Ruby it doesn&#8217;t copy from anybody else ever.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. Everyone&#8217;s copying from everyone. Developers are sharing ideas like polyglot developers just pass around ideas and information in years of conferences and you start talking to Alexa developers and you realize they&#8217;re copying stuff from other languages too. Instead of making fun of each other for the choice or for the language that you&#8217;re currently using, you should be sharing information about the struggles that you have, in the ways that they resolve and the tooling that you like and how it helps at certain situations.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Instead of feeling smug about yourself that you obviously made the right choice because other language developers are stupid, you get to be happy that you come up with this really cool idea for a tool that could totally help out in your community, then people would be singing your praises as a hero for raising this amazing thing. It&#8217;s a totally different mindset and it&#8217;s hard to change for some people. But just don&#8217;t be a jerk about languages.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Technical differences aside, how&#8217;s your experience of Ruby community been different from your experience with the PHP community?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve been enjoying taking very much a backseat in the Ruby community. I feel like in a lot of ways, Ruby community isn&#8217;t perfect like when I turned up there, I felt like things are pretty much under control. I was thinking about being part of a community such as a programming community, as like living in a neighborhood. If you live in a neighborhood and you starts to know there&#8217;s a few problems, you might start joining some local boards or commissions that will help out in certain ways. You might start helping out around the neighborhood to fix those problems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When I got to Ruby I was like, &#8220;Oh, it was pretty cool.&#8221; If there are problems, I&#8217;m the one that&#8217;ve noticed so I&#8217;m sure this thought leaders in the community, they&#8217;re shouting at each other and DHH occasionally post some interesting stuff and people end up getting very upset.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, so I just ignore those stuff and I always do it again or whatever and it&#8217;s fine. Whereas in the PHP community, I felt like there was a lot of things that needed to be worked on so I got super involved working on a lot of different things. It was slow and there needs to be PHP the right way for information, PHP Fake for standards bodies, PHP League of Extraordinary Packages for creating some of these gaps that left between frameworks building everything and the diagnostic stuff that exists too. All of these things over time, I got more and more stuff and I got more and more stuff. just going to Ruby and seeing like a really good tool for this and they really get standard for that and seeing it already be there, I was just like, &#8220;I can ride my bike now.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So you help PHP grow up as a language. At Ruby, it was already mature when you got there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I guess. I have a bit of a theory on how this works and it&#8217;s hard to prove anything but the PHP community is only recently, over the last couple of years, come together to knock down the barriers between different silos. The Ruby community is pretty much just Rails like there&#8217;s other tools &#8212; the Sinatra &#8212; but the bulk of people using Ruby really are using Rails a lot of the time. That was the one framework people would use, therefore if you had to build a gem, it would usually work by itself and with Ruby, there would be bridge packages but Ruby was always the center of people&#8217;s minds.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Where in the PHP community, which I think is much, much larger. PHP community is huge. They saw it being broken down by the specific framework. There&#8217;s Cake, there&#8217;s [inaudible], there&#8217;s [inaudible] these days is the new and kind of biggest one but there&#8217;s lots and lots and lots of different frameworks and people for the longest time would be just building things to work for their framework. It is hard coded and the framework is in the name of the package. It&#8217;s really that and it is only recently, like a lot of effort for myself and a lot of other individuals and the PHP-FIG and things like that, the framework are mostly packages. The start has becoming more of a thing and there&#8217;s standards that helping to define interfaces that various different frameworks can then latch onto to make sure the code works was in various places and stuff like that have started to bring people together to focus on PHP more than focusing on the specific framework or the specific CMS or a specific whatever.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In a couple of years about that, that&#8217;s start happening in 2011, 2012 and that&#8217;s really helped PHP grow up because when you have all of your efforts being separated into 10 almost identical communities and everyone is working on the same stuff and they&#8217;re all working on style guides, never working on whatever. Caching packages that would only work for their system, there&#8217;s so much effort being wasted. Instead of 10 different teams, which might be 20 people working on caching, you could have maybe four or five people making this one package and maintaining this one package that everyone can use and there&#8217;s other people can go and build something really cool. Instead of just constantly redeveloping the same way over and over and over again, you can start to build more, new work, greater stuff or ideas that people never even thought to make developing easier for people they&#8217;re just getting into it by removing some of the stuff they&#8217;d have to code and making a gem for that so &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is if they can all get along.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If they can all get along. If you can get along, if you can use some teamwork and you can have a code of conduct to help with people being jerks, then you can do really cool stuff. But if you just want to scream at each other and just code the same stuff over and over again and release the 12,000 PHP routing library because you think you&#8217;re so much smarter than everyone else, then coding just sucks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think, that&#8217;s what it&#8217;s all about. We want to make coding suck less.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, please.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For everybody. This has been a great conversation, Phil. We&#8217;ve really enjoyed having you on the show. We end every show with reflections, where we think about the conversations that we&#8217;ve had and while there&#8217;s some of the most salient points of the conversation and maybe some things that we want to do differently or think about a little bit more as a result of the conversation. Who would like to reflect first?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Me. Phil, you made a point pretty early in the show. There&#8217;s two actually that I think maybe go together. One was that one of your superpowers was in fact being confused by a book and not understanding it. You did what you had to do to understand it and then you brought that to people in a way that they could understand.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mama bird style.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, that&#8217;s beautiful. When you have the time and put in the effort to turn your confusion into something that as washes everyone else&#8217;s. I wonder if this has something to do with another phrase that you used. You said you had a habit of failing upward. I interpret that as when something doesn&#8217;t work out, something better will.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, basically.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And when you put your energy out there into the community, that totally happens.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, failing upwards is all about learning from your mistakes and then working hard. Failing upward for me was like I got fired from a cinema for just being a lazy, rubbish employee. Then after getting fired from a cinema, I realized no one would have ever hire me so I started my own company and that went crap in the recession and I got a job at a bigger firm and things like that. Part of that is luck, obviously and part of it is just kind of, &#8220;Okay, I did a bad thing here. Let&#8217;s try and make this better,&#8221; which people should focus on instead of, &#8220;Okay, I did a bad thing. Let&#8217;s argue with everyone before I did a bad thing.&#8221; Then just make sure I can really explain to myself that I did a good thing really. It&#8217;s about accepting your failures and trying to be better next time, in all of the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s not about, &#8220;No, past me was okay.&#8221; It&#8217;s about, &#8220;Future me is going to be better.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, for sure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That sounds like a perfect time for me to jump in. One of the things, looking back that really struck me about this is that we talked about a bunch of little cases and almost throw away comments that when I unpack them, they seemed we&#8217;re talking about people who have a very superficial understanding of the opposing position in whatever argument they&#8217;re in and they take that superficial understanding and then it&#8217;s just run and scream with that. I commented on this in the chat earlier about how I find it sort of hilariously sad that in tech, we have tools for doing root cause analysis.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The most prominent of which I can think of is the five whys technique. At least, some of us are really used to using those to figure out what&#8217;s going on with technical issues but those very same tools can work for social issues as well. If you just take some of the your initial understanding of some problem, like I think you mentioned there just aren&#8217;t as many women in tech as there are men, if you ask, &#8220;Why is that?&#8221; and then why is that, then why is that? You might actually get somewhere. It&#8217;s going to be harder for you to maybe have those answers right away because as a technologist, you&#8217;re probably more used to thinking about, &#8220;I know that there are problems with possibly cache misses or something,&#8221; and it&#8217;s going to be harder to think about complicated human behavior but it can be done. People do it and there is literature, lots and lots and lots of literature on all of that stuff. You just have to be willing to do a little bit of work. That, I guess sort of a combination of reflection and call to action is to try five whys on something that isn&#8217;t technical.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think for me, I&#8217;ve been reflecting a lot on the conversation and thinking back on maybe things that haven&#8217;t thought about for a while. I really like the idea of how empathy is somehow and very often, pitted against pure reason. I think I&#8217;m one of those people who gets really frustrated with that sort of dichotomy and I think that frustration probably manifest as me being aggressive or doesn&#8217;t really lend itself to having a productive conversation with someone.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">I&#8217;ve definitely changed my approach to things over the past couple of years based on experiences I&#8217;ve had but I need to do a better job of thinking about how to get past people&#8217;s visceral reaction to social justice issues and think about how to create better allies because I can&#8217;t do it alone. I&#8217;m going to give that some more thought. Phil, what do you think of our conversation we had today?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>PHIL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s really hard to talk about any of this stuff and I do hope that my thoughts came across as I intended them. I think one thing that I definitely takeaway from this conversation is that I really need to start bookmarking things that I find. You folks have been talking about various different articles that helped understand various different parts. So many times that I&#8217;ve been like, &#8220;This article is amazing. If more people can read this one article, then that might set them on their path,&#8221; especially with these other kind of five things that I went to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think it&#8217;s really important to kind of bookmark these things and save them and back them up so that you can help show people your path of thinking and your path of reasoning. Also, when I came to talk about something, I mentioned things like lending your privilege. I can&#8217;t remember who came up with that phrase so I&#8217;m talking about stuff without attribution, which is tough. I love to be the person that just kind of points people to other smart people and others smart things, instead of becoming this like, &#8220;Looks like that person got some great ideas,&#8221; because I&#8217;m just regurgitating things that I&#8217;d like to learn and heard and thought but a lot of the time these thoughts come from somebody first. Without being able to kind of channel people in the right directions, it just kind of sounds like I&#8217;m hogging stuff. This conversation made me realize that I need to do a much better job of bookmarking my sources and linking to things so that it&#8217;s more fair for everyone.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Before we end the show, we would like to point out that Greater Than Code is entirely listener supported. If you would like to join our community Slack, you can do so by contributing any amount to us at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. At increasing levels of donation, there are a few extra perks but basically we just want you to hang around and chat with us and feel like you are contributing to the show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also, as happened a few weeks ago, if you are hanging out in the flak at exactly the right time you might find yourself on the show randomly. With that, it&#8217;s been a really wonderful conversation and I feel like I could take another hour or two to just keep enjoying and digesting it but it&#8217;s time for us all to go and do work. Thank you very much everyone and listeners, we&#8217;ll catch you next week.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Phil Sturgeon: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/philsturgeon"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@philsturgeon</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span><a href="https://philsturgeon.uk/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">philsturgeon.uk</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to Greater Than Code: The SJW Takeover</span></p>
<p><b>00:53</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story, Superpowers, and Bike Messengering</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://leanpub.com/build-apis-you-wont-hate"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Build APIs You Won&#8217;t Hate</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.instacart.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Instacart</span></a></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en" style="text-align: left;">Had pesto chicken pasta for dinner, in honor of <a href="https://twitter.com/philsturgeon">@philsturgeon</a>’s interview on <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode">@greaterthancode</a> today. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/2.3/72x72/1f60b.png" alt="😋" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></p>
<p>— Sam Livingston-Gray (@geeksam) <a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam/status/834644793376411648">February 23, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>07:59</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Long-form Blogging (aka Rants)</span></p>
<p><b>08:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Codes of Conduct: Adoption, Enforcing, Conspiracy Theories</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://contributor-covenant.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Contributor Covenant</span></a></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">“Codes of Conducts are so full of slippery slope arguments, they could open a waterslide park.” <a href="https://twitter.com/philsturgeon">@philsturgeon</a></p>
<p>— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode/status/834862579004628994">February 23, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>17:40 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What it means to be a “Social Justice Warrior”, Tolerance, and “Being Nice”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d6376?gi=5a03baffa4c2#.ty01vckbo"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tolerance is not a moral precept</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://where.coraline.codes/blog/on-opalgate/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke: On Opalgate</span></a></p>
<p><b>27:46 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– False Reports vs Genuine Issues; Dogmatic Logic vs Empathy</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Susan J. Fowler: Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://philsturgeon.uk/2016/07/23/talking-about-diversity-marginalization/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Phil Sturgeon: Talking About Diversity: Marginalization</s]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">| </span><a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Phil Sturgeon: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/philsturgeon"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@philsturgeon</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span><a href="https://philsturgeon.uk/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">philsturgeon.uk</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:28 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to Greater Than Code: The SJW Takeover</span></p>
<p><b>00:53</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story, Superpowers, and Bike Messengering</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://leanpub.com/build-apis-you-wont-hate"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Build APIs You Won&#8217;t Hate</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.instacart.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Instacart</span></a></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en" style="text-align: left;">Had pesto chicken pasta for dinner, in honor of <a href="https://twitter.com/philsturgeon">@philsturgeon</a>’s interview on <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode">@greaterthancode</a> today. <img src="https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/2.3/72x72/1f60b.png" alt="😋" class="wp-smiley" style="height: 1em; max-height: 1em;" /></p>
<p>— Sam Livingston-Gray (@geeksam) <a href="https://twitter.com/geeksam/status/834644793376411648">February 23, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>07:59</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Long-form Blogging (aka Rants)</span></p>
<p><b>08:50 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Codes of Conduct: Adoption, Enforcing, Conspiracy Theories</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://contributor-covenant.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Contributor Covenant</span></a></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">“Codes of Conducts are so full of slippery slope arguments, they could open a waterslide park.” <a href="https://twitter.com/philsturgeon">@philsturgeon</a></p>
<p>— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode/status/834862579004628994">February 23, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>17:40 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What it means to be a “Social Justice Warrior”, Tolerance, and “Being Nice”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://extranewsfeed.com/tolerance-is-not-a-moral-precept-1af7007d6376?gi=5a03baffa4c2#.ty01vckbo"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Tolerance is not a moral precept</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://where.coraline.codes/blog/on-opalgate/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke: On Opalgate</span></a></p>
<p><b>27:46 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– False Reports vs Genuine Issues; Dogmatic Logic vs Empathy</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Susan J. Fowler: Reflecting On One Very, Very Strange Year At Uber</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://philsturgeon.uk/2016/07/23/talking-about-diversity-marginalization/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Phil Sturgeon: Talking About Diversity: Marginalization</s]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/phil1.jpg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/phil1.jpg"></googleplay:image>
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					<itunes:explicit>yes</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>Yes</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>0:00</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>Episode 020: Sexuality in Tech with Jenn Schiffer</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-020-jenn-schiffer/</link>
					<pubDate>Fri, 17 Feb 2017 02:54:33 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=391</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[In this powerful episode, we talk to Jenn Schiffer about pixel art, sexuality in tech, and online presence.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[In this powerful episode, we talk to Jenn Schiffer about pixel art, sexuality in tech, and online presence.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jenn Schiffer: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jennschiffer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@jennschiffer</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://jennmoney.biz/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">jennmoney.biz</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Neon Abstract Podcast Erotica!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:15</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://bocoup.com/">Bocoup</a></p>
<p><b>03:05</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="http://jennmoney.biz/art/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Art</span></a></p>
<p><b>06:37 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Viewing Source and Learning How to Code</span></p>
<p><b>11:02 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Getting a Computer Science Degree</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><b>13:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Pixel Art, Sexuality in Tech, and Online Presence </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/aphyr"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@aphyr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (Kyle Kingsbury)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Madison_data_breach"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ashley Madison Scandal</span></a></p>
<p><b>26:54 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– How do potential employers react to your satire?</span></p>
<p><b>28:41 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://medium.com/cool-code-pal"><span style="font-weight: 400;">CSS Perverts</span></a></p>
<p><b>36:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Vetting Potential Employers and Company Culture; Dealing with Toxic People</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Takeaways:</b></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Everyone has something that they keep quiet about because they aren’t sure of the consequences.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Being privileged enough to have the responsibility to be public and show people that it’s okay that they are who they are.</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">You don’t have to separate your passions.</span></p>
<p><b>Jenn:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> We all need a space to feel uninhibited. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
Get behind-the-scenes exclusives <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-20-it-8121016">like this one</a>!</b></p>
<div id="Transcript" style="display: none;">
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to Episode 20 of &#8216;Neon Abstract Podcast Erotica&#8217;. Today, I&#8217;m joined by Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Coraline. However, I think this might be the only episode of Neon Abstract Podcast Erotica but it&#8217;s Episode 20 of Greater Than Code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re doing two podcasts simultaneously, Jessica.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s sounds great, Coraline and I&#8217;m told to be here with Astrid Countee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Jessica and I&#8217;m thrilled to introduce our guest today, Jenn Schiffer. Jenn is better known at jennmoneydollars. She&#8217;s an artist in Jersey City on purpose and a web app engineer. Her visual art has been described as &#8216;neon abstract pixel erotica&#8217; and her tech satire has been described as &#8216;your eyes are awful, like you are also awful&#8217;. She feels privileged to be able to express herself and works hard to help others do the same. She&#8217;s on Twitter at @jennschiffer. Hi Jenn, welcome to the show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, thanks for having me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What we&#8217;d like to do before we get started is find out a bit about your origin story, so take it away.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You can talk about the new super powers you have too. This is the correct place &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s very important so make sure you add the super powers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, okay, super powers. I am the first living, breathing lizard made entirely out of CSS and JavaScript. I started out as a lizard in college studying computer science and be interested in building websites so that people on the internet can see drawings I did and things I&#8217;ve written. Then I started working as a department administrator and teaching at the university that I went to where I got my masters in computer science. But then it became kind of boring and I decided to enter the industry.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">I went to work at the MBA and work with basketball statistics stuff and then left there because I got bored. I joined a consulting company called Bocoup, worked there for a few years and I recently just left. I started a new job but it still a secret so you can just say that my secret job is super lizard, right going back to my roots. Also, I guess as a tech humorist, I write and joke a lot about the industry and the culture and builds web applications that are both serious and also for jokes. That’s kind of what people known me for.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think everyone wants to know, Jenn, are you a lizard with one &#8216;z&#8217; or two &#8216;z&#8217;s&#8217; because that&#8217;s an important distinction.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or is it a &#8216;zed&#8217;?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One &#8216;z&#8217;, one &#8216;zed&#8217;. How about that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m a hybrid.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s sort of half-Canadian lizard.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Jenn, I would like to go back a little bit because you had mentioned that when you&#8217;re going to school for computer science that you were interested in making web apps so that you can put your drawings up there. When did you start drawing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve always been drawing since I was really little, just like cartoons and stuff like that. I never did it really professionally. When I was going to college, I was making band flyers, all of my boyfriends were band and stuff and for my friends. When I was younger, I had friends but I didn&#8217;t really go out much so when I started babysitting these neighbor&#8217;s kids, they had a computer with the internet and I saw like, &#8220;Oh, you can put something online and strangers can see it.&#8221; I thought that was weirdly exciting. Then I saw that other people are making web pages that I can see.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I didn&#8217;t have a computer in my home until I was a senior in high school. I don&#8217;t really have that access. When I babysat, these kids had just showed me the stuff they&#8217;re putting out there and it was really exciting. I got really involved in the Wheezer fan space where I was making Wheezer fan pages on Geocities and being involved with the message boards and stuff, which was funny. That sort of what I was doing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Even today, I find myself going back to those roots and just using my web presence more to share my art, which I had been doing for some time because there was a time period where making art with code. It was something that made people see you as not a serious developer. I see that changing now but there&#8217;s a time where that wasn&#8217;t the case so I kind of hid that part of me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I noticed that on your current website, URL just fell off my head, what is it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>JennMoney.biz.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, you have flaming GIFs. Is that a whole [inaudible] from your Geocities days?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I just really like that aesthetic. I&#8217;m also not a designer. For my own personal stuff, I just do what looks good to me and I&#8217;m also in a position where I&#8217;m not looking for a desired job so I don&#8217;t have to worry about whether my aesthetic matches with who I want to employ me or whatever. I like animated GIFs. I like the old Geocities&#8217; aesthetic. I like old web, pre-standard stuff just because of nostalgia and stuff like that. People seemed to enjoy it also.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I get a lot of compliments on JennMoney.biz because it reminds people back when they first view source of websites and building their own things. It&#8217;s just older people that complimented it. The younger people are just getting through a whole [inaudible] wave of it which seems like new to them but it&#8217;s coming back for the rest of us. They’re into that as well. It’s very interesting time for web aesthetic. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Your website is like retro?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s little dancing MC Hammer, which is my favorite part.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m sure a lot of people going on to that webpage have no idea who that guy is. They probably heard MC Hammer but I always explicitly state that there&#8217;s an MC Hammer dancing in my website and they&#8217;ll just like, &#8220;It was like little man dancing all over the webpage.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>With poppy pants.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You mentioned viewing source, is that one of the ways that you taught yourself how to build websites in your [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, definitely. I remember my first webpage was just a collage of photos of the band Wheezer and I saw other webpage that had cool scrolling marquees. I would like to view the source of the page and copy their code and I would put it into my website and realized that is not working. Then I realized that it has all these tags that say script in it and maybe I need those two, sort of learning JavaScript and how that works and how the fits into the equation of the web and that&#8217;s where and how I got into that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also, Myspace was a big thing at the time and all of my friends wanted their Myspace pages to look cool like mine so I was viewing the source of websites that we like, like our favorite bands and copying their CSS over onto the Myspace via text box which you will enter all the CSS so I started getting into doing things like that. I would say, that&#8217;s for the most part how I learned how to get into building websites.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That&#8217;s not really the case anymore as we&#8217;re building web applications with JavaScript framework that hide all that stuff. View source is not really a thing that a lot of new developers have access to when they want to learn how to build more sophisticated applications, which is unfortunate. But I&#8217;m hoping to see that turnaround. I think there are some browsers that don&#8217;t even have a view source but it&#8217;s very obvious how to do view the source of the page.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And now that source is at least 200k of minimized JavaScript scripts.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. Exactly. A lot of people are building stuff that don&#8217;t have source maps that allow you to see that stuff. If you want to actually understand what&#8217;s going on a webpage, you have to be really sophisticated with browser dev tools, which are difficult to do. Actually, my new job which is still a secret, my secret lizard super job, we are going to hopefully change that and trying to get back to how we learn how to code and have other people have that sort of access to learning the same way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s important that it&#8217;s an accessibility issue in a lot of ways because so many of us have been doing this for a while, did learn by viewing source and the minify of JavaScript prevents that. Now, if you want to do something cool on the web, you have to learn one of 2000 frameworks and wrap your head around. It’s more of a focus on the programming aspect of it and less about the arts and the visual presentation and making things cool. There’s so much friction now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We like to think that we&#8217;re badass because we started it when HTML was just tables and there was no CSS. Or we started what you wrote C with pointers. But the fact is we had an easier on-ramp because we started when that stuff was simpler so we have it easy by starting there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, definitely. There’s this huge impact over the years where everyone should learn how to code and my idea is not everyone should learn how to code but everyone should have access to learn how to code, if they want to. You know, there are people who&#8217;ve been creating great organizations to make the education more accessible but sometimes, even if there&#8217;s this organizations available, there are people who are just themselves with the computer, be it at home or in a library.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Like me when I was a kid, if there were organizations to teach young girls how to code, I don&#8217;t have access to those. My parents both worked two jobs, I was always at home, my only access to computer is in school. Even now, the state of education for computers is terrible. I think the national average is about 5% of public schools have computer science education. In New York City alone, it&#8217;s 1% so there are people like young &#8216;lizard Jenn&#8217; who are just looking at a computer somewhere and view sources all that they have. I think it&#8217;s according to not hold the ladder up behind us and go back to how we learned and make that available to other people, if that make sense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Jenn, you said you went in the school for a computer science degree, what led you to make that decision?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wanted to build spaceships but I couldn&#8217;t afford the schooling. Then I got a scholarship where I was able to choose any state university in New Jersey, that&#8217;s where I live now and Montclair State&#8217;s Computer Science Department chair recruited me. Other departments have recruited me but the Montclair State Department was the only one that had a female department chair and I thought that was super awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I was like this is what I want to get involved with. I wanted to do computer stuff because that seems like the next path down that I can afford, next to building rocket ship. This woman have personally called me and I was like, &#8220;Wow, they want me and it&#8217;s a woman in-charge,&#8221; so that&#8217;s what I did. Shout out to Dorothy Deremer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How did that impact your approach because it sounds like when you&#8217;re coming out, a lot of your approaches were very visual and you were very focused on presenting art to the world and your own creativity to the world? How did that intersects with, I don&#8217;t know when I think of computer science degrees, I think they have, &#8220;Oh your algorithm, it&#8217;s in the ability of your compiler.&#8221; Did you see those two things merging back then or it was something that happened after the fact?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I think I realized during high school that I was very much a problem solver and I&#8217;m a visual learner but I do love numbers and word problems so the theoretical computer science education fed that need whereas I was able to use that theory to build things that fed my visual needs. I got a lot involved in learning the math behind computer graphics and stuff like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The math behind pixels?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The math behind pixels, exactly. There’s a separation and there&#8217;s a lot of, I guess people who study computer science or people who think of those with computer science think that you need computer science to build web applications or like a separation which I could talk for hours and hours about because I used to write computer science curriculum and also teach web development.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But computer science and much of web development is such an interdisciplinary field that lots of people who come from different backgrounds that can thrive in either of the spaces. Some of the best engineers I know have backgrounds in creative writing and have an art and stuff like that. My background is in computer science and math and statistics and stuff but a lot of people first meet me through my art work so it was the opposite way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Let&#8217;s talk about your art. Can you tell us more about what pixel art actually is, for people who doesn&#8217;t seen it before?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. How do I describe pixel art? Well, a pixel is the smallest unit on a display. If you have a crappy TV like I do at home and you look really close to it, like your parents tell you not to when it&#8217;s on, you can see little squares that each have a single color and that&#8217;s a pixel. Pixel art sort of harkens back to early game console, old TV displays. I would say that it&#8217;s a type of abstract art.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> My pixel art, in particular which is reflected in the titles of today&#8217;s podcast is an erotic pixel art so I draw a lot of nude ladies. I called it &#8216;pixelbabes&#8217;, which are mostly self-portraits or just portraits of women that I know most of them who are in tech. Also, some men in tech who let me draw them. Tech is a very progressive industry. We&#8217;re always trying to [inaudible] and stuff like that but when it comes to sexuality, I feel like it is very inhibited so pixel art is abstract enough where I can post on Instagram a pixel of drawing of a nude woman but you can&#8217;t post of a photograph of a nude woman. But what is pixel art is really an image zoomed in all the way so it was like a joking take on our inhibitions within the industry, while still being able to post boobs on the internet without getting in trouble.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s so interesting with what you said about sexuality being kind of taboo in tech industry. I know a lot of women in tech who have this whole other life, in terms of their sexuality, whether it&#8217;s kink or their sexual history or things among those lines that they&#8217;re afraid to talk about because it is so taboo and because unfortunately, it also represents a vector for abuse. If you are a visible woman on the internet, you&#8217;re subject to abuse and you don&#8217;t want to give your harassers any additional fuel by which to attack you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, also I feel like people who are men in tech have still some sort of [inaudible] on their backs so somebody is trying to oppress them in some sort of way so why give them that fuel. If you think about teachers, women teachers all the time are being fired because of raunchy photos being found of them on the internet and stuff like that and you just think that the tech industry is a lot more progressive than that. But I feel like our sexuality is taken out on us in more silent ways, or even more public by anonymous people and harassers and stuff like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I know men in tech who we&#8217;re very open with their sexuality, either involved in all of those kink communities and I wish that women can be that open in the industry without fearing their day job being taken away from them or being harassed by other people but that&#8217;s just simply not the case today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>To be fair, it&#8217;s not trivial for men either. I really appreciate @aphyr on Twitter for all the gay kink posts that he makes and the photos of his ass which are quite enjoyable to look at. But I really appreciate that openness because you don&#8217;t see it with men either.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and Kyle&#8217;s a good friend of mine. He&#8217;s actually the subject of some of my male erotic art. I&#8217;ve talked to him about this too. He can be very open. It&#8217;s so funny, he&#8217;ll speak in a conference and he&#8217;s the smartest engineers ever and he&#8217;ll get all these new followers and he&#8217;ll [inaudible] all new followers the photo of his ass and it&#8217;s so brilliant. It is a performance art in itself. It&#8217;s so great but that definitely would have the same effect if I were to speak at a conference and then be like [inaudible] followers of the photo of my tits. It will have the same effect. Also, I don&#8217;t work for myself. He works for himself now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and he&#8217;s publicly one of the most brilliant developers in the world and doing amazing innovative work. When you have a million people who would love to hire you, you can take those risk.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly and I just feel like it&#8217;s harder for a woman to be in that same position. Kyle gets pushed back also. With every tweet that he posts of a photo of himself, he&#8217;ll have somebody just flat-out asked him for supposed less gay stuff. You&#8217;ll never know if that person&#8217;s going to be somebody that goes to interview with to hire him for a contract job, you know what I mean? It’s a risk that he need to put out there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I don&#8217;t feel comfortable putting myself out there. I&#8217;m a pretty visible person that is very secure at my job but I still not comfortable opening myself up to that harassment. I feel like people use women sexuality against them a lot more than people who use men sexuality against them. I don&#8217;t want my sexuality to be used in a negative way because it&#8217;s a very positive, amazing thing in my opinion.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, when I meet people at a conference, I don&#8217;t want them thinking of me in sexual terms. I want them talking about programming with me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is a symptom of the problem that in general, we&#8217;re not allowed to be our full selves, whether it&#8217;s in internet presence or how we present ourselves to the world at a conference or in person when you meet someone. In tech, we’re not allowed to be our full selves and there&#8217;s the theme that I always come back to, on this podcast and that is the ideal developer is still held up to be this emotionless robot with no outside life, spending all of their free time coding open source and that&#8217;s not a human. Humans are complex and we have layers. We have interests outside of technology and it&#8217;s like a fucking taboo that we can&#8217;t talk about these things. It&#8217;s really depressing that we can bring our full selves to that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What I find so interesting about that is I have yet to meet a person who actually feels comfortable being in their full self. They’re always saying what you just said, Coraline that there&#8217;s things that they enjoy that they don&#8217;t want to talk about because they&#8217;re afraid people won&#8217;t take them seriously or they don&#8217;t want people to see them in a different way. It affects the questions of why do we care about these stereotypes so much if nobody actually is enjoying the privilege of them because I haven&#8217;t met those people either who are that emotionless robot that is projected as what an engineer is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a good point. Everybody is keeping quiet about something &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, for sure. I think that personally, I always have this fear of making my peers feel uncomfortable which is a very hard thing to deal with as like when I write satire or if I&#8217;m posting surreal tweets on Twitter as I normally do. I like to tweet something and then I&#8217;m going to be like, &#8220;Oh, my gosh. Is this going to make one of my coworkers uncomfortable? And should I care about that? If they do feel uncomfortable, is that my problem or is it their problem that they need to face?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Not that I ever posted anything about work and stuff like that but you&#8217;ll never know if I post about a date I&#8217;m on or something like that. You’ll just never know who is going to think of what and how that can possibly be if somebody see you. It takes a lot of comfort with your peers to be able to open yourself up in any sort of way. Right now, I love the job of [inaudible] all of my best times and the company that I&#8217;ve just joined now is really awesome but everyone there is quite new to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A large group of them seemed to know about my online presence so I feel comfortable that they know what they&#8217;re getting into but I&#8217;m not entirely sure what I can or cannot get away with, in terms of my own personality coming through. But then again, they hired me so that&#8217;s what they&#8217;re getting but it&#8217;s like a really weird slippery slope, for lack of a better phrase. I&#8217;m kidding&#8230; I love that phrase &#8216;slippery slope&#8217; but &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m on a Slack community, well, I&#8217;m in like 20 Slack communities but one of them specifically for queer people in tech. We have a Selfie channel and I&#8217;ve said on Twitter that I think I was a transwoman, celebrating my body is a political act. I really believe that. But we have another channel on that Slack called &#8216;Selfie [inaudible] Club&#8217; where people post kind of suggestive photos to each other and flirting is allowed and encouraged.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For the longest time, I was terrified to post there because even it was a private Slack community, what if one of the pictures got out and one of it was weaponized against me. Eventually, I got to point where I was like, &#8220;Fuck it. I&#8217;m going to celebrate my body. I&#8217;ll just deal with the consequences.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was telling this to a guy not too long ago about how women in tech all have backup plans like I&#8217;m at home right now working. What if I found that somebody like released my address or sent on their way, I already know what my contingency plan is. People will say like you have to have a fire escape plan right now, women who are visible online should have their ducts escape plan. Who am I going to stay in with? What am I going to do with my [inaudible]? That sort of stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When you&#8217;re posting stuff online, whether it&#8217;s a public tweet or a suggestive photo, I have my back plan like, &#8220;What am I going to do? How do I&#8217;m going to explain myself when this gets out? And if lose my job, what can I do? Who’s my support plan?&#8221; It&#8217;s super exhausting and that&#8217;s why I feel like a lot of people hide parts of themselves from that. It’s really interesting. I&#8217;ve been sick all week and up until late at night coughing and last night, I was able to watch a Netflix where there&#8217;s this 45-minute documentary about Ashley Madison hacking and just [inaudible] all the people whose info got out. It was mostly about the business behind Ashley Madison and stuff like that. I was hoping we would touch more on the people that were affected but didn&#8217;t really. It&#8217;s just interesting that nobody seems to think like, &#8220;What will I do if my information is found that I&#8217;m on the site?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I feel like whenever you joined a website, whenever you posted online, you better have to actively think what consequences can I have for doing this and how will I save myself from those consequences. If you don&#8217;t do that, then it just seems like you&#8217;re at a loss. Again, it can be very exhausting to do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For background, Ashley Madison was like a site that targeted finding people to hook up with when you were cheating on your spouse?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s an adultery match-up website. I guess in over a course of years, these hackers gathered all their data and started dumping all the information of the customers and the founders themselves. Not only did they release all the customer’s information but also it was noticed that most within on the site were actually [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s bad. That was terrible. I think you have a very useful coping mechanism there. I do this too of when I&#8217;m afraid of something, I think about in my head, &#8220;What do I do if this happens?&#8221; And I make up a story about the actions that I would take and then I can go on. It&#8217;s no longer a fear, it&#8217;s now a risk.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, exactly. Then speaking about suggestive photos getting out, I was thinking also like let&#8217;s say I posted on Slack a suggestive photo in a safe space and somehow it got out, I could probably own it but then down the line, any opportunities that come to me, people can blame it on, &#8220;Oh, because of those photos,&#8221; like Kim Kardashian. Kim Kardashian has all these ads and all these business and TV shows and stuff like that but she became famous because of that sex tape kind of thing and there is always one thing that get the right person to notice you. Maybe it did blame on all that work on that one moment were somebody noticed you, it&#8217;s just a very interesting thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We have a questioned someone in our community Slack, Sophie who wants to know and this is sort of in line with what we&#8217;ve been talking about for the imagery that you produced and more about the satire that you produced. How do you think potential employers reacts to your satire?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I can talk about my former employer, Bocoup and I stated this in conferences and in public before so it&#8217;s true. They love my satire. They love the message behind it that she is trying to take tech less seriously and call out the sort of call out culture that we seemed to have still today. I always say that they not only tolerate my voice but they celebrate it. I can say with full confidence that my new super lizard employer feels the same way and they followed my work and know me. I&#8217;m confident that they&#8217;re all great with that. I feel like if anybody dislikes my satire or they think that it&#8217;s bad, they’re ignoring the actual toxicity in the industry and therefore, they&#8217;re not somebody that I would want to work for. But I&#8217;m very fortunate that a lot of people support me that I can make that decisions stands.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, because we don&#8217;t need all the jobs in the world. We don&#8217;t need to maximize the number of jobs that we could have. We need to maximize for one job at the moment and that is the best job.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>yeah, I always get people telling me like, &#8220;You could probably work wherever you want to work if you wanted to,&#8221; unlike [inaudible] where the case which is not true. Maybe I don&#8217;t want to work everywhere. You know what I mean? I have a mission myself and that narrows down a lot of the companies that I would be willing to work for to act to that mission.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Speaking of sexuality in tech, when are going to talk about CSS Perverts?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, CSS Perverts. The origin of CSS Perverts goes back to the origin of rock star developer or JavaScript ninja. Those phrases that we used in tech that make ourselves stand out, although everybody is using it, therefore no one was standing out. My friend, Nick and I created CSS Perverts as our phrase. I guess, I got a recruiter email once and it was like, &#8220;Jenn, we&#8217;re looking for a JavaScript ninjas for this job,&#8221; and I was like, &#8220;Call me when you&#8217;re looking for a CSS Pervert.&#8221; I think that was the origin. I think they never called me back. It&#8217;s tragic.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It became our name for running satire in tech. Both of the recruiter level and development level, any of managerial, I don&#8217;t know if they&#8217;re just trying to stand out to get all the best developers to work for them but this whole industry seems like a huge pissing contest. &#8220;Who has the most ping pong tables?&#8221; You only need one table. &#8220;Which developers are willing to work for 20 hours straight?&#8221; That’s bananas. No one should work that much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Like, &#8220;Our company, we have trucks where you need your haircut.&#8221; I don&#8217;t want to get my haircut on a truck. That doesn&#8217;t sound like a fun time. It’s very surreal and we&#8217;re in this bubble where we had all these ridiculous amenities thrown at us. Then also these ridiculous expectations that are supposed to compensate for these amenities. Then I think back to my previous job at Montclair State where I had an office but it didn&#8217;t have windows and there&#8217;s a coffee maker in the kitchen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Sometimes, I had to make my own coffee because other professors have finished the pot and being guys, they didn&#8217;t know how to refill it afterwards. I felt that the cushy lifestyle that I have now in this industry but at the same time, I feel like the work-life balance isn&#8217;t there so it feels less cushy. It&#8217;s a very interesting paradox that this industry has created for us. In my new job, I think there&#8217;s like five types of water and that&#8217;s awesome. Water is good for me and I need that. It’s actually great because I&#8217;ve never been more hydrated in my entire life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But that&#8217;s like super great. I super appreciate that. But then when I see these and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Oh, are they expecting to be here all the time,&#8221; and that&#8217;s not the case. I&#8217;ve been working from home all week because I&#8217;ve been sick and they would rather be not pass my disease onto the rest of them. I just stayed at home. That&#8217;s really great but I know that there are some jobs, some offices that really expect you to be there all the time and like, &#8220;We have people to do your laundry.&#8221; No one needs to do the laundry at work. Maybe I&#8217;m old. I just turned 32. I&#8217;m not old &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;re not old. If you&#8217;re old, then I&#8217;m in big trouble. With this expectations that you&#8217;re talking about of working for 20 hours. When I was younger, when I was coming up in software development, I felt like I had to work extra hard because I do not have a CS degree. I was self-taught. I have mentors that helped me and I read a lot of books. I felt like I had something to prove. I actually, at one job worked for 32 hours straight on a project and it was horrible way to live. This is when my daughter was young so I actually missed that a lot, with my daughter as a result of having this really unsustainable work ethic.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I remember very clearly one May day, we were driving the car, shoes in the back seat and I was talking about May day and I was talking to her about the labor movement and I was like, &#8220;You know, a lot of people fought and died for an 8-hour work day and a 40-hour work week,&#8221; and she said, &#8220;But Mommy, you work a lot more than eight hours a day.&#8221; I was like, &#8220;Oh, you&#8217;re so right. What am I doing?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Right now, inside my head it is like, &#8220;It&#8217;s about that but then you put it that way, it&#8217;s about work-life balance is super important,&#8221; but then why should you complain because we work in these places that offer all these amenities? Would you take it back? Would I prefer to work in an office that didn&#8217;t have all of those things? But then again, is this just in the industry where the expectations has surpassed what people are willing to offer us in order to make up for that lack of work-life balance?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It&#8217;s like a huge problem that I see getting better because I see culture at different companies improving. I certainly have been very fortunate where I worked at two companies now that have really excellent culture and really believed in work-life balance because they recognized productivity is higher when you&#8217;re not not getting any sleep, which is not a noble concepts &#8212; the idea of humans getting sleep and therefore, being productive. Why are you forgetting that? Who are deciding what are these basic human needs? They’re not really basic human needs, like churn out some code. It was just very weird.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, often it&#8217;s an unfair kind of trade because it&#8217;s not like the work you&#8217;re doing isn&#8217;t really intensive and maybe you need a ping pong break or a water break. Why should you have to give it up because you don&#8217;t want to work 12 to 15 hours straight? It feels like there&#8217;s an equal equation there. Even this is not exactly necessarily all true, it just kind of reminds me of the first time I watched Mad Men and I was like, &#8220;What? Is this how people work?&#8221; Because they were drinking at nine in the morning, they had couches that they were going to sleep on and then it&#8217;s the 50s and 60s so when they leave work, there&#8217;s no way to contact them because the only way you can call them is at home and they don&#8217;t go straight homes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They were able to have a wait time that it feels like you don&#8217;t have been [inaudible] just because you&#8217;re not at work, it doesn&#8217;t mean that you&#8217;re not going to get pinged or someone is not going to call you or you&#8217;re not expected to be available because there&#8217;s not like a 24-hour waiting period for you to respond to an email like, &#8220;Oh, I emailed you.&#8221; Or somebody calls you, &#8220;Did you get my email?&#8221; No, it&#8217;s seven o&#8217;clock. I&#8217;m eating but it&#8217;s kind of expected now for you to work all the time. I think it&#8217;s unfair to kind of make people feel like, &#8220;They gave me free water so I should be here.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s the sort of thing that&#8217;s optimized for 25-year olds with no family obligations too, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, but that also assumes that the 25-year olds has no friends and no family that they want to see either.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s a little unfair to say, &#8220;You don&#8217;t have immediate family that has to see you so therefore, you should be good with working all day and all night.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and that&#8217;s definitely something that I&#8217;ve had said to me in one of my first jobs. I was complaining about having this daily and no one else did and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Well, you are young and you&#8217;re single and we have kids.&#8221; It&#8217;s like I can pop out a baby if I wanted to. Don&#8217;t [inaudible] the good time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s a bad way when you don&#8217;t having a child is your version of getting work-life balance. That&#8217;s not a good way to do it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m interested, Jenn since she does went through a job search process to arrive at your super lizard company, how did you figure out what kind of culture they had before you agreed to join.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The company that I joined, I&#8217;ve known about for a while and I&#8217;ve had long conversations with the CEO and talked to other people that were in there. I was very fortunate that they wanted me to work for them. I was sort of approached. Also, a lot of companies, their CEO or their employees write blogs so I read a lot to get an understanding of the culture of the company and the people that are running it. I did a lot of reading and research.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As I said before, what I looked for a job, if I&#8217;m talking to somebody about a project, I really want to work with somebody who has the same mission as I do and my mission is again, learning to code and being a part of this industry accessible to anybody who wants in on it and trying to make it a more inclusive and happy place to be a part of. When I was learning how to code, I was really having a fun time. I really enjoyed it and I feel like that sometimes gets lost on us when we start to work. I watched Nick learn how to code like a fun experience and stay upon experience that new people coming in to the industry and hopefully pushing off the tops of people at the same time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Doing that sort of research and talking to people is really the best thing that one can do in order to find a space that they feel safe working in and leaving their other really great job. My last job was really awesome. I just needed to do something different. I don&#8217;t like to do consulting anymore but it was a huge, tough decision for me to make. I probably [inaudible] a whole Saturday about changing jobs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to go back to something you just said. Are you implying that there are toxic people in the community and is that for real?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Take a seat &#8212; Toxic people in the community, yes, they&#8217;re there and they&#8217;re out in the open. They’re not even hiding.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>They&#8217;re rock stars. They&#8217;re ninjas.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>They&#8217;re rock stars and ninjas, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Should we forgive them for their transgressions because they&#8217;re rock stars and ninjas. I mean, they&#8217;re productive, right? And that&#8217;s the most important thing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If they&#8217;re not generative.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And they created a lot of the technologies that we use so therefore, they&#8217;re forgiven. It’s really interesting. You see, this is like the music industry where there are these performance artists that are actually horrible human beings but then they make music and like, &#8220;Oh, this music is actually great.&#8221; Let&#8217;s use R Kelly for example. Not particularly a good human being. Some will call him a sexual predator. He&#8217;s made music that sounds really great and it&#8217;s very nostalgic. Every time I&#8217;m in karaoke parties, someone puts in Ignition Remix and it makes those people feel good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then you think of, let&#8217;s say &#8212; God, hopefully, this isn&#8217;t going to get me in trouble &#8212; Linus Torvalds. Some say he&#8217;s a toxic person but he gets away with it because he made Linux. Does Linux made people feel good the way that Ignition Remix feels good? Can you compare software and music and the separation if the engineer and what they built and the artist and the art that they created? I don&#8217;t think that we made that separation like we do with software and they&#8217;re completely different things. It’s just something interesting that I feel not a lot of people talk about enough.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">I go to museums a lot. I&#8217;m an artist and I like to look at art and if it&#8217;s a modern art museum and there&#8217;s a Picasso exhibit, usually it&#8217;s where the people turn the corner and see Picasso, they finally see something that they recognized and like, &#8220;Oh, Picasso.&#8221; But like, &#8220;Is it really that Picasso is not a good person?&#8221; Or like Frank Sinatra, was like not a good person but everybody loves that song New York here in New York.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I feel like we sort of idolized software developers the same way that we do on these musicians and we have this idea, this cults of personality like celebrity in software development and to think that it&#8217;s warranted, like are these people famous? I don&#8217;t think so. Just like the other day, Eric S Raymond &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, one of my favorite people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, in the Python dev mailing list like, &#8220;I&#8217;m back. I sort of faded away after that whole being famous nonsense,&#8221; and I think I tweeted that I laughed out loud and coughed at the same time and got a nosebleed, which is completely true because I was sick. But I just say, &#8220;I can&#8217;t believe this is happening.&#8221; Not only just the presumptuousness of knowing the whole list and be like, &#8220;I&#8217;m back,&#8221; but then from being famous nonsense and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Being famous, that&#8217;s what you&#8217;re calling, like all of that, you&#8217;re being famous?&#8221; I can&#8217;t even with some of these people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But I feel like the Python community now is a lot different in terms of their analysts have a code of conduct and people are more aware of what the proper way to behave is and also people are aware of his past and his delusions grandeur about things that &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What was the story there?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>He has just a lot of bad ideas. There’s a whole list of things but I think generally, the last thing was he sort of coming out and saying that women in tech groups were trying to seduce men to call out fake rape accusation about game developers. I think he was saying that people are trying to do that to Linus Torvalds out. It&#8217;s just this boring, like you&#8217;re irrelevant, stay irrelevant but people do their jobs and write code and try to build these really great Python community nobody needs kind of thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>He has this [inaudible] against code of conduct. He already [inaudible] piece about me on why hackers must eject the social justice warriors. He also has a great quote talking about the fact that, from his opinion, why people commit more crimes because they have lower IQ&#8217;s than my people. He&#8217;s literally the worst human being. I&#8217;m actually, Jenn giving a talk at OSCON this year which I&#8217;m super nervous about called &#8216;The Broken Promise of Open Source,&#8217; where I&#8217;m calling out these so-called leaders and pointing out that the cult of personality runs counter to open source values and why the fuck do we keep on doing this? Why do we keep elevating people and forgiving people?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It reminds me this phrase that I learn in Latin, which I think is insidious. I don&#8217;t remember the Latin words but it translates to &#8216;love the art, hate the artist&#8217; and I think that is the worst thing we can do. That’s the worse.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because I&#8217;m going to use Linux and I&#8217;m going to use Emacs but I never want to work with Linus or ESR. If I never want to work with the person, then that kills the collaboration of open source.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, unfortunately, Python has strived without ESR involves. I&#8217;m not so much involves with the Linux community but I hear about all that sort of drama all the time. I just feel like it&#8217;s very important to open source to make sure that there is a large inclusive thriving communities so that it can drive out the need to interact with these toxic people. If someone creates a project and they&#8217;re a bad person and the project built up this huge community then the community will out voice that person. I feel like that how the system should be. No benevolent dictator, that kind of thing which exist in a lot of projects to avoid that interaction.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s also so many projects now where I feel like if I don&#8217;t like somebody, then I can leave the project or I can talk to somebody about it. I feel like codes and conduct have really made that visible and great. I got to say that if somebody who is seen as people have called me famous and I always correct them, like I&#8217;m popular in my weird niche of way. I am definitely a part of this whole cult of personality thing. There are people who want to meet me at conferences. I get invited to speak in conferences all the time. I never have to do a CFP for a conference before and I&#8217;ve spoken out to 30 different places and people who want me to work for them, I know that 90% of it is just because of my personality online.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Maybe I&#8217;m not giving myself enough credit like I do build a lot of open source stuff but people like me for my mission and my attitude about things. I feel like it&#8217;s an attitude that a lot more people who need to have in their workplace and jobs. I feel like I&#8217;m on the other end of things where I didn&#8217;t build something that everybody is using and therefore I get away with everything. I&#8217;m getting way with things because I&#8217;m on the right side of the culture. I just want to make more people who are on that right side of culture visible in the industry so they can have the opportunities that I have &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because there are plenty of nice people who can build great software and there are plenty of good people making good music.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just want to point out, I tweeted this morning that you&#8217;re going to be a guest on the show and I asked if anyone have any questions. I&#8217;m already receiving for asking tweets on your behalf so great culture we have here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Congratulations.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe the part of the problem is we need to be more demarketizing and less like warring tribes because it kind of sounds almost like when we&#8217;re talking about the ninja, the rock star, these idea that you can be a person who&#8217;s larger than life and because of that, then people follow you. That is not the same of what you&#8217;re saying, Coraline about open source. It&#8217;s not the same concept of everybody come together and collaborate because that means that there&#8217;s these leaders that you can follow then you can decide, if you agree or don&#8217;t agree with them. But what they did is more important than whether or not you agree with them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Maybe what we should be doing is more so, everybody collaborates. It doesn&#8217;t matter how big your name is or how many people know who you are because you&#8217;re just a collaborator like everybody else and make that more of a democracy. That would take away, I think a little bit from this, I get to be a war leader because that&#8217;s almost the culture that&#8217;s developed where once you have enough power, then you feel like you are entitled to say and do what you want.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s exactly is and open source was a reaction against hierarchies because a hierarchical organization is necessarily a risk averse and any risk that&#8217;s taken that fails, falls down on a single person. Open source was organized more like a network and a network can take risk because the impact isn&#8217;t felt by a single person and the consequences aren&#8217;t felt by a single person but the network absorbs whatever happened and can respond to it in a really productive way. With these cults of personality, we have hierarchies again that are so counter to the founding philosophy of open source and no one seems to see that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because everybody wants to be famous and that means that you need [inaudible] to notice. Everyone who defends Linus is like, &#8220;Maybe Linus will notice me defending him and make me his henchman.&#8221; This is complete thing that does not exist. You know what I mean? I get it too I have people who will defend me when I don&#8217;t need defending and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;What are you trying to do? I noticed you. Does that make you happy?&#8221; I don&#8217;t know&#8230; It&#8217;s just a very weird thing to notice. It’s a sociological problem. There are probably plenty of people working on their PhD, studying on these kind of thing &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I hope so, I bet somebody is doing the research.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah but in the meantime, how do you combat that? I feel like I&#8217;m trying to combat it by using my popularity to amplify other voices and also try to do good in some way in the community and not just making about what my bad ideas are. I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;ve plenty of bad ideas.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>With what Astrid&#8217;s said, it&#8217;s like we don&#8217;t need a bunch of famous leaders or more famous leaders. We need a large number of popular people who are strengthening the network.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We need mentors, people who are also advocates. Mentors and advocates because there&#8217;s a lot of people in the community that we need to be advocated for. We need diversity and open source projects and not &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And it takes calling them individually and inviting them personally.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a lot of work but if you get to the point where a lot of people know who you are, they amplify you. It’s time to do the work. I think that it is like if you push somebody up the ladder, they have to turn around and grab you and pick you up behind them and not just leave all these people behind.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think we reach the portion of the show where we want to do reflections. For new listeners, reflections is when we look back on a conversation that we&#8217;ve had with our fascinating guest and definitely true in this episode, Jenn is wonderful and highlight things that really resonated with us and maybe things that we want to do is resolve the conversation. Jessica, do you want to go first?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love to. I love the discussion about tech considering itself progressive and it is, compared to a lot of careers. But it&#8217;s actually we&#8217;re quite inhibited and that led us to everybody has something that they keep quiet about because they&#8217;re not sure of the consequences. Some of us, like Kyle and Jenn and me have the privilege of not really being worried about being unable to find a jobs soon. When we do express more of ourselves, when Jenn makes her retro website that some people are going to scoff at, and when she writes satire and makes erotic pixel art, pushes those boundaries.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When I talk about being polyamorous on Twitter when Coraline is proud of who she is, all of these are using our privilege &#8212; our privilege of being unlikely to be unable to find a job. When we do that in public, it&#8217;s just these standards. It sets an example. It makes it a little bit easier for other people to put more of themselves out there. Jenn and Coraline, thank you for doing that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had similar reactions. I think those of us with the privilege of not being worried about how the things we say in public will necessarily impact our ability to find a good job. It does give us a responsibility to be public about these things, to show people that it&#8217;s okay. But I think we also have to recognize that not everyone has that privilege. Especially people who are early in their careers, they do you have to be careful because their options are necessary limited by their limited experience. Hopefully, we can open the way, do some dialogue about these things and hopefully we can start breaking down some taboos.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My reflection actually comes from something you&#8217;ve mentioned earlier in our conversation, Jenn which you were talking about your origin story and I thought it was really profound that you see yourself know as a computer scientist but you also see yourself as an artist and you don&#8217;t seem to have this need to separate them or feel like you have to explain them. I think that&#8217;s very important because so many people feel like tech may not be for them because they&#8217;re not a certain type of person. Even some of our previous guests who have had artistic endeavors, have also talked about how do they felt that they had to pick one or the other and I think it&#8217;s great that you never did.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think my reflection on this conversation is I guess the thing that I learned as we&#8217;re speaking was how much a struggle with trying to be myself when realizing that a lot of people think that I&#8217;m very comfortable with being myself, especially when it comes to sexuality. But I am a lot more comfortable today than I was six months ago and was six months before that. I see that, as Coraline said the more that we talked about these stuff, the more we start breaking down those taboos and maybe there will be a point where we all can really, truly, comfortably be ourselves.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s not until we can be ourselves that we will do and make the best work that we can do so it&#8217;s really in everybody&#8217;s favor: our peers, our employers, the staff to provide a space where we are in inhibited. I&#8217;m not saying like walking around naked everywhere. Again, I don&#8217;t want anyone to feel uncomfortable but I want to take away the fear of saying something about myself or expressing something about myself that can inhibit me anymore. That’s something that I really like discussing. I wasn&#8217;t expecting us to discuss and I think that being all women today is really been a huge factor and I appreciated that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That worked out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This has been an amazing conversation and Jenn, I want to thank you so much for agreeing to be on the show. As a sort of behind the scenes [inaudible], we organize the show into 10 to 15 minutes segments and we plan in advance to the things that we want to talk about. We did not follow the script at all today and I am so happy about that because I think the conversation we have is very real and very important. I really hope our listeners appreciate it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Speaking of listeners, Greater Than Code is 100% listener-funded. If you want to support our show, if you want us to have more conversation like this and more amazing guest like Jenn, please go to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode, pledging at any level gets you access to our Patreon-only Slack community where you have the opportunity to continue the conversation with guest, suggest a new guest and find a really welcoming and safe community to talk about some of these hard issues in tech beyond the way the JavaScript framework. Thank you all very much and this has been a great episode and I look forward to next week so I hope you did too. Thanks everybody.</span></p>
</div>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to Episode 20 of &#8216;Neon Abstract Podcast Erotica&#8217;. Today, I&#8217;m joined by Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Coraline. However, I think this might be the only episode of Neon Abstract Podcast Erotica but it&#8217;s Episode 20 of Greater Than Code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re doing two podcasts simultaneously, Jessica.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s sounds great, Coraline and I&#8217;m told to be here with Astrid Countee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Jessica and I&#8217;m thrilled to introduce our guest today, Jenn Schiffer. Jenn is better known at jennmoneydollars. She&#8217;s an artist in Jersey City on purpose and a web app engineer. Her visual art has been described as &#8216;neon abstract pixel erotica&#8217; and her tech satire has been described as &#8216;your eyes are awful, like you are also awful&#8217;. She feels privileged to be able to express herself and works hard to help others do the same. She&#8217;s on Twitter at @jennschiffer. Hi Jenn, welcome to the show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, thanks for having me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What we&#8217;d like to do before we get started is find out a bit about your origin story, so take it away.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You can talk about the new super powers you have too. This is the correct place &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s very important so make sure you add the super powers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, okay, super powers. I am the first living, breathing lizard made entirely out of CSS and JavaScript. I started out as a lizard in college studying computer science and be interested in building websites so that people on the internet can see drawings I did and things I&#8217;ve written. Then I started working as a department administrator and teaching at the university that I went to where I got my masters in computer science. But then it became kind of boring and I decided to enter the industry.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">I went to work at the MBA and work with basketball statistics stuff and then left there because I got bored. I joined a consulting company called Bocoup, worked there for a few years and I recently just left. I started a new job but it still a secret so you can just say that my secret job is super lizard, right going back to my roots. Also, I guess as a tech humorist, I write and joke a lot about the industry and the culture and builds web applications that are both serious and also for jokes. That’s kind of what people known me for.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think everyone wants to know, Jenn, are you a lizard with one &#8216;z&#8217; or two &#8216;z&#8217;s&#8217; because that&#8217;s an important distinction.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or is it a &#8216;zed&#8217;?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One &#8216;z&#8217;, one &#8216;zed&#8217;. How about that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m a hybrid.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s sort of half-Canadian lizard.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Jenn, I would like to go back a little bit because you had mentioned that when you&#8217;re going to school for computer science that you were interested in making web apps so that you can put your drawings up there. When did you start drawing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve always been drawing since I was really little, just like cartoons and stuff like that. I never did it really professionally. When I was going to college, I was making band flyers, all of my boyfriends were band and stuff and for my friends. When I was younger, I had friends but I didn&#8217;t really go out much so when I started babysitting these neighbor&#8217;s kids, they had a computer with the internet and I saw like, &#8220;Oh, you can put something online and strangers can see it.&#8221; I thought that was weirdly exciting. Then I saw that other people are making web pages that I can see.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I didn&#8217;t have a computer in my home until I was a senior in high school. I don&#8217;t really have that access. When I babysat, these kids had just showed me the stuff they&#8217;re putting out there and it was really exciting. I got really involved in the Wheezer fan space where I was making Wheezer fan pages on Geocities and being involved with the message boards and stuff, which was funny. That sort of what I was doing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Even today, I find myself going back to those roots and just using my web presence more to share my art, which I had been doing for some time because there was a time period where making art with code. It was something that made people see you as not a serious developer. I see that changing now but there&#8217;s a time where that wasn&#8217;t the case so I kind of hid that part of me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I noticed that on your current website, URL just fell off my head, what is it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>JennMoney.biz.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, you have flaming GIFs. Is that a whole [inaudible] from your Geocities days?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I just really like that aesthetic. I&#8217;m also not a designer. For my own personal stuff, I just do what looks good to me and I&#8217;m also in a position where I&#8217;m not looking for a desired job so I don&#8217;t have to worry about whether my aesthetic matches with who I want to employ me or whatever. I like animated GIFs. I like the old Geocities&#8217; aesthetic. I like old web, pre-standard stuff just because of nostalgia and stuff like that. People seemed to enjoy it also.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I get a lot of compliments on JennMoney.biz because it reminds people back when they first view source of websites and building their own things. It&#8217;s just older people that complimented it. The younger people are just getting through a whole [inaudible] wave of it which seems like new to them but it&#8217;s coming back for the rest of us. They’re into that as well. It’s very interesting time for web aesthetic. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Your website is like retro?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s little dancing MC Hammer, which is my favorite part.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m sure a lot of people going on to that webpage have no idea who that guy is. They probably heard MC Hammer but I always explicitly state that there&#8217;s an MC Hammer dancing in my website and they&#8217;ll just like, &#8220;It was like little man dancing all over the webpage.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>With poppy pants.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You mentioned viewing source, is that one of the ways that you taught yourself how to build websites in your [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, definitely. I remember my first webpage was just a collage of photos of the band Wheezer and I saw other webpage that had cool scrolling marquees. I would like to view the source of the page and copy their code and I would put it into my website and realized that is not working. Then I realized that it has all these tags that say script in it and maybe I need those two, sort of learning JavaScript and how that works and how the fits into the equation of the web and that&#8217;s where and how I got into that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also, Myspace was a big thing at the time and all of my friends wanted their Myspace pages to look cool like mine so I was viewing the source of websites that we like, like our favorite bands and copying their CSS over onto the Myspace via text box which you will enter all the CSS so I started getting into doing things like that. I would say, that&#8217;s for the most part how I learned how to get into building websites.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That&#8217;s not really the case anymore as we&#8217;re building web applications with JavaScript framework that hide all that stuff. View source is not really a thing that a lot of new developers have access to when they want to learn how to build more sophisticated applications, which is unfortunate. But I&#8217;m hoping to see that turnaround. I think there are some browsers that don&#8217;t even have a view source but it&#8217;s very obvious how to do view the source of the page.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And now that source is at least 200k of minimized JavaScript scripts.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. Exactly. A lot of people are building stuff that don&#8217;t have source maps that allow you to see that stuff. If you want to actually understand what&#8217;s going on a webpage, you have to be really sophisticated with browser dev tools, which are difficult to do. Actually, my new job which is still a secret, my secret lizard super job, we are going to hopefully change that and trying to get back to how we learn how to code and have other people have that sort of access to learning the same way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s important that it&#8217;s an accessibility issue in a lot of ways because so many of us have been doing this for a while, did learn by viewing source and the minify of JavaScript prevents that. Now, if you want to do something cool on the web, you have to learn one of 2000 frameworks and wrap your head around. It’s more of a focus on the programming aspect of it and less about the arts and the visual presentation and making things cool. There’s so much friction now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We like to think that we&#8217;re badass because we started it when HTML was just tables and there was no CSS. Or we started what you wrote C with pointers. But the fact is we had an easier on-ramp because we started when that stuff was simpler so we have it easy by starting there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, definitely. There’s this huge impact over the years where everyone should learn how to code and my idea is not everyone should learn how to code but everyone should have access to learn how to code, if they want to. You know, there are people who&#8217;ve been creating great organizations to make the education more accessible but sometimes, even if there&#8217;s this organizations available, there are people who are just themselves with the computer, be it at home or in a library.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Like me when I was a kid, if there were organizations to teach young girls how to code, I don&#8217;t have access to those. My parents both worked two jobs, I was always at home, my only access to computer is in school. Even now, the state of education for computers is terrible. I think the national average is about 5% of public schools have computer science education. In New York City alone, it&#8217;s 1% so there are people like young &#8216;lizard Jenn&#8217; who are just looking at a computer somewhere and view sources all that they have. I think it&#8217;s according to not hold the ladder up behind us and go back to how we learned and make that available to other people, if that make sense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Jenn, you said you went in the school for a computer science degree, what led you to make that decision?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wanted to build spaceships but I couldn&#8217;t afford the schooling. Then I got a scholarship where I was able to choose any state university in New Jersey, that&#8217;s where I live now and Montclair State&#8217;s Computer Science Department chair recruited me. Other departments have recruited me but the Montclair State Department was the only one that had a female department chair and I thought that was super awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I was like this is what I want to get involved with. I wanted to do computer stuff because that seems like the next path down that I can afford, next to building rocket ship. This woman have personally called me and I was like, &#8220;Wow, they want me and it&#8217;s a woman in-charge,&#8221; so that&#8217;s what I did. Shout out to Dorothy Deremer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How did that impact your approach because it sounds like when you&#8217;re coming out, a lot of your approaches were very visual and you were very focused on presenting art to the world and your own creativity to the world? How did that intersects with, I don&#8217;t know when I think of computer science degrees, I think they have, &#8220;Oh your algorithm, it&#8217;s in the ability of your compiler.&#8221; Did you see those two things merging back then or it was something that happened after the fact?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I think I realized during high school that I was very much a problem solver and I&#8217;m a visual learner but I do love numbers and word problems so the theoretical computer science education fed that need whereas I was able to use that theory to build things that fed my visual needs. I got a lot involved in learning the math behind computer graphics and stuff like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The math behind pixels?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The math behind pixels, exactly. There’s a separation and there&#8217;s a lot of, I guess people who study computer science or people who think of those with computer science think that you need computer science to build web applications or like a separation which I could talk for hours and hours about because I used to write computer science curriculum and also teach web development.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But computer science and much of web development is such an interdisciplinary field that lots of people who come from different backgrounds that can thrive in either of the spaces. Some of the best engineers I know have backgrounds in creative writing and have an art and stuff like that. My background is in computer science and math and statistics and stuff but a lot of people first meet me through my art work so it was the opposite way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Let&#8217;s talk about your art. Can you tell us more about what pixel art actually is, for people who doesn&#8217;t seen it before?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. How do I describe pixel art? Well, a pixel is the smallest unit on a display. If you have a crappy TV like I do at home and you look really close to it, like your parents tell you not to when it&#8217;s on, you can see little squares that each have a single color and that&#8217;s a pixel. Pixel art sort of harkens back to early game console, old TV displays. I would say that it&#8217;s a type of abstract art.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> My pixel art, in particular which is reflected in the titles of today&#8217;s podcast is an erotic pixel art so I draw a lot of nude ladies. I called it &#8216;pixelbabes&#8217;, which are mostly self-portraits or just portraits of women that I know most of them who are in tech. Also, some men in tech who let me draw them. Tech is a very progressive industry. We&#8217;re always trying to [inaudible] and stuff like that but when it comes to sexuality, I feel like it is very inhibited so pixel art is abstract enough where I can post on Instagram a pixel of drawing of a nude woman but you can&#8217;t post of a photograph of a nude woman. But what is pixel art is really an image zoomed in all the way so it was like a joking take on our inhibitions within the industry, while still being able to post boobs on the internet without getting in trouble.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s so interesting with what you said about sexuality being kind of taboo in tech industry. I know a lot of women in tech who have this whole other life, in terms of their sexuality, whether it&#8217;s kink or their sexual history or things among those lines that they&#8217;re afraid to talk about because it is so taboo and because unfortunately, it also represents a vector for abuse. If you are a visible woman on the internet, you&#8217;re subject to abuse and you don&#8217;t want to give your harassers any additional fuel by which to attack you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, also I feel like people who are men in tech have still some sort of [inaudible] on their backs so somebody is trying to oppress them in some sort of way so why give them that fuel. If you think about teachers, women teachers all the time are being fired because of raunchy photos being found of them on the internet and stuff like that and you just think that the tech industry is a lot more progressive than that. But I feel like our sexuality is taken out on us in more silent ways, or even more public by anonymous people and harassers and stuff like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I know men in tech who we&#8217;re very open with their sexuality, either involved in all of those kink communities and I wish that women can be that open in the industry without fearing their day job being taken away from them or being harassed by other people but that&#8217;s just simply not the case today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>To be fair, it&#8217;s not trivial for men either. I really appreciate @aphyr on Twitter for all the gay kink posts that he makes and the photos of his ass which are quite enjoyable to look at. But I really appreciate that openness because you don&#8217;t see it with men either.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and Kyle&#8217;s a good friend of mine. He&#8217;s actually the subject of some of my male erotic art. I&#8217;ve talked to him about this too. He can be very open. It&#8217;s so funny, he&#8217;ll speak in a conference and he&#8217;s the smartest engineers ever and he&#8217;ll get all these new followers and he&#8217;ll [inaudible] all new followers the photo of his ass and it&#8217;s so brilliant. It is a performance art in itself. It&#8217;s so great but that definitely would have the same effect if I were to speak at a conference and then be like [inaudible] followers of the photo of my tits. It will have the same effect. Also, I don&#8217;t work for myself. He works for himself now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and he&#8217;s publicly one of the most brilliant developers in the world and doing amazing innovative work. When you have a million people who would love to hire you, you can take those risk.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly and I just feel like it&#8217;s harder for a woman to be in that same position. Kyle gets pushed back also. With every tweet that he posts of a photo of himself, he&#8217;ll have somebody just flat-out asked him for supposed less gay stuff. You&#8217;ll never know if that person&#8217;s going to be somebody that goes to interview with to hire him for a contract job, you know what I mean? It’s a risk that he need to put out there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I don&#8217;t feel comfortable putting myself out there. I&#8217;m a pretty visible person that is very secure at my job but I still not comfortable opening myself up to that harassment. I feel like people use women sexuality against them a lot more than people who use men sexuality against them. I don&#8217;t want my sexuality to be used in a negative way because it&#8217;s a very positive, amazing thing in my opinion.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, when I meet people at a conference, I don&#8217;t want them thinking of me in sexual terms. I want them talking about programming with me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is a symptom of the problem that in general, we&#8217;re not allowed to be our full selves, whether it&#8217;s in internet presence or how we present ourselves to the world at a conference or in person when you meet someone. In tech, we’re not allowed to be our full selves and there&#8217;s the theme that I always come back to, on this podcast and that is the ideal developer is still held up to be this emotionless robot with no outside life, spending all of their free time coding open source and that&#8217;s not a human. Humans are complex and we have layers. We have interests outside of technology and it&#8217;s like a fucking taboo that we can&#8217;t talk about these things. It&#8217;s really depressing that we can bring our full selves to that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What I find so interesting about that is I have yet to meet a person who actually feels comfortable being in their full self. They’re always saying what you just said, Coraline that there&#8217;s things that they enjoy that they don&#8217;t want to talk about because they&#8217;re afraid people won&#8217;t take them seriously or they don&#8217;t want people to see them in a different way. It affects the questions of why do we care about these stereotypes so much if nobody actually is enjoying the privilege of them because I haven&#8217;t met those people either who are that emotionless robot that is projected as what an engineer is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a good point. Everybody is keeping quiet about something &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, for sure. I think that personally, I always have this fear of making my peers feel uncomfortable which is a very hard thing to deal with as like when I write satire or if I&#8217;m posting surreal tweets on Twitter as I normally do. I like to tweet something and then I&#8217;m going to be like, &#8220;Oh, my gosh. Is this going to make one of my coworkers uncomfortable? And should I care about that? If they do feel uncomfortable, is that my problem or is it their problem that they need to face?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Not that I ever posted anything about work and stuff like that but you&#8217;ll never know if I post about a date I&#8217;m on or something like that. You’ll just never know who is going to think of what and how that can possibly be if somebody see you. It takes a lot of comfort with your peers to be able to open yourself up in any sort of way. Right now, I love the job of [inaudible] all of my best times and the company that I&#8217;ve just joined now is really awesome but everyone there is quite new to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A large group of them seemed to know about my online presence so I feel comfortable that they know what they&#8217;re getting into but I&#8217;m not entirely sure what I can or cannot get away with, in terms of my own personality coming through. But then again, they hired me so that&#8217;s what they&#8217;re getting but it&#8217;s like a really weird slippery slope, for lack of a better phrase. I&#8217;m kidding&#8230; I love that phrase &#8216;slippery slope&#8217; but &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m on a Slack community, well, I&#8217;m in like 20 Slack communities but one of them specifically for queer people in tech. We have a Selfie channel and I&#8217;ve said on Twitter that I think I was a transwoman, celebrating my body is a political act. I really believe that. But we have another channel on that Slack called &#8216;Selfie [inaudible] Club&#8217; where people post kind of suggestive photos to each other and flirting is allowed and encouraged.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For the longest time, I was terrified to post there because even it was a private Slack community, what if one of the pictures got out and one of it was weaponized against me. Eventually, I got to point where I was like, &#8220;Fuck it. I&#8217;m going to celebrate my body. I&#8217;ll just deal with the consequences.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was telling this to a guy not too long ago about how women in tech all have backup plans like I&#8217;m at home right now working. What if I found that somebody like released my address or sent on their way, I already know what my contingency plan is. People will say like you have to have a fire escape plan right now, women who are visible online should have their ducts escape plan. Who am I going to stay in with? What am I going to do with my [inaudible]? That sort of stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When you&#8217;re posting stuff online, whether it&#8217;s a public tweet or a suggestive photo, I have my back plan like, &#8220;What am I going to do? How do I&#8217;m going to explain myself when this gets out? And if lose my job, what can I do? Who’s my support plan?&#8221; It&#8217;s super exhausting and that&#8217;s why I feel like a lot of people hide parts of themselves from that. It’s really interesting. I&#8217;ve been sick all week and up until late at night coughing and last night, I was able to watch a Netflix where there&#8217;s this 45-minute documentary about Ashley Madison hacking and just [inaudible] all the people whose info got out. It was mostly about the business behind Ashley Madison and stuff like that. I was hoping we would touch more on the people that were affected but didn&#8217;t really. It&#8217;s just interesting that nobody seems to think like, &#8220;What will I do if my information is found that I&#8217;m on the site?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I feel like whenever you joined a website, whenever you posted online, you better have to actively think what consequences can I have for doing this and how will I save myself from those consequences. If you don&#8217;t do that, then it just seems like you&#8217;re at a loss. Again, it can be very exhausting to do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For background, Ashley Madison was like a site that targeted finding people to hook up with when you were cheating on your spouse?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s an adultery match-up website. I guess in over a course of years, these hackers gathered all their data and started dumping all the information of the customers and the founders themselves. Not only did they release all the customer’s information but also it was noticed that most within on the site were actually [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s bad. That was terrible. I think you have a very useful coping mechanism there. I do this too of when I&#8217;m afraid of something, I think about in my head, &#8220;What do I do if this happens?&#8221; And I make up a story about the actions that I would take and then I can go on. It&#8217;s no longer a fear, it&#8217;s now a risk.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, exactly. Then speaking about suggestive photos getting out, I was thinking also like let&#8217;s say I posted on Slack a suggestive photo in a safe space and somehow it got out, I could probably own it but then down the line, any opportunities that come to me, people can blame it on, &#8220;Oh, because of those photos,&#8221; like Kim Kardashian. Kim Kardashian has all these ads and all these business and TV shows and stuff like that but she became famous because of that sex tape kind of thing and there is always one thing that get the right person to notice you. Maybe it did blame on all that work on that one moment were somebody noticed you, it&#8217;s just a very interesting thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We have a questioned someone in our community Slack, Sophie who wants to know and this is sort of in line with what we&#8217;ve been talking about for the imagery that you produced and more about the satire that you produced. How do you think potential employers reacts to your satire?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I can talk about my former employer, Bocoup and I stated this in conferences and in public before so it&#8217;s true. They love my satire. They love the message behind it that she is trying to take tech less seriously and call out the sort of call out culture that we seemed to have still today. I always say that they not only tolerate my voice but they celebrate it. I can say with full confidence that my new super lizard employer feels the same way and they followed my work and know me. I&#8217;m confident that they&#8217;re all great with that. I feel like if anybody dislikes my satire or they think that it&#8217;s bad, they’re ignoring the actual toxicity in the industry and therefore, they&#8217;re not somebody that I would want to work for. But I&#8217;m very fortunate that a lot of people support me that I can make that decisions stands.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, because we don&#8217;t need all the jobs in the world. We don&#8217;t need to maximize the number of jobs that we could have. We need to maximize for one job at the moment and that is the best job.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>yeah, I always get people telling me like, &#8220;You could probably work wherever you want to work if you wanted to,&#8221; unlike [inaudible] where the case which is not true. Maybe I don&#8217;t want to work everywhere. You know what I mean? I have a mission myself and that narrows down a lot of the companies that I would be willing to work for to act to that mission.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Speaking of sexuality in tech, when are going to talk about CSS Perverts?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, CSS Perverts. The origin of CSS Perverts goes back to the origin of rock star developer or JavaScript ninja. Those phrases that we used in tech that make ourselves stand out, although everybody is using it, therefore no one was standing out. My friend, Nick and I created CSS Perverts as our phrase. I guess, I got a recruiter email once and it was like, &#8220;Jenn, we&#8217;re looking for a JavaScript ninjas for this job,&#8221; and I was like, &#8220;Call me when you&#8217;re looking for a CSS Pervert.&#8221; I think that was the origin. I think they never called me back. It&#8217;s tragic.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It became our name for running satire in tech. Both of the recruiter level and development level, any of managerial, I don&#8217;t know if they&#8217;re just trying to stand out to get all the best developers to work for them but this whole industry seems like a huge pissing contest. &#8220;Who has the most ping pong tables?&#8221; You only need one table. &#8220;Which developers are willing to work for 20 hours straight?&#8221; That’s bananas. No one should work that much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Like, &#8220;Our company, we have trucks where you need your haircut.&#8221; I don&#8217;t want to get my haircut on a truck. That doesn&#8217;t sound like a fun time. It’s very surreal and we&#8217;re in this bubble where we had all these ridiculous amenities thrown at us. Then also these ridiculous expectations that are supposed to compensate for these amenities. Then I think back to my previous job at Montclair State where I had an office but it didn&#8217;t have windows and there&#8217;s a coffee maker in the kitchen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Sometimes, I had to make my own coffee because other professors have finished the pot and being guys, they didn&#8217;t know how to refill it afterwards. I felt that the cushy lifestyle that I have now in this industry but at the same time, I feel like the work-life balance isn&#8217;t there so it feels less cushy. It&#8217;s a very interesting paradox that this industry has created for us. In my new job, I think there&#8217;s like five types of water and that&#8217;s awesome. Water is good for me and I need that. It’s actually great because I&#8217;ve never been more hydrated in my entire life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But that&#8217;s like super great. I super appreciate that. But then when I see these and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Oh, are they expecting to be here all the time,&#8221; and that&#8217;s not the case. I&#8217;ve been working from home all week because I&#8217;ve been sick and they would rather be not pass my disease onto the rest of them. I just stayed at home. That&#8217;s really great but I know that there are some jobs, some offices that really expect you to be there all the time and like, &#8220;We have people to do your laundry.&#8221; No one needs to do the laundry at work. Maybe I&#8217;m old. I just turned 32. I&#8217;m not old &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;re not old. If you&#8217;re old, then I&#8217;m in big trouble. With this expectations that you&#8217;re talking about of working for 20 hours. When I was younger, when I was coming up in software development, I felt like I had to work extra hard because I do not have a CS degree. I was self-taught. I have mentors that helped me and I read a lot of books. I felt like I had something to prove. I actually, at one job worked for 32 hours straight on a project and it was horrible way to live. This is when my daughter was young so I actually missed that a lot, with my daughter as a result of having this really unsustainable work ethic.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I remember very clearly one May day, we were driving the car, shoes in the back seat and I was talking about May day and I was talking to her about the labor movement and I was like, &#8220;You know, a lot of people fought and died for an 8-hour work day and a 40-hour work week,&#8221; and she said, &#8220;But Mommy, you work a lot more than eight hours a day.&#8221; I was like, &#8220;Oh, you&#8217;re so right. What am I doing?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Right now, inside my head it is like, &#8220;It&#8217;s about that but then you put it that way, it&#8217;s about work-life balance is super important,&#8221; but then why should you complain because we work in these places that offer all these amenities? Would you take it back? Would I prefer to work in an office that didn&#8217;t have all of those things? But then again, is this just in the industry where the expectations has surpassed what people are willing to offer us in order to make up for that lack of work-life balance?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It&#8217;s like a huge problem that I see getting better because I see culture at different companies improving. I certainly have been very fortunate where I worked at two companies now that have really excellent culture and really believed in work-life balance because they recognized productivity is higher when you&#8217;re not not getting any sleep, which is not a noble concepts &#8212; the idea of humans getting sleep and therefore, being productive. Why are you forgetting that? Who are deciding what are these basic human needs? They’re not really basic human needs, like churn out some code. It was just very weird.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, often it&#8217;s an unfair kind of trade because it&#8217;s not like the work you&#8217;re doing isn&#8217;t really intensive and maybe you need a ping pong break or a water break. Why should you have to give it up because you don&#8217;t want to work 12 to 15 hours straight? It feels like there&#8217;s an equal equation there. Even this is not exactly necessarily all true, it just kind of reminds me of the first time I watched Mad Men and I was like, &#8220;What? Is this how people work?&#8221; Because they were drinking at nine in the morning, they had couches that they were going to sleep on and then it&#8217;s the 50s and 60s so when they leave work, there&#8217;s no way to contact them because the only way you can call them is at home and they don&#8217;t go straight homes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They were able to have a wait time that it feels like you don&#8217;t have been [inaudible] just because you&#8217;re not at work, it doesn&#8217;t mean that you&#8217;re not going to get pinged or someone is not going to call you or you&#8217;re not expected to be available because there&#8217;s not like a 24-hour waiting period for you to respond to an email like, &#8220;Oh, I emailed you.&#8221; Or somebody calls you, &#8220;Did you get my email?&#8221; No, it&#8217;s seven o&#8217;clock. I&#8217;m eating but it&#8217;s kind of expected now for you to work all the time. I think it&#8217;s unfair to kind of make people feel like, &#8220;They gave me free water so I should be here.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s the sort of thing that&#8217;s optimized for 25-year olds with no family obligations too, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, but that also assumes that the 25-year olds has no friends and no family that they want to see either.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>[inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s a little unfair to say, &#8220;You don&#8217;t have immediate family that has to see you so therefore, you should be good with working all day and all night.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and that&#8217;s definitely something that I&#8217;ve had said to me in one of my first jobs. I was complaining about having this daily and no one else did and they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Well, you are young and you&#8217;re single and we have kids.&#8221; It&#8217;s like I can pop out a baby if I wanted to. Don&#8217;t [inaudible] the good time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s a bad way when you don&#8217;t having a child is your version of getting work-life balance. That&#8217;s not a good way to do it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m interested, Jenn since she does went through a job search process to arrive at your super lizard company, how did you figure out what kind of culture they had before you agreed to join.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The company that I joined, I&#8217;ve known about for a while and I&#8217;ve had long conversations with the CEO and talked to other people that were in there. I was very fortunate that they wanted me to work for them. I was sort of approached. Also, a lot of companies, their CEO or their employees write blogs so I read a lot to get an understanding of the culture of the company and the people that are running it. I did a lot of reading and research.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As I said before, what I looked for a job, if I&#8217;m talking to somebody about a project, I really want to work with somebody who has the same mission as I do and my mission is again, learning to code and being a part of this industry accessible to anybody who wants in on it and trying to make it a more inclusive and happy place to be a part of. When I was learning how to code, I was really having a fun time. I really enjoyed it and I feel like that sometimes gets lost on us when we start to work. I watched Nick learn how to code like a fun experience and stay upon experience that new people coming in to the industry and hopefully pushing off the tops of people at the same time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Doing that sort of research and talking to people is really the best thing that one can do in order to find a space that they feel safe working in and leaving their other really great job. My last job was really awesome. I just needed to do something different. I don&#8217;t like to do consulting anymore but it was a huge, tough decision for me to make. I probably [inaudible] a whole Saturday about changing jobs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to go back to something you just said. Are you implying that there are toxic people in the community and is that for real?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Take a seat &#8212; Toxic people in the community, yes, they&#8217;re there and they&#8217;re out in the open. They’re not even hiding.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>They&#8217;re rock stars. They&#8217;re ninjas.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>They&#8217;re rock stars and ninjas, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Should we forgive them for their transgressions because they&#8217;re rock stars and ninjas. I mean, they&#8217;re productive, right? And that&#8217;s the most important thing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If they&#8217;re not generative.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And they created a lot of the technologies that we use so therefore, they&#8217;re forgiven. It’s really interesting. You see, this is like the music industry where there are these performance artists that are actually horrible human beings but then they make music and like, &#8220;Oh, this music is actually great.&#8221; Let&#8217;s use R Kelly for example. Not particularly a good human being. Some will call him a sexual predator. He&#8217;s made music that sounds really great and it&#8217;s very nostalgic. Every time I&#8217;m in karaoke parties, someone puts in Ignition Remix and it makes those people feel good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then you think of, let&#8217;s say &#8212; God, hopefully, this isn&#8217;t going to get me in trouble &#8212; Linus Torvalds. Some say he&#8217;s a toxic person but he gets away with it because he made Linux. Does Linux made people feel good the way that Ignition Remix feels good? Can you compare software and music and the separation if the engineer and what they built and the artist and the art that they created? I don&#8217;t think that we made that separation like we do with software and they&#8217;re completely different things. It’s just something interesting that I feel not a lot of people talk about enough.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">I go to museums a lot. I&#8217;m an artist and I like to look at art and if it&#8217;s a modern art museum and there&#8217;s a Picasso exhibit, usually it&#8217;s where the people turn the corner and see Picasso, they finally see something that they recognized and like, &#8220;Oh, Picasso.&#8221; But like, &#8220;Is it really that Picasso is not a good person?&#8221; Or like Frank Sinatra, was like not a good person but everybody loves that song New York here in New York.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I feel like we sort of idolized software developers the same way that we do on these musicians and we have this idea, this cults of personality like celebrity in software development and to think that it&#8217;s warranted, like are these people famous? I don&#8217;t think so. Just like the other day, Eric S Raymond &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, one of my favorite people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, in the Python dev mailing list like, &#8220;I&#8217;m back. I sort of faded away after that whole being famous nonsense,&#8221; and I think I tweeted that I laughed out loud and coughed at the same time and got a nosebleed, which is completely true because I was sick. But I just say, &#8220;I can&#8217;t believe this is happening.&#8221; Not only just the presumptuousness of knowing the whole list and be like, &#8220;I&#8217;m back,&#8221; but then from being famous nonsense and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Being famous, that&#8217;s what you&#8217;re calling, like all of that, you&#8217;re being famous?&#8221; I can&#8217;t even with some of these people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But I feel like the Python community now is a lot different in terms of their analysts have a code of conduct and people are more aware of what the proper way to behave is and also people are aware of his past and his delusions grandeur about things that &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What was the story there?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>He has just a lot of bad ideas. There’s a whole list of things but I think generally, the last thing was he sort of coming out and saying that women in tech groups were trying to seduce men to call out fake rape accusation about game developers. I think he was saying that people are trying to do that to Linus Torvalds out. It&#8217;s just this boring, like you&#8217;re irrelevant, stay irrelevant but people do their jobs and write code and try to build these really great Python community nobody needs kind of thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>He has this [inaudible] against code of conduct. He already [inaudible] piece about me on why hackers must eject the social justice warriors. He also has a great quote talking about the fact that, from his opinion, why people commit more crimes because they have lower IQ&#8217;s than my people. He&#8217;s literally the worst human being. I&#8217;m actually, Jenn giving a talk at OSCON this year which I&#8217;m super nervous about called &#8216;The Broken Promise of Open Source,&#8217; where I&#8217;m calling out these so-called leaders and pointing out that the cult of personality runs counter to open source values and why the fuck do we keep on doing this? Why do we keep elevating people and forgiving people?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It reminds me this phrase that I learn in Latin, which I think is insidious. I don&#8217;t remember the Latin words but it translates to &#8216;love the art, hate the artist&#8217; and I think that is the worst thing we can do. That’s the worse.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because I&#8217;m going to use Linux and I&#8217;m going to use Emacs but I never want to work with Linus or ESR. If I never want to work with the person, then that kills the collaboration of open source.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, unfortunately, Python has strived without ESR involves. I&#8217;m not so much involves with the Linux community but I hear about all that sort of drama all the time. I just feel like it&#8217;s very important to open source to make sure that there is a large inclusive thriving communities so that it can drive out the need to interact with these toxic people. If someone creates a project and they&#8217;re a bad person and the project built up this huge community then the community will out voice that person. I feel like that how the system should be. No benevolent dictator, that kind of thing which exist in a lot of projects to avoid that interaction.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s also so many projects now where I feel like if I don&#8217;t like somebody, then I can leave the project or I can talk to somebody about it. I feel like codes and conduct have really made that visible and great. I got to say that if somebody who is seen as people have called me famous and I always correct them, like I&#8217;m popular in my weird niche of way. I am definitely a part of this whole cult of personality thing. There are people who want to meet me at conferences. I get invited to speak in conferences all the time. I never have to do a CFP for a conference before and I&#8217;ve spoken out to 30 different places and people who want me to work for them, I know that 90% of it is just because of my personality online.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Maybe I&#8217;m not giving myself enough credit like I do build a lot of open source stuff but people like me for my mission and my attitude about things. I feel like it&#8217;s an attitude that a lot more people who need to have in their workplace and jobs. I feel like I&#8217;m on the other end of things where I didn&#8217;t build something that everybody is using and therefore I get away with everything. I&#8217;m getting way with things because I&#8217;m on the right side of the culture. I just want to make more people who are on that right side of culture visible in the industry so they can have the opportunities that I have &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because there are plenty of nice people who can build great software and there are plenty of good people making good music.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just want to point out, I tweeted this morning that you&#8217;re going to be a guest on the show and I asked if anyone have any questions. I&#8217;m already receiving for asking tweets on your behalf so great culture we have here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Congratulations.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe the part of the problem is we need to be more demarketizing and less like warring tribes because it kind of sounds almost like when we&#8217;re talking about the ninja, the rock star, these idea that you can be a person who&#8217;s larger than life and because of that, then people follow you. That is not the same of what you&#8217;re saying, Coraline about open source. It&#8217;s not the same concept of everybody come together and collaborate because that means that there&#8217;s these leaders that you can follow then you can decide, if you agree or don&#8217;t agree with them. But what they did is more important than whether or not you agree with them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Maybe what we should be doing is more so, everybody collaborates. It doesn&#8217;t matter how big your name is or how many people know who you are because you&#8217;re just a collaborator like everybody else and make that more of a democracy. That would take away, I think a little bit from this, I get to be a war leader because that&#8217;s almost the culture that&#8217;s developed where once you have enough power, then you feel like you are entitled to say and do what you want.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s exactly is and open source was a reaction against hierarchies because a hierarchical organization is necessarily a risk averse and any risk that&#8217;s taken that fails, falls down on a single person. Open source was organized more like a network and a network can take risk because the impact isn&#8217;t felt by a single person and the consequences aren&#8217;t felt by a single person but the network absorbs whatever happened and can respond to it in a really productive way. With these cults of personality, we have hierarchies again that are so counter to the founding philosophy of open source and no one seems to see that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because everybody wants to be famous and that means that you need [inaudible] to notice. Everyone who defends Linus is like, &#8220;Maybe Linus will notice me defending him and make me his henchman.&#8221; This is complete thing that does not exist. You know what I mean? I get it too I have people who will defend me when I don&#8217;t need defending and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;What are you trying to do? I noticed you. Does that make you happy?&#8221; I don&#8217;t know&#8230; It&#8217;s just a very weird thing to notice. It’s a sociological problem. There are probably plenty of people working on their PhD, studying on these kind of thing &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I hope so, I bet somebody is doing the research.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah but in the meantime, how do you combat that? I feel like I&#8217;m trying to combat it by using my popularity to amplify other voices and also try to do good in some way in the community and not just making about what my bad ideas are. I&#8217;m sure I&#8217;ve plenty of bad ideas.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>With what Astrid&#8217;s said, it&#8217;s like we don&#8217;t need a bunch of famous leaders or more famous leaders. We need a large number of popular people who are strengthening the network.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We need mentors, people who are also advocates. Mentors and advocates because there&#8217;s a lot of people in the community that we need to be advocated for. We need diversity and open source projects and not &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And it takes calling them individually and inviting them personally.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a lot of work but if you get to the point where a lot of people know who you are, they amplify you. It’s time to do the work. I think that it is like if you push somebody up the ladder, they have to turn around and grab you and pick you up behind them and not just leave all these people behind.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think we reach the portion of the show where we want to do reflections. For new listeners, reflections is when we look back on a conversation that we&#8217;ve had with our fascinating guest and definitely true in this episode, Jenn is wonderful and highlight things that really resonated with us and maybe things that we want to do is resolve the conversation. Jessica, do you want to go first?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I love to. I love the discussion about tech considering itself progressive and it is, compared to a lot of careers. But it&#8217;s actually we&#8217;re quite inhibited and that led us to everybody has something that they keep quiet about because they&#8217;re not sure of the consequences. Some of us, like Kyle and Jenn and me have the privilege of not really being worried about being unable to find a jobs soon. When we do express more of ourselves, when Jenn makes her retro website that some people are going to scoff at, and when she writes satire and makes erotic pixel art, pushes those boundaries.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When I talk about being polyamorous on Twitter when Coraline is proud of who she is, all of these are using our privilege &#8212; our privilege of being unlikely to be unable to find a job. When we do that in public, it&#8217;s just these standards. It sets an example. It makes it a little bit easier for other people to put more of themselves out there. Jenn and Coraline, thank you for doing that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had similar reactions. I think those of us with the privilege of not being worried about how the things we say in public will necessarily impact our ability to find a good job. It does give us a responsibility to be public about these things, to show people that it&#8217;s okay. But I think we also have to recognize that not everyone has that privilege. Especially people who are early in their careers, they do you have to be careful because their options are necessary limited by their limited experience. Hopefully, we can open the way, do some dialogue about these things and hopefully we can start breaking down some taboos.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My reflection actually comes from something you&#8217;ve mentioned earlier in our conversation, Jenn which you were talking about your origin story and I thought it was really profound that you see yourself know as a computer scientist but you also see yourself as an artist and you don&#8217;t seem to have this need to separate them or feel like you have to explain them. I think that&#8217;s very important because so many people feel like tech may not be for them because they&#8217;re not a certain type of person. Even some of our previous guests who have had artistic endeavors, have also talked about how do they felt that they had to pick one or the other and I think it&#8217;s great that you never did.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JENN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think my reflection on this conversation is I guess the thing that I learned as we&#8217;re speaking was how much a struggle with trying to be myself when realizing that a lot of people think that I&#8217;m very comfortable with being myself, especially when it comes to sexuality. But I am a lot more comfortable today than I was six months ago and was six months before that. I see that, as Coraline said the more that we talked about these stuff, the more we start breaking down those taboos and maybe there will be a point where we all can really, truly, comfortably be ourselves.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It’s not until we can be ourselves that we will do and make the best work that we can do so it&#8217;s really in everybody&#8217;s favor: our peers, our employers, the staff to provide a space where we are in inhibited. I&#8217;m not saying like walking around naked everywhere. Again, I don&#8217;t want anyone to feel uncomfortable but I want to take away the fear of saying something about myself or expressing something about myself that can inhibit me anymore. That’s something that I really like discussing. I wasn&#8217;t expecting us to discuss and I think that being all women today is really been a huge factor and I appreciated that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That worked out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This has been an amazing conversation and Jenn, I want to thank you so much for agreeing to be on the show. As a sort of behind the scenes [inaudible], we organize the show into 10 to 15 minutes segments and we plan in advance to the things that we want to talk about. We did not follow the script at all today and I am so happy about that because I think the conversation we have is very real and very important. I really hope our listeners appreciate it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Speaking of listeners, Greater Than Code is 100% listener-funded. If you want to support our show, if you want us to have more conversation like this and more amazing guest like Jenn, please go to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode, pledging at any level gets you access to our Patreon-only Slack community where you have the opportunity to continue the conversation with guest, suggest a new guest and find a really welcoming and safe community to talk about some of these hard issues in tech beyond the way the JavaScript framework. Thank you all very much and this has been a great episode and I look forward to next week so I hope you did too. Thanks everybody.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jenn Schiffer: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jennschiffer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@jennschiffer</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://jennmoney.biz/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">jennmoney.biz</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Neon Abstract Podcast Erotica!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:15</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://bocoup.com/">Bocoup</a></p>
<p><b>03:05</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="http://jennmoney.biz/art/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Art</span></a></p>
<p><b>06:37 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Viewing Source and Learning How to Code</span></p>
<p><b>11:02 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Getting a Computer Science Degree</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><b>13:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Pixel Art, Sexuality in Tech, and Online Presence </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/aphyr"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@aphyr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (Kyle Kingsbury)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Madison_data_breach"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ashley Madison Scandal</span></a></p>
<p><b>26:54 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– How do potential employers react to your satire?</span></p>
<p><b>28:41 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://medium.com/cool-code-pal"><span style="font-weight: 400;">CSS Perverts</span></a></p>
<p><b>36:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Vetting Potential Employers and Company Culture; Dealing with Toxic People</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Takeaways:</b></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Everyone has something that they keep quiet about because they aren’t sure of the consequences.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Being privileged enough to have the responsibility to be public and show people that it’s okay that they are who they are.</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">You don’t have to separate your passions.</span></p>
<p><b>Jenn:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> We all need a space to feel uninhibited. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
Get behind-the-scenes exclusives <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-20-it-8121016">like this one</a>!</b></p>
<div id="Transcript" style="display: none;">
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to Episode 20 of &#8216;Neon Abstract Podcast Erotica&#8217;. Today, I&#8217;m joined by Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Coraline. However, I think this might be the only episode of Neon Abstract Podcast Erotica but it&#8217;s Episode 20 of Greater Than Code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re doing two podcasts simultaneously, Jessica.</span></p]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jenn Schiffer: </span><a href="https://twitter.com/jennschiffer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@jennschiffer</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://jennmoney.biz/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">jennmoney.biz</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Welcome to “Neon Abstract Podcast Erotica!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:15</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Origin Story</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://bocoup.com/">Bocoup</a></p>
<p><b>03:05</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="http://jennmoney.biz/art/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Art</span></a></p>
<p><b>06:37 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Viewing Source and Learning How to Code</span></p>
<p><b>11:02 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Getting a Computer Science Degree</span></p>
<p style="text-align: left;"><b>13:56 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Pixel Art, Sexuality in Tech, and Online Presence </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://twitter.com/aphyr"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@aphyr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (Kyle Kingsbury)</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashley_Madison_data_breach"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ashley Madison Scandal</span></a></p>
<p><b>26:54 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– How do potential employers react to your satire?</span></p>
<p><b>28:41 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– </span><a href="https://medium.com/cool-code-pal"><span style="font-weight: 400;">CSS Perverts</span></a></p>
<p><b>36:03 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Vetting Potential Employers and Company Culture; Dealing with Toxic People</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Takeaways:</b></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Everyone has something that they keep quiet about because they aren’t sure of the consequences.</span></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Being privileged enough to have the responsibility to be public and show people that it’s okay that they are who they are.</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">You don’t have to separate your passions.</span></p>
<p><b>Jenn:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> We all need a space to feel uninhibited. </span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
Get behind-the-scenes exclusives <a href="https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-20-it-8121016">like this one</a>!</b></p>
<div id="Transcript" style="display: none;">
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello and welcome to Episode 20 of &#8216;Neon Abstract Podcast Erotica&#8217;. Today, I&#8217;m joined by Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Coraline. However, I think this might be the only episode of Neon Abstract Podcast Erotica but it&#8217;s Episode 20 of Greater Than Code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re doing two podcasts simultaneously, Jessica.</span></p]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/16403404_10102148754710392_5663053789649913146_o.jpg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/16403404_10102148754710392_5663053789649913146_o.jpg"></googleplay:image>
										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/391/episode-020-jenn-schiffer.mp3" length="53865493" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>yes</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>Yes</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>0:00</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>Episode 019: It&#8217;s Made of People!</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-019-its-made-of-people/</link>
					<pubDate>Fri, 10 Feb 2017 00:37:22 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=382</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[&#160; This episode is in loving memory of Melia L. Moore Panelists: Astrid Countee &#124; Sam Livingston-Gray &#124; Jessica Kerr &#124; Coraline Ada Ehmke Guest Panelists: Darin Wilson of Infinite Red and Keyboardist in @4Minus1Trio Cheryl Schaefer of Launch Code and CoderGirl Show Notes: 01:11 – What it means to be a Senior Engineer When You... <div class="link-more"><a href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-019-its-made-of-people/">Read More</a></div>]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[&#160; This episode is in loving memory of Melia L. Moore Panelists: Astrid Countee &#124; Sam Livingston-Gray &#124; Jessica Kerr &#124; Coraline Ada Ehmke Guest Panelists: Darin Wilson of Infinite Red and Keyboardist in @4Minus1Trio Cheryl Schaefer of ]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/york/obituary.aspx?n=melia-moore&amp;pid=183703504&amp;fhid=30387">This episode is in loving memory of Melia L. Moore</a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span> <a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href=" https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Panelists:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/darinwilson"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Darin Wilson</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span><a href="https://infinite.red/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Infinite Red</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and Keyboardist in </span><a href="https://twitter.com/4Minus1Trio"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@4Minus1Trio</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span></a><a href="https://twitter.com/CherylGSchaefer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cheryl Schaefer</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span><a href="https://www.launchcode.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Launch Code</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://www.launchcode.org/coder_girl"><span style="font-weight: 400;">CoderGirl</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:11 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What it means to be a Senior Engineer When You Don’t Want to Go Into Management</span></p>
<p><b>05:07</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Generativity: The difference between your team’s output with you on it and your team’s output without you.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://leanpub.com/37things"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gregor Hohpe: 37 Things One Architect Knows About IT Transformation</span></a></p>
<p><b>13:46</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – The Job of An Architect</span></p>
<p><b>22:09 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What are the managers doing? “It is too much to ask for your manager to be your career mentor?”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://a16z.com/2014/07/30/the-happy-demise-of-the-10x-engineer/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Gerstenzang: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/131908575X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=131908575X&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;linkId=d08b37c3206978c7992ae8c263c1f1dd"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Everything&#8217;s an Argument by Andrea A. Lunsford, et al.</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Takeaways:</b></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">From Jessica’s perspective, what a software architect actually is supposed to be doing.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/131908575X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=131908575X&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;linkId=d08b37c3206978c7992ae8c263c1f1dd"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Everything&#8217;s an Argument by Andrea A. Lunsford, et al.</span></a></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> I’m going to read ^ book.</span></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">More surprise episodes!</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!</b></p>
<p><b>Darin:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Think less about me and more about the team around me. And I’m looking for a mentor!</span></p>
<p><b>Cheryl:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Greater Than Code &gt; Mission Taco</span></p>
<div id="Transcript" style="display: none;">
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello, everybody. I&#8217;m Astrid Countee and welcome to&#8230; What are we talking about today? What is this today? Well, here today is one of our patrons, Darin. Say hello, Darin.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DARIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello. I&#8217;m very happy to be here with Sam Livingston-Gray.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello. Welcome Darin and I would also like to welcome another surprise special guest, Cheryl Schaefer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks, Sam. I&#8217;m happy to be here and introduce our friend here, Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks, Cheryl and this is a really fascinating episode today. Let me tell you the story of how this episode happened. See, Coraline was in Africa and she was coming back from Africa. Then people wanted a show with some origin story so we thought we&#8217;d have a show with just us but we moved it because Coraline was coming back from Africa but apparently Coraline is still in Africa time zone because she&#8217;s not here so we popped up in the Slack and ask for some company and Cheryl joined us and Darin joined us and Darin has a question and we don&#8217;t know what it is. Darin, what is the topic of today&#8217;s show?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DARIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a senior engineer when you don&#8217;t want to go into management so I wondered what all of that meant to you. What is your career path look like now that you&#8217;ve sort of crossed over to senior developer when it&#8217;s not as clear what the next steps are?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Excellent question.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a really interesting question. It&#8217;s one that I&#8217;ve been pondering for like five or six years. I don&#8217;t really have a good answer but I really love programming. I really love figuring out how to get better and better at expressing solutions and even just expressing problems and I love being able to teach people. But I have zero interest in going into management because I know that if my job involves going to meetings and remembering stuff, I would be absolutely horrible at it. I&#8217;ve been a senior developer, in title, for six years and I don&#8217;t know where to go from there and that&#8217;s probably going to be an issue at some point. But it&#8217;s okay for now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can I ask a question related to this because I don&#8217;t have an answer, obviously but I do have a question, which is when I was working at HP and I&#8217;m wondering if this is just because they do a lot of hardware, they seem to have a path for this and it was different. It was like you became almost a senior fellow kind of thing where you were a person who within the company, you were considered to be an expert. Whenever different groups were working on certain types of solutions that maybe using your wheel house, they could consult with you. It was like you were an in-house advisor and you were also the first point of contact for whenever they were going to make new products or something like that. Does that not exist for software?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It does in a few places. In Monsanto, they called it a Technical Fellow. That would be like the extreme senior level, like Kent Beck at Facebook of someone that anyone can consult when they need with some mysterious wisdom or serious perspective on what the company is doing. Sometimes, it&#8217;s just a matter of knowing so many different groups in the company that you can give a much broader perspective and connect people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve seen places that after senior engineer, they might have tech lead and they might have principal engineer but those have definitely been much less common as I&#8217;ve just been wandering around looking at random job postings.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Like the principal engineers and the tech leads, what are they doing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, tech lead is fairly descriptive like you&#8217;re a senior engineer who is also like the nominal head of a team &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As far as technical decision &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, yeah. When I was in LivingSocial, they had at least the idea of this, where they would have somebody who was taking care of the management side. This, I think was more at the director level but they had somebody who was taking care of the management side of things so that they could have tech leads focus on tech leading. But one or two of the places where I&#8217;ve seen principal engineer, at least one of them, it was basically an excuse to give you a higher salary than they could if you were a senior engineer. In other places it may vary.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. At Stripe, they had a very well-defined technical track that went as far up as the managerial track because they really do want people to remain technical and also they defined it pretty well. Basically, as you move up in the technical track, you’re expected to have more impact and influence at the company, like these technical fellows do at the top level.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But you can think of it as if you want to be more value to the company, then there&#8217;s only so much productivity you can have. There’s only so much code you can write, really. As you get senior and more impactful, you start having more influence on what other people are doing, you start making the people around you more productive. As a tech lead, hopefully what you&#8217;re doing is making the people on your team as productive as they can be, even if the sacrifice is for you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I have a name for it. It&#8217;s generativity. I got this word by reading the Journal of Organizational Psychology, kind of randomly. This would came up in three articles in just one volume and every time, it had a different definition. But the definition that I liked and therefore the only one I care about is generativity is the difference between your team&#8217;s output with you on it and your team&#8217;s output without you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As opposed to your personal output, you can have a ton of productivity. You can be primed in the Phoenix Project and you could have a negative generativity because if you are dragging your team members down, if you&#8217;re not helping them, if you&#8217;re making them feel stupid, you&#8217;re actually going to be destructive even while you look way better than they are. This is one way to be a 10X developers, to hold the other team members down. In my opinion, this is not a senior developer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A senior developer is about generativity. It’s about, is two developers more productive because I&#8217;m on it? Two junior developers are more productive and you&#8217;re not doing the work of two junior developers. You’re bringing up the junior developers on your team, to you and then at a higher level, you can even do that for the whole company.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I see several ways that you could go about increasing the productivity of your team and your company as you move upward in the senior developer track. There&#8217;s the usual ways of pairing and teaching, mentorship of helping other people understand what&#8217;s important, also sponsorship in making the managers aware of who should be promoted from junior to mid-level or whatever and who&#8217;s not happy on the team and who would be a really good fit over there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Networking is another one. One thing that most developers, when we start out don&#8217;t do a lot of is finding out what&#8217;s going on in other teams. That&#8217;s a huge generativity boost, both for your team and for the other teams, when you can find those synergies and more often, find those pitfalls of what you&#8217;re about to break for somebody else. Or what they&#8217;re about to break for you but we can express it in the positive sense of finding things that you&#8217;re both doing and could work together on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Management is another way that you can increase your influence, your leverage, your impact but if we talk about, that’ll be another segment. I&#8217;ve got a brand new one. This is totally new. You know the architect career track, which is stereotypically, I&#8217;m just going to tell you all what to do and let you deal with the fallout and making it actually work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m going to make beautifully UML diagrams over here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, which the business loves because one of the jobs of an architect is to make the technical reality legible to the business people and those diagrams add legibility. They make it so that people can understand or have the feeling of understanding without knowing the whole thing because nobody can know the whole thing anymore. That&#8217;s one job of an architect.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Actually, Gregor Hohpe has a good book about this which I will link in the show notes. He’s fun to read and really fun to listen to but I don&#8217;t think he usually [inaudible] talks be videotaped which is that [inaudible] he didn&#8217;t, the last time I was there. I have a theory that the real architects, the real ones who are influencing how the software is actually written and increasing the productivity of the developers, have the title infrastructure engineer because an infrastructure engineer is building the platforms that developers are using and as we accept the face of reality of devops is a necessity of we have to operate the software that we write, we don&#8217;t just each team picks its own way to operate it. But that would be a mess because it&#8217;s a lot of work to pick a way to operate it. A lot of work to automate that operation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And it&#8217;s bad for the business to have portability problems like if I change from one team to another and I have to spend two weeks learning how to ops on that team, then I&#8217;ve just wasted two weeks of money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s a dangerous consideration to focus on because then you start viewing people&#8217;s resources. It&#8217;s also a thing. That and it&#8217;s just a decision fatigue and the work of getting everything right. Well, before you get to the size of Stripe, most companies when you get three or four teams, somebody is doing the operations stuff and handing other people their scripts.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Somebody did it to begin with and other teams just copy it. Then as you get bigger, you&#8217;ve got a team whose responsibility is to maintain that infrastructure and to keep the other developers productive so that everybody doesn&#8217;t have to know everything about everything because since your system gets big enough, that impossible and that happens really early. Way earlier than you think it will.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But those people have huge generativity. They are leverage. This is the team that making your other teams able to focus on the business logic. That&#8217;s the goal and we haven&#8217;t achieve it yet but we made progress in that direction. We talk about how software is for and by people. This is very important. There&#8217;s also the part that people are influenced by software. The software we have available changes how we work. See, operational software that you have changes how you deploy your code. If you make something easy, they will do it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You talked about how this works at bigger companies where each team is responsible for each part. How would you say that plays out in smaller teams where maybe that kind of infrastructure work becomes a story that you take turns doing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s great because it spreads the knowledge. Usually, there&#8217;s somebody on each team who&#8217;s good at Bash and rectify the scripts then everybody else uses them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe my small team doesn&#8217;t necessarily have one of those people yet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mine doesn&#8217;t.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But we all taking turns like, &#8220;Oh, we have to do that now.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You might look at that at your next hire, seriously. At Monsanto, it&#8217;s David Dooling and I have recruited him to Atomist with me. It&#8217;s one of those things where automating your work feels unproductive because it&#8217;s not your work and also because it&#8217;s more fun than your work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But it&#8217;s incredibly productive once you get like a decent idea of, &#8220;This is taking too long. I should stop now. No, this is going to be worth it,&#8221; or even not. If you just have like that kind of hack day where you can experiment and find that magical golden yak that once you shave it, there is wisdom under it skin.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s the thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, totally.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a pretty cold calculation that you can do for automation which is how much time am I spending on it now? How much time am I saving by automating it? And how many times does that run? You multiply time I save by times it&#8217;s run and that&#8217;s how much time you should spend on automating. It&#8217;s pretty straightforward.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a starting point. That&#8217;s a minimum of the time you&#8217;re going to save. Look at Git, how much time did I spend waiting for svn log? None, because I never used it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But now I use git log all the time because it&#8217;s at my fingertips. It&#8217;s right there. It was unusable before and now it&#8217;s usable. Now, I have a tool that I didn&#8217;t even know that I needed. Somebody quoted a [inaudible] article on Twitter the other day and I think it was at Google. Someone optimized the page load time to make pages look faster and they discovered that the average page load time actually went up. When they dug into that, they found out that it was because they were now getting a lot of requests from Africa, where before, it wasn&#8217;t usable from Africa so they just didn&#8217;t get requests. Now, it is usable so they get requests that are much more challenging so their average page load time went up. But that&#8217;s a win, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. Making it so accessible to many people that&#8217;s a total win.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, like git log is accessible to me and [inaudible] was not. The time that you saved is only the stuff that you know you will benefit from this. But the real benefit is the stuff that you do that you never did before because it wasn&#8217;t right at your fingertips. Or maybe because you have the time to do it now. I haven&#8217;t even started on my actual opinion of what &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ll be talking about this in April. I&#8217;ve got a 15-minute keynote at O&#8217;Reilly Software Architecture. But you&#8217;ll get some of the advance thoughts.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> People are influenced by software and what you make easy for them is what they&#8217;re going to do so if we take the job of an architect, rather than to decree, you must use event sourcing or your service must be tolerant of downtime. Make that thing easy. Make it painful if they don&#8217;t. Maybe write automated tests that run on various services and make things turn red so measure it and make it easy for them to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you want a specific coding style, don&#8217;t just put a freakin&#8217; RuboCop up there to yell at you on your pull request. I&#8217;m not going back to add freakin&#8217; spaces in the place that you want spaces all over my code. I have better things to do than that. But when you&#8217;ve got RuboCop autocorrect, fine. You want a space there? Put a freakin space there. I don&#8217;t care. That’s like basic linting. There’s also like refactoring. Take what you want to do and make it easy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This is what we&#8217;re building at Atomist, among other things. We’re building kind of a framework so that people don&#8217;t have to have a whole team to build SlackBots to coordinate GitHub, with Travis, with RuboCop &#8212; I wouldn&#8217;t write them in RuboCop &#8212; also there&#8217;s automated code changes. If you want my code different, write a program that alters my code and if you want me to continue to follow that standard, automate a little reviewer that checks that and makes the commit. If you want me to close my issue after I merge the pull request, close the issue in JIRA after I merged a pull request in GitHub or something like that, make that notification that says, &#8220;You close this pull request.&#8221; Isn&#8217;t that great? Have a button on it that says, &#8220;Closed your issue.&#8221; Or, &#8220;Relate to JIRA issue.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Actionable notifications and automation of code changing and reviewing, I think this is what architecture should be doing. Not decreeing how things should be but automating to make that the easiest way for developers to work. That&#8217;s generativity.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It sounds like what you&#8217;re saying is the architect should be basically like user experience researchers with software engineers and say, what are you guys doing? How are you actually working? And then build something that enhances that process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or build something that nudges them more in the direction you would like them to go, if it is demonstrably better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, that if it&#8217;s demonstrably better as where I&#8217;ve watched the screaming magic happens.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s why you bring data to that fight.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and if you don&#8217;t have data, rock-paper-scissors or whatever. Make a decision. Then you can get consistency between teams.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, just as an example of that, a team that I was on a couple of years ago, we had a variety of process tweaks over the years but one thing that remained fairly constant for quite a while was that at the beginning of the Sprint, we would do planning poker, which is where we describe a story and everybody has these cards and we all hold up the cards which are labeled with points: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and so on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If there is wild divergence, we talk about it and then everybody holds up their cards again until we come to some sort of consensus on how many points the thing is. We would argue about how many points a thing was. Was it five? Was it eight? Until eventually, we also had to track our time on this project. Eventually, somebody on the team who had a background in statistics took all of the data on how many points we assigned to stories and tried to correlate them to the amount of hours that we spent working on them and it turned out that we were pretty accurate for 1, 2 and 3 points and anything above three was just too complicated and there was no correlation or whatsoever between points in time. What we learned from that was if it&#8217;s too big, break it down. That’s one of the best examples I&#8217;ve personally of bringing data to the screaming match and it worked out really, really well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that unexpected skill of statistics that you probably didn&#8217;t hire for but you got lucky brought a huge amount of value to the team because it save you a lot of arguments.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah, that actually leads to another. Remember the bug’s story about I can save that for later.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, of ways to advance as a senior dev, I think at anyway that you can bring up the productivity of the people around you, whether that&#8217;s networking, automating, encouraging.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or like you said, mentoring and pairing. That goes back to something that I saw on Twitter a while ago. It was the best way to be a 10X engineer is to find five other people and make them 2X engineers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But also that statistics example brings up sometimes your most valuable developers are the ones that have skills unrelated to devops. You would think they would be unrelated to development but software is developed by people so there&#8217;s not much that&#8217;s not related. Any of those skills that are rare on your team is particularly valuable.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Oh, and one more. Understanding the company, the business that you&#8217;re in, on one side networking. But on another side, really understanding the business that you&#8217;re working in, whether it&#8217;s like finance or insurance or retail or health care, that is a huge, huge benefit because it can save a lot of really wrong implementations. Personally, I think that if I were hiring software developers as a company, I would look for developers with experience in my industry and not care what language they knew.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s sort of leads into this idea that has been for me in my head is that you talked a little bit about how good principal or &#8212; what did you call it &#8212; a technical fellow, knows a lot of different teams in the company and has some idea of where one team might benefit from something that another team is doing. Then that sort of lead into networking a little bit. It seems to me that there&#8217;s a fuzzy line here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Darin, you started out asking about how do you advance as a senior developer without going into management. You know, there&#8217;s a lot of these things that boiled down to people skills and bringing value by connecting different people together who might not necessarily have the same jargon or even the same job titles or background. But there&#8217;s a really sort of an almost a dangerous slippery slope there of like if I get too good at that, maybe they&#8217;re going to try and push me over into management, right? How do we avoid that, if we want to?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DARIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I really like Jessica&#8217;s focus because I&#8217;ve been thinking about what was being a senior developer mean for me. What should I be doing? You just help me shift the focus out toward the people around me and not so much about what I&#8217;m doing, which is really useful. Because the truth is I don&#8217;t feel that much different than I did when I was a junior developer. Still think I don&#8217;t know anything. I mean, I know I know stuff but I don&#8217;t know what I know and I don&#8217;t know how I know it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DARIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m working with junior developers now and sometimes they come to me with questions and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Well, you do this,&#8221; and they&#8217;re like,&#8221; How did you know that?&#8221; I was like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know. You know, it&#8217;s just something that came to me at some point in my career.&#8221; If I think about it, there was probably some horror story back that, &#8220;Oh, yeah. That was the time I screwed up that option.&#8221; This is how I do that before but it&#8217;s years of acquired stuff that you don&#8217;t think about too much. But just changing the focus to &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s pretty much the &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DARIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess so. But sometimes, there are other times in other areas where I&#8217;ve had to really work hard to learn something and I can articulate that process to somebody else. But coding has always come pretty intuitive to me. You know, I study and I learn but I just kind of absorb. Whereas other things I&#8217;ve learned other types of skills, I had to follow a series of steps that I can articulate those steps to somebody else but coding is different. But just shifting the focus to how can I bring the team up, that&#8217;s a great way to think about it, I think.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a question tangential to that. Jessica, from what you explain about architects and then even some of the questions you just asked Sam, what are the managers supposed to be doing because it sounds like you could run this whole system without managers. What are they doing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a really good question and it plays into a question on our Slack, from [inaudible] he asked about, &#8220;Is it too much to ask for your manager to be your career mentor?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Everything we&#8217;ve talked about the architect, this is pretty technical direction. This is like shepherding the software but that only has some impact on keeping the people happy. You can&#8217;t get anything done if your people leave or if they&#8217;re despondent or they don&#8217;t feel like they&#8217;re growing &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or if you&#8217;ve got 50 people packed into a room and that&#8217;s like right next to a construction area.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And we haven&#8217;t gotten into how do you decide what to work on because you can build software and write all day and get nothing for it if you&#8217;re not building the right software.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So your managers should be dictating the right direction to go in?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is that a manager or is that a product owner?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>See, that&#8217;s my question because I was thinking as you guys were talking, why should you be 10X engineer. This doesn&#8217;t seem to exist in other technical areas. There’s nothing like a 10X researcher or like a 10X doctor. Why should you be a 10X engineer? Is that something that we&#8217;re just making up because we can do that? Or is that a failure of something else in the system because our systems are changing so quickly?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You actually kind of hinted at my answer right there, which is that there is no such thing as a 10X engineer. Some of us just like to think that we&#8217;re better than others.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That 10X thing among musicians is actually a thing &#8212; a construct that maybe some people think is real but maybe it really isn&#8217;t a thing that if I&#8217;m just starting out and I can get into the studio of the best teacher, the strongest rock star unicorn, then somehow I will succeed because of their guidance. I think, there&#8217;s got to be some tempering of that. So many people who are been in the field like less than two or three years are hungering for that direction than help. But the other person is still just one person. Especially, if you&#8217;re stretched amongst 20 or 30 other people, how much effect can that really have? If you&#8217;re stretched among five, then they can do a lot to help.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DARIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a distinction between people who are really, really good at what they do and people who can teach what they do and they&#8217;re not always the same. This especially true for musicians because the work is so abstract. You can meet fantastic musicians who cannot explain what they do at all and there are some people who are fantastic teachers that are never famous as musicians but they really know how to get people from a starting point to an advance point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or if they know how to get them from somewhat advanced point to a more advanced point. In my personal experience was is that very few teachers were good at the beginning point that were also good at a college or high school level. It could be beginner teachers who were good at teaching beginners and there&#8217;s not a lot of exposure to that. But if you could teach someone who was a masters lever or higher, then of course, there&#8217;s a lot of exposure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s this assumption that since you can play this, you should be able to teach someone else. Then when they&#8217;re not with you, they will be able to learn as well and that&#8217;s a totally different thing than teaching them to play the song or teaching them to write this specific code to do this thing. It&#8217;s like helping them come to that mindset where they can figure out what to play or what to write and then come up with the plan that&#8217;s going to work in this case that maybe different from that case.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that was my first impression after hearing your question. I was like, &#8220;What if you find that magical musical guru and you study with them for two or three years and it turns out that what they&#8217;re good at is teaching you how to play like them. Have you really gained anything or do you still have to go through a couple years of mastering your craft until to the point where you develop your own voice? Does that make sense at all?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, absolutely. I found, as a musician that I learned from people with very different voices and that help me learn faster like Jump Studios. Like my teachers came from different universities that almost like your parents: go live with a foster parent for to learn something different, hangout with the babysitter, get in trouble for your parents later. I haven&#8217;t been coding long enough to do that yet, really but it&#8217;s easier, I think to see other people&#8217;s voices and know what&#8217;s different about them because I can&#8217;t just hop on different kinds of tutorial that come from different perspectives.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Does it work, though, in your opinion, Cheryl? Like there&#8217;s other really 10X people?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would say, they&#8217;re 10X teams and that&#8217;s the same with music like that rock star has, someone else is paying the bills at home and someone else running the music group and someone else handling the sound for them, like our fantastic MIDI. There’s somebody else is handling the sound, which makes them sound better and then somebody else is handling each part and as an aggregate, then they&#8217;re fantastic.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I see, so then why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we even have this as a concept? It seems like it&#8217;s just self-defeating.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The 10X thing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, the 10X thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Historical reasons. I think in development, there’s been a trope for a long time. There was some research &#8212; or I meant there&#8217;s was an article &#8212; that was published in one place and said that certain developers are 10 times more productive than other developers and that you should just hire these 10X developers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s a book out about fallacies that we believe in software development and it debunks this 10X myth, specifically it was published at one place and then cited in a thousand and then all those citations start citing each other so that it looks like there&#8217;s a lot of sources but he traced it to its roots and that was like this one study and that study was like not applicable or that good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The 10X developer is a myth that has permeated our industry. Frankly, I observed when I was a young developer that I was 10 times more productive than some other people who were new developers. But as we advance and passed entry level, that is not the case anymore. I think we level up a lot. But maybe that&#8217;s one thing that makes it stick that you can look around and find a developer that is less than 10 times as productive as you at a lot of large organizations.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s a useful abstraction too. If I&#8217;m considering a sports team, I&#8217;m going to think of the quarterback. I&#8217;m not going to think of the whole team. I&#8217;m not going to think of all the coaches and that&#8217;s okay, as long as we don&#8217;t try and make ourselves be all 60 people. If you think of that team as that person is the symbol of the team, I think that kind of brings this up too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s a fallacy that results from looking at productivity, instead of generativity because sometimes that person who is not nearly as productive as I am. It could be if they knew what I knew, if they had my context, if they knew the people that I knew, if they had the background in the code or if they happen to have lucked out and their three computer science classes at college taught them C in Unix and that&#8217;s exactly what they wound up doing as a job.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How do we show that it&#8217;s if we&#8217;re working with non-technical managers? How do you show that your productivity in a generative way instead of saying, &#8220;I worked on these stories. I worked on this.&#8221; I mean, I&#8217;m going to be here the whole time. I&#8217;m not going to take a month off so that they can see what I would be like without me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What if this is the job of a manager? We&#8217;re talking about what are they even good for? What if part of their job is to recognize who is contributing in ways that are harder to see and giving them credit for that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that is a job of a good manager. When I&#8217;ve been a manager in other context, I really tried to spend my time helping to put the right people in the right places. We were doing a technical product but it wasn&#8217;t software but we had some people who were able to figure out the really tough stuff and they could only produce maybe two or three things each day, whereas versus another person who could go really fast at really easy stuff and produce 25.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But the return on having those really hard products created was high so it was worth taking the right person, who&#8217;s this was something they were good at and letting them move technically at a slower productivity. But to produce something that was high quality that we were going to really use and then have other people who were probably never going to be able do that job and let them just escape on the easy stuff and just trying things out because at the end of the of the month, they would balance out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It was better to have those people in the right position that they were all happy and then not have them feel like they all had to do the same thing because I think that&#8217;s where people start to feel really upset and they feel disillusioned because everybody is not the same. Their strengths are different and if you give them the same goal and then they&#8217;re going to measure themselves against other people, then they start to feel like, &#8220;Maybe I&#8217;m not as good. Maybe I can&#8217;t do this.&#8221; It just didn&#8217;t help. We had a morale issue when I started and by putting people in the right positions and then leaving them alone and then not let other people tell them like, &#8220;I&#8217;m better than you,&#8221; it actually helped a lot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think really, a good manager should be helping people be better at what they do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That kind of coordination and behind the scenes, sort of noticing who people are and what they can do and where the need is, that is hard and it&#8217;s time consuming.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, which is why I don&#8217;t understand. That’s why I asked my original question because it doesn&#8217;t seem like managers are doing that a lot in software teams. I&#8217;m not trying to hate on all the managers because I think they&#8217;re also getting tasked with the wrong things too. But I think that it would need to have, it&#8217;d be someone&#8217;s job so that actually help other people deal with their jobs that are better and not give them a whole bunch of business task and metrics crap because that doesn&#8217;t really help anything in the end. You’ll meet your goals if you&#8217;re actually taking care of your people. I think instead, they have more focus on these business goals, which doesn&#8217;t really include the people so there&#8217;s always a disconnect.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DARIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, that actually ties into my original question, which is that a lot of people who have the title of software manager are senior developers who didn&#8217;t want to be developers anymore and weren&#8217;t necessarily trained to be managers, which is a totally different skill set.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, or maybe they did want to be developers but the track ended at some point and the only way to make more money and to keep progressing, especially in an upper organization is to hop onto a different track. One of the reasons that I am absolutely horrified at the idea of ever personally becoming a manager is that I recognize that there is a completely different skill set. It&#8217;s one that I&#8217;m going to have to go back to being a newbie. I know that my brain is probably not predisposed to work well in those ways and the idea of being a newbie at something that I might not be inherently good at and having that responsibility for the welfare of other people, it&#8217;s just a horrifying concept to contemplate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think because you actually know that about yourself, Sam. You&#8217;d probably eventually make a good manager. I think &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe in five or ten years but &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A lot of the bad managers are the people who don&#8217;t even think like that. They’re just like, &#8220;I have a title. I get to run the world,&#8221; and they&#8217;re just so drunk with power and they&#8217;re railroading over people and they don&#8217;t even see it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is it different minds that, whether you got empathy or is it just opportunity?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, because you can learn a lot if you care about people. I think being a good manager is not something you can actually get trained to do. You can get trained on tools but it&#8217;s you either care about your staff as people or you don&#8217;t. If you care about them as people, then you&#8217;re going to take the time to notice like, &#8220;Look, this person&#8217;s been coming in. I noticed every day when we do our stand ups.&#8221; They&#8217;re not really giving much detail. They don&#8217;t seem to talk that much to their teammates because this is like their personality or is there something going on and they don&#8217;t feel comfortable saying in private group.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A good manager would try to like, &#8220;Let&#8217;s talk,&#8221; and not make it this your-job-is-on-the-line conversation but for somebody who doesn&#8217;t care, they&#8217;ll just&#8230; you know, whatever. That one little thing that could just be alleviated with a good discussion could grow into a huge team disruption. Then the manager will just [inaudible] the team.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to bring this back around to [inaudible] question, which is that he heard that it&#8217;s too much to ask for your manager to be your career mentor. We can get into what it means to be a career mentor versus a manager and whether this might or might not be compatible. What do you think?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think they should be your career mentors. My best managers were career mentors.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Where I am now is completely built on the idea that they are and that they can be. But I think you have to select for that when you&#8217;re looking for a job. I see myself continuing the next good things that I&#8217;ll be looking at doing that, that being an important thing like do I get to work at something fun? Does this have a future? Is there someone here who can mentor me in the tech and the things around the tech while I&#8217;m there?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think a lot of people crave that. I think the people who continually self-improve want that. I think it&#8217;s valuable to have career mentors that are outside your job too, though because you&#8217;re their managers, if you&#8217;re ever going to- it&#8217;s time to go.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Also, like you said about having multiple teachers that you find your voice when you have multiple sources of learning.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But I think there&#8217;s a difference between your personal growth as a software engineer and understanding the opportunities inside of the company that you would thrive in. I think that is something that your manager should be helping you do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I would say your manager only needs to be a mentor and even more than a mentor &#8212; a sponsor for you, if they want you to advance within the company. If they just assume you&#8217;ll leave, then no. The manager doesn&#8217;t need to be a career mentor.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Very good points.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Did Caroline just stepped in? Oh, hi!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hey, there. Remember me?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Who are you?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yay! Coraline. It&#8217;s been so long.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have missed the show so much. I&#8217;ve been travelling so much for the last few weeks and I just got back from South Africa where I can [inaudible] and it was amazing. Jet lag just caught up with me so I just slept for about 14 hours just now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right and let&#8217;s see if Coraline has any comment. The topic was should your manager be your career mentor.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, my God. My first impression of that is like what a terrible idea.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, we&#8217;ve now got representatives from all the parts of that spectrum.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess I have to express why I think that&#8217;s a terrible idea.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and maybe define what is a manager to you? What is a career mentor to you? What are those roles?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. A manager is tied to a job and a manager&#8217;s job itself is she has to represent the best interests of the company and your best interests and not to cause a conflict of interest. I think having someone that&#8217;s a career mentor who works for your company, they&#8217;re going to focus on things like retention when it may be best for your career to move on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There are so many possibilities for conflicts to arise that just strikes me so it&#8217;s a really bad idea. Given how mobile a lot of us in tech are and the fact that we take advantage of that mobility to get the salary bumps that companies don&#8217;t normally give us because no one likes to give raises anymore, it seems like you would be going through a new mentor every year and a half or two years. I see a mentoring relationship as a long term relationship. It has to outlast the job you&#8217;re at. I don&#8217;t really see a role for a manager in that process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to distinguish components of mentoring because there&#8217;s mentoring like giving an advice and then there&#8217;s mentoring as sponsorship. As far as sponsoring you and your career advancement within the company, I think a manager absolutely has to do that or they&#8217;re failing. But you can also sponsor someone outside of the company as a mentor and like, &#8220;Have you seen this opportunity over here?&#8221; And, &#8220;I know this awesome developer. You should really interview her.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess for me, mentoring goes beyond like someone who&#8217;s giving you advice and it&#8217;s someone that you build a long term personal relationship with someone you have to trust deeply and mentoring is a two-way street. Both the mentor and the mentee have to get something out of it. That just seems to me to be in conflict with the responsibilities of a manager.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that is very different.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What would you suggest for those people who have made their first foray in tech that are turning their manager into their career mentor? Where should they go to find someone else to do that? Can they take some components from their manager and go find someone else to fulfill the other parts?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Probably so but I really think that, especially if you&#8217;re new in tech, you have to find two things. I think it is important to find a mentor to make sure that you&#8217;re on a path of learning and growth and that someone&#8217;s looking out for your future and sort of advising you on where to go from here. We have lots of great resources for getting people in the tech but not for keeping them there so finding someone like that, I think is really critical.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Another thing is finding a community of peers because someone who is further along in their field than you are, while they may have empathy for where you are, they may not have the memory of what it was like to be where you are so having that peer network to fall back on to say, &#8220;This is really hard, isn&#8217;t it?&#8221; then you hear people say, &#8220;Yes, it is and we can do this stuff.&#8221; I think it&#8217;s really important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Finding a mentor is difficult but if you&#8217;re new in tech, you should be networking and networking and networking. There are lots of people who are available and are willing to be mentors if you can find them. I think there&#8217;s been some websites and so on that have tried to create mentor-mentee networks that I don&#8217;t think any of them really gain traction. I really think it requires sort of in-person networking to find that right person and find that right match.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Coraline, I understand what you&#8217;re saying about the manager having the conflict of interest that you may have the retention. But one thing that I was thinking about as you were talking is that I have actually had managers who, I think encouraged me to leave the company, which was interesting. But I think maybe one of the difference is that, we were all in the same industry so they were kind of mentoring me from a position of I know what this industry is and I can see what you could be doing and you are have that opportunity here. That might be different in tech because I don&#8217;t know how many people are thinking about their tech career in terms of industry versus like acquisition of skills. Maybe, this is a unique issue in technology because I didn&#8217;t have the same kind of concern before.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it makes a lot of sense and I don&#8217;t want to say that a manager can&#8217;t be a mentor. I just don&#8217;t think they should be your first choice but obviously, my experience is skewed definitely toward tech.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I&#8217;ve personally had managers who were from various points along that spectrum as well. I have had managers like they had a very paternalistic style and just rubbed me the wrong way at every possible minute. I&#8217;ve had managers who are totally hands off. While that can be freeing, it&#8217;s also like, &#8220;Uhhh&#8230; Where do I go from here?&#8221; I had one manager who not only advised me to leave the company but left with me to go to the next job.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In my experience &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What? What? You mean, managers are people too?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know, right? That last one and I are still friends and we keep looking for other excuses to work together again. But in my experience, that is definitely in the minority. Most managers that I have worked for or near, they get distracted by the minutiae of the administration of the job. Or they don&#8217;t have a technical background and they don&#8217;t really understand what our particular needs are so they can&#8217;t really be effective mentors.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m coming from the mentor perspective. If there&#8217;s a tendency, I think and I&#8217;ve seen this in other places I work as well. Once other coworkers find out that this one person is good at mentoring and is willing to help, you get pigeonholed and a whole bunch of evil all come to you. There’s other people here as well who could do that would be willing to help but it&#8217;s like not knowing if they can do it. Maybe they feel that impostor syndrome, maybe I&#8217;m not ready for this and they don&#8217;t know how to make that jump.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And then you&#8217;ve got the problem that you referred to earlier of having 30 to 50 students.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t want to make it sound like I don&#8217;t like managers. I&#8217;ve had some really good managers. I don&#8217;t want to dismiss the role of the manager outright. I&#8217;ve a manager now which was really challenging me. Not technically because I&#8217;ve reached a certain point and I consider myself responsible for my own tactical learning at this point. She is challenging me to be diplomatic which is something that does not come easily be me, especially when I&#8217;m right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Which is always.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And being a sore winner is always so much worse than being a sore loser.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and she sort of pointed out to me that if I feel very strongly about something, all of my diplomacy just flies out the window and I&#8217;m very declarative and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;No, this is what we have to do because it&#8217;s the right thing to do,&#8221; and I shut down conversation and I alienate people. I keep doing this because I keep feeling really strongly about things and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;No, there&#8217;s no compromise. There&#8217;s only one way to move forward with this. I&#8217;m sorry. I don&#8217;t even say I&#8217;m sorry but &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m being challenged to work on that and that to me, makes her a great manager to me because she&#8217;s challenging me and I&#8217;m having to change in response to that. It’s really interesting and hard.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, but if you want, not only to be right but to spread that rightness. Diplomacy is important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I can&#8217;t be effective if I&#8217;m just right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can I make a book recommendation along those lines?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can I say no?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, of course.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, no. Please do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>All right. Well, fine. I&#8217;ll just keep it to myself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, please do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s a mystery.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things that I absolutely did not expect when I went back to college was to find a profound life altering text in 100-level writing class. But my textbook for one of those classes was called Everything’s an Argument. It&#8217;s by Andrea Lunsford, et al, I think. But this is basically a book on rhetoric but they don&#8217;t really talk about it in classical terms. It’s very modern, up to date. The cover of the edition that I had at the time was a Dilbert cartoon.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It basically talks about how all speech is persuasive speech and it talks about the thing that made me think of it, particularly for you Coraline is that it encourages you to go beyond the statements that people are making and try to figure out what the values are or what the goal that they&#8217;re trying to meet is that would make them make that statement. It can be a profound tool, essentially for starting your empathy. Also, if you can understand where somebody is coming from and what they value and what they want to get to, maybe you can figure out how to either change your message or possibly even change your mind because you realized that they value this other thing you hadn&#8217;t thought of.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s like requirements gathering?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I suppose.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You want me to do what? No, no, why. What problem are you trying to solve?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that is so helpful but maybe you are right but you&#8217;re right on the wrong context and somebody has seen from the world, from a different angle and there are going to be people who when confronted with that forceful statement just that and you lose their voices. Then there&#8217;s a whole level of involvement that we would lose.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s like being a rock in a stream &#8212; the water is just going to go around you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes and then you can be productive in your way but you&#8217;re not being generative.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay. This is the time in the show where we each decide something that we will take away or a call-to-action or something else that we say. Who want to go first?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I learned from Jessica&#8217;s perspective what&#8217;s the stuff for architect actually is supposed to be doing because I&#8217;ve asked this question several times and most of the times, the responses I get are they&#8217;re just software engineers who get paid more because they think they&#8217;re smarter than everybody else.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is not always wrong. There were so much interesting stuff in this call that I&#8217;m having trouble thinking of a specific thing so I&#8217;m going to cheat and say that my book recommendation to Coraline is a call-to-action to any listener with time on their hands who wants to get better at arguing and not in the shouting back and forth sense but in actually persuading people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m going to pledge to read that book.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really enjoyed this episode and my call-to-action is to propose that we do more surprise episodes like this.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hopefully our listeners enjoy it &#8212; the free form conversation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, let us know on Twitter or you can email Panel@GreaterThanCode.com or even better, join our Community Slack. In fact, while we&#8217;re on the topic, if you become a patron of Greater Than Code at any amount, you get an invitation to our Greater Than Code Community Slack. Also, you get special patron-only content such as what we really talked about when Coraline popped in today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And you might even get invited to be on the show at random.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Darin, Cheryl, you have any takeaways?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DARIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a couple, actually. The conversation around what it means to be senior and where to go next was really useful. I&#8217;m going to think less about me and more about the team around me. That&#8217;s going to be very useful. The other thing is that the mentorship conversation was very useful because I&#8217;ve never had a mentor. I think right now, I could really use one so I&#8217;m going to go and look in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>At least we have the whole internet to look in now, not just the local community.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks for bringing me on. I did miss Mission Taco for this but it was worth it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, man. That sounds good. We should go to lunch next week.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My commitments are isn&#8217;t my work, except she&#8217;s on leave for medical reasons. I too, will be mentor hunting. Maybe I should watch out for that conflict of interest.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s good to be back. I really miss you all and I&#8217;m looking forward to coming back to our regular schedule next episode.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome. Thank you for joining this episode of the Stone Cold Podcast. No, wait&#8230;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Did we change it again when I was gone? I like Greater Than Code. It’s so fitting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It comes back every time, Coraline. Don&#8217;t worry. It will be back next week.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What if it doesn&#8217;t?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Then you&#8217;ll just tell everybody that you&#8217;re right and then &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, I&#8217;m right. The podcast is called Greater Than Code. Stop it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you for listening to Greater Than Code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And that&#8217;s the way it is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Bye, everybody.</span></p>
</div>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello, everybody. I&#8217;m Astrid Countee and welcome to&#8230; What are we talking about today? What is this today? Well, here today is one of our patrons, Darin. Say hello, Darin.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DARIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello. I&#8217;m very happy to be here with Sam Livingston-Gray.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello. Welcome Darin and I would also like to welcome another surprise special guest, Cheryl Schaefer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks, Sam. I&#8217;m happy to be here and introduce our friend here, Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks, Cheryl and this is a really fascinating episode today. Let me tell you the story of how this episode happened. See, Coraline was in Africa and she was coming back from Africa. Then people wanted a show with some origin story so we thought we&#8217;d have a show with just us but we moved it because Coraline was coming back from Africa but apparently Coraline is still in Africa time zone because she&#8217;s not here so we popped up in the Slack and ask for some company and Cheryl joined us and Darin joined us and Darin has a question and we don&#8217;t know what it is. Darin, what is the topic of today&#8217;s show?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DARIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a senior engineer when you don&#8217;t want to go into management so I wondered what all of that meant to you. What is your career path look like now that you&#8217;ve sort of crossed over to senior developer when it&#8217;s not as clear what the next steps are?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Excellent question.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a really interesting question. It&#8217;s one that I&#8217;ve been pondering for like five or six years. I don&#8217;t really have a good answer but I really love programming. I really love figuring out how to get better and better at expressing solutions and even just expressing problems and I love being able to teach people. But I have zero interest in going into management because I know that if my job involves going to meetings and remembering stuff, I would be absolutely horrible at it. I&#8217;ve been a senior developer, in title, for six years and I don&#8217;t know where to go from there and that&#8217;s probably going to be an issue at some point. But it&#8217;s okay for now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can I ask a question related to this because I don&#8217;t have an answer, obviously but I do have a question, which is when I was working at HP and I&#8217;m wondering if this is just because they do a lot of hardware, they seem to have a path for this and it was different. It was like you became almost a senior fellow kind of thing where you were a person who within the company, you were considered to be an expert. Whenever different groups were working on certain types of solutions that maybe using your wheel house, they could consult with you. It was like you were an in-house advisor and you were also the first point of contact for whenever they were going to make new products or something like that. Does that not exist for software?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It does in a few places. In Monsanto, they called it a Technical Fellow. That would be like the extreme senior level, like Kent Beck at Facebook of someone that anyone can consult when they need with some mysterious wisdom or serious perspective on what the company is doing. Sometimes, it&#8217;s just a matter of knowing so many different groups in the company that you can give a much broader perspective and connect people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve seen places that after senior engineer, they might have tech lead and they might have principal engineer but those have definitely been much less common as I&#8217;ve just been wandering around looking at random job postings.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Like the principal engineers and the tech leads, what are they doing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, tech lead is fairly descriptive like you&#8217;re a senior engineer who is also like the nominal head of a team &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As far as technical decision &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, yeah. When I was in LivingSocial, they had at least the idea of this, where they would have somebody who was taking care of the management side. This, I think was more at the director level but they had somebody who was taking care of the management side of things so that they could have tech leads focus on tech leading. But one or two of the places where I&#8217;ve seen principal engineer, at least one of them, it was basically an excuse to give you a higher salary than they could if you were a senior engineer. In other places it may vary.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. At Stripe, they had a very well-defined technical track that went as far up as the managerial track because they really do want people to remain technical and also they defined it pretty well. Basically, as you move up in the technical track, you’re expected to have more impact and influence at the company, like these technical fellows do at the top level.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But you can think of it as if you want to be more value to the company, then there&#8217;s only so much productivity you can have. There’s only so much code you can write, really. As you get senior and more impactful, you start having more influence on what other people are doing, you start making the people around you more productive. As a tech lead, hopefully what you&#8217;re doing is making the people on your team as productive as they can be, even if the sacrifice is for you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I have a name for it. It&#8217;s generativity. I got this word by reading the Journal of Organizational Psychology, kind of randomly. This would came up in three articles in just one volume and every time, it had a different definition. But the definition that I liked and therefore the only one I care about is generativity is the difference between your team&#8217;s output with you on it and your team&#8217;s output without you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As opposed to your personal output, you can have a ton of productivity. You can be primed in the Phoenix Project and you could have a negative generativity because if you are dragging your team members down, if you&#8217;re not helping them, if you&#8217;re making them feel stupid, you&#8217;re actually going to be destructive even while you look way better than they are. This is one way to be a 10X developers, to hold the other team members down. In my opinion, this is not a senior developer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A senior developer is about generativity. It’s about, is two developers more productive because I&#8217;m on it? Two junior developers are more productive and you&#8217;re not doing the work of two junior developers. You’re bringing up the junior developers on your team, to you and then at a higher level, you can even do that for the whole company.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I see several ways that you could go about increasing the productivity of your team and your company as you move upward in the senior developer track. There&#8217;s the usual ways of pairing and teaching, mentorship of helping other people understand what&#8217;s important, also sponsorship in making the managers aware of who should be promoted from junior to mid-level or whatever and who&#8217;s not happy on the team and who would be a really good fit over there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Networking is another one. One thing that most developers, when we start out don&#8217;t do a lot of is finding out what&#8217;s going on in other teams. That&#8217;s a huge generativity boost, both for your team and for the other teams, when you can find those synergies and more often, find those pitfalls of what you&#8217;re about to break for somebody else. Or what they&#8217;re about to break for you but we can express it in the positive sense of finding things that you&#8217;re both doing and could work together on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Management is another way that you can increase your influence, your leverage, your impact but if we talk about, that’ll be another segment. I&#8217;ve got a brand new one. This is totally new. You know the architect career track, which is stereotypically, I&#8217;m just going to tell you all what to do and let you deal with the fallout and making it actually work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m going to make beautifully UML diagrams over here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, which the business loves because one of the jobs of an architect is to make the technical reality legible to the business people and those diagrams add legibility. They make it so that people can understand or have the feeling of understanding without knowing the whole thing because nobody can know the whole thing anymore. That&#8217;s one job of an architect.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Actually, Gregor Hohpe has a good book about this which I will link in the show notes. He’s fun to read and really fun to listen to but I don&#8217;t think he usually [inaudible] talks be videotaped which is that [inaudible] he didn&#8217;t, the last time I was there. I have a theory that the real architects, the real ones who are influencing how the software is actually written and increasing the productivity of the developers, have the title infrastructure engineer because an infrastructure engineer is building the platforms that developers are using and as we accept the face of reality of devops is a necessity of we have to operate the software that we write, we don&#8217;t just each team picks its own way to operate it. But that would be a mess because it&#8217;s a lot of work to pick a way to operate it. A lot of work to automate that operation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And it&#8217;s bad for the business to have portability problems like if I change from one team to another and I have to spend two weeks learning how to ops on that team, then I&#8217;ve just wasted two weeks of money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s a dangerous consideration to focus on because then you start viewing people&#8217;s resources. It&#8217;s also a thing. That and it&#8217;s just a decision fatigue and the work of getting everything right. Well, before you get to the size of Stripe, most companies when you get three or four teams, somebody is doing the operations stuff and handing other people their scripts.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Somebody did it to begin with and other teams just copy it. Then as you get bigger, you&#8217;ve got a team whose responsibility is to maintain that infrastructure and to keep the other developers productive so that everybody doesn&#8217;t have to know everything about everything because since your system gets big enough, that impossible and that happens really early. Way earlier than you think it will.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But those people have huge generativity. They are leverage. This is the team that making your other teams able to focus on the business logic. That&#8217;s the goal and we haven&#8217;t achieve it yet but we made progress in that direction. We talk about how software is for and by people. This is very important. There&#8217;s also the part that people are influenced by software. The software we have available changes how we work. See, operational software that you have changes how you deploy your code. If you make something easy, they will do it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You talked about how this works at bigger companies where each team is responsible for each part. How would you say that plays out in smaller teams where maybe that kind of infrastructure work becomes a story that you take turns doing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s great because it spreads the knowledge. Usually, there&#8217;s somebody on each team who&#8217;s good at Bash and rectify the scripts then everybody else uses them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe my small team doesn&#8217;t necessarily have one of those people yet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mine doesn&#8217;t.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But we all taking turns like, &#8220;Oh, we have to do that now.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You might look at that at your next hire, seriously. At Monsanto, it&#8217;s David Dooling and I have recruited him to Atomist with me. It&#8217;s one of those things where automating your work feels unproductive because it&#8217;s not your work and also because it&#8217;s more fun than your work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But it&#8217;s incredibly productive once you get like a decent idea of, &#8220;This is taking too long. I should stop now. No, this is going to be worth it,&#8221; or even not. If you just have like that kind of hack day where you can experiment and find that magical golden yak that once you shave it, there is wisdom under it skin.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s the thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, totally.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a pretty cold calculation that you can do for automation which is how much time am I spending on it now? How much time am I saving by automating it? And how many times does that run? You multiply time I save by times it&#8217;s run and that&#8217;s how much time you should spend on automating. It&#8217;s pretty straightforward.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a starting point. That&#8217;s a minimum of the time you&#8217;re going to save. Look at Git, how much time did I spend waiting for svn log? None, because I never used it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But now I use git log all the time because it&#8217;s at my fingertips. It&#8217;s right there. It was unusable before and now it&#8217;s usable. Now, I have a tool that I didn&#8217;t even know that I needed. Somebody quoted a [inaudible] article on Twitter the other day and I think it was at Google. Someone optimized the page load time to make pages look faster and they discovered that the average page load time actually went up. When they dug into that, they found out that it was because they were now getting a lot of requests from Africa, where before, it wasn&#8217;t usable from Africa so they just didn&#8217;t get requests. Now, it is usable so they get requests that are much more challenging so their average page load time went up. But that&#8217;s a win, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. Making it so accessible to many people that&#8217;s a total win.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, like git log is accessible to me and [inaudible] was not. The time that you saved is only the stuff that you know you will benefit from this. But the real benefit is the stuff that you do that you never did before because it wasn&#8217;t right at your fingertips. Or maybe because you have the time to do it now. I haven&#8217;t even started on my actual opinion of what &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ll be talking about this in April. I&#8217;ve got a 15-minute keynote at O&#8217;Reilly Software Architecture. But you&#8217;ll get some of the advance thoughts.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> People are influenced by software and what you make easy for them is what they&#8217;re going to do so if we take the job of an architect, rather than to decree, you must use event sourcing or your service must be tolerant of downtime. Make that thing easy. Make it painful if they don&#8217;t. Maybe write automated tests that run on various services and make things turn red so measure it and make it easy for them to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you want a specific coding style, don&#8217;t just put a freakin&#8217; RuboCop up there to yell at you on your pull request. I&#8217;m not going back to add freakin&#8217; spaces in the place that you want spaces all over my code. I have better things to do than that. But when you&#8217;ve got RuboCop autocorrect, fine. You want a space there? Put a freakin space there. I don&#8217;t care. That’s like basic linting. There’s also like refactoring. Take what you want to do and make it easy.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This is what we&#8217;re building at Atomist, among other things. We’re building kind of a framework so that people don&#8217;t have to have a whole team to build SlackBots to coordinate GitHub, with Travis, with RuboCop &#8212; I wouldn&#8217;t write them in RuboCop &#8212; also there&#8217;s automated code changes. If you want my code different, write a program that alters my code and if you want me to continue to follow that standard, automate a little reviewer that checks that and makes the commit. If you want me to close my issue after I merge the pull request, close the issue in JIRA after I merged a pull request in GitHub or something like that, make that notification that says, &#8220;You close this pull request.&#8221; Isn&#8217;t that great? Have a button on it that says, &#8220;Closed your issue.&#8221; Or, &#8220;Relate to JIRA issue.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Actionable notifications and automation of code changing and reviewing, I think this is what architecture should be doing. Not decreeing how things should be but automating to make that the easiest way for developers to work. That&#8217;s generativity.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It sounds like what you&#8217;re saying is the architect should be basically like user experience researchers with software engineers and say, what are you guys doing? How are you actually working? And then build something that enhances that process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or build something that nudges them more in the direction you would like them to go, if it is demonstrably better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, that if it&#8217;s demonstrably better as where I&#8217;ve watched the screaming magic happens.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s why you bring data to that fight.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and if you don&#8217;t have data, rock-paper-scissors or whatever. Make a decision. Then you can get consistency between teams.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, just as an example of that, a team that I was on a couple of years ago, we had a variety of process tweaks over the years but one thing that remained fairly constant for quite a while was that at the beginning of the Sprint, we would do planning poker, which is where we describe a story and everybody has these cards and we all hold up the cards which are labeled with points: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 and so on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If there is wild divergence, we talk about it and then everybody holds up their cards again until we come to some sort of consensus on how many points the thing is. We would argue about how many points a thing was. Was it five? Was it eight? Until eventually, we also had to track our time on this project. Eventually, somebody on the team who had a background in statistics took all of the data on how many points we assigned to stories and tried to correlate them to the amount of hours that we spent working on them and it turned out that we were pretty accurate for 1, 2 and 3 points and anything above three was just too complicated and there was no correlation or whatsoever between points in time. What we learned from that was if it&#8217;s too big, break it down. That’s one of the best examples I&#8217;ve personally of bringing data to the screaming match and it worked out really, really well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that unexpected skill of statistics that you probably didn&#8217;t hire for but you got lucky brought a huge amount of value to the team because it save you a lot of arguments.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah, that actually leads to another. Remember the bug’s story about I can save that for later.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, of ways to advance as a senior dev, I think at anyway that you can bring up the productivity of the people around you, whether that&#8217;s networking, automating, encouraging.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or like you said, mentoring and pairing. That goes back to something that I saw on Twitter a while ago. It was the best way to be a 10X engineer is to find five other people and make them 2X engineers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But also that statistics example brings up sometimes your most valuable developers are the ones that have skills unrelated to devops. You would think they would be unrelated to development but software is developed by people so there&#8217;s not much that&#8217;s not related. Any of those skills that are rare on your team is particularly valuable.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Oh, and one more. Understanding the company, the business that you&#8217;re in, on one side networking. But on another side, really understanding the business that you&#8217;re working in, whether it&#8217;s like finance or insurance or retail or health care, that is a huge, huge benefit because it can save a lot of really wrong implementations. Personally, I think that if I were hiring software developers as a company, I would look for developers with experience in my industry and not care what language they knew.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s sort of leads into this idea that has been for me in my head is that you talked a little bit about how good principal or &#8212; what did you call it &#8212; a technical fellow, knows a lot of different teams in the company and has some idea of where one team might benefit from something that another team is doing. Then that sort of lead into networking a little bit. It seems to me that there&#8217;s a fuzzy line here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Darin, you started out asking about how do you advance as a senior developer without going into management. You know, there&#8217;s a lot of these things that boiled down to people skills and bringing value by connecting different people together who might not necessarily have the same jargon or even the same job titles or background. But there&#8217;s a really sort of an almost a dangerous slippery slope there of like if I get too good at that, maybe they&#8217;re going to try and push me over into management, right? How do we avoid that, if we want to?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DARIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I really like Jessica&#8217;s focus because I&#8217;ve been thinking about what was being a senior developer mean for me. What should I be doing? You just help me shift the focus out toward the people around me and not so much about what I&#8217;m doing, which is really useful. Because the truth is I don&#8217;t feel that much different than I did when I was a junior developer. Still think I don&#8217;t know anything. I mean, I know I know stuff but I don&#8217;t know what I know and I don&#8217;t know how I know it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DARIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m working with junior developers now and sometimes they come to me with questions and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Well, you do this,&#8221; and they&#8217;re like,&#8221; How did you know that?&#8221; I was like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know. You know, it&#8217;s just something that came to me at some point in my career.&#8221; If I think about it, there was probably some horror story back that, &#8220;Oh, yeah. That was the time I screwed up that option.&#8221; This is how I do that before but it&#8217;s years of acquired stuff that you don&#8217;t think about too much. But just changing the focus to &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s pretty much the &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DARIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess so. But sometimes, there are other times in other areas where I&#8217;ve had to really work hard to learn something and I can articulate that process to somebody else. But coding has always come pretty intuitive to me. You know, I study and I learn but I just kind of absorb. Whereas other things I&#8217;ve learned other types of skills, I had to follow a series of steps that I can articulate those steps to somebody else but coding is different. But just shifting the focus to how can I bring the team up, that&#8217;s a great way to think about it, I think.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a question tangential to that. Jessica, from what you explain about architects and then even some of the questions you just asked Sam, what are the managers supposed to be doing because it sounds like you could run this whole system without managers. What are they doing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a really good question and it plays into a question on our Slack, from [inaudible] he asked about, &#8220;Is it too much to ask for your manager to be your career mentor?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Everything we&#8217;ve talked about the architect, this is pretty technical direction. This is like shepherding the software but that only has some impact on keeping the people happy. You can&#8217;t get anything done if your people leave or if they&#8217;re despondent or they don&#8217;t feel like they&#8217;re growing &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or if you&#8217;ve got 50 people packed into a room and that&#8217;s like right next to a construction area.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And we haven&#8217;t gotten into how do you decide what to work on because you can build software and write all day and get nothing for it if you&#8217;re not building the right software.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So your managers should be dictating the right direction to go in?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is that a manager or is that a product owner?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>See, that&#8217;s my question because I was thinking as you guys were talking, why should you be 10X engineer. This doesn&#8217;t seem to exist in other technical areas. There’s nothing like a 10X researcher or like a 10X doctor. Why should you be a 10X engineer? Is that something that we&#8217;re just making up because we can do that? Or is that a failure of something else in the system because our systems are changing so quickly?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You actually kind of hinted at my answer right there, which is that there is no such thing as a 10X engineer. Some of us just like to think that we&#8217;re better than others.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That 10X thing among musicians is actually a thing &#8212; a construct that maybe some people think is real but maybe it really isn&#8217;t a thing that if I&#8217;m just starting out and I can get into the studio of the best teacher, the strongest rock star unicorn, then somehow I will succeed because of their guidance. I think, there&#8217;s got to be some tempering of that. So many people who are been in the field like less than two or three years are hungering for that direction than help. But the other person is still just one person. Especially, if you&#8217;re stretched amongst 20 or 30 other people, how much effect can that really have? If you&#8217;re stretched among five, then they can do a lot to help.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DARIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a distinction between people who are really, really good at what they do and people who can teach what they do and they&#8217;re not always the same. This especially true for musicians because the work is so abstract. You can meet fantastic musicians who cannot explain what they do at all and there are some people who are fantastic teachers that are never famous as musicians but they really know how to get people from a starting point to an advance point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or if they know how to get them from somewhat advanced point to a more advanced point. In my personal experience was is that very few teachers were good at the beginning point that were also good at a college or high school level. It could be beginner teachers who were good at teaching beginners and there&#8217;s not a lot of exposure to that. But if you could teach someone who was a masters lever or higher, then of course, there&#8217;s a lot of exposure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s this assumption that since you can play this, you should be able to teach someone else. Then when they&#8217;re not with you, they will be able to learn as well and that&#8217;s a totally different thing than teaching them to play the song or teaching them to write this specific code to do this thing. It&#8217;s like helping them come to that mindset where they can figure out what to play or what to write and then come up with the plan that&#8217;s going to work in this case that maybe different from that case.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that was my first impression after hearing your question. I was like, &#8220;What if you find that magical musical guru and you study with them for two or three years and it turns out that what they&#8217;re good at is teaching you how to play like them. Have you really gained anything or do you still have to go through a couple years of mastering your craft until to the point where you develop your own voice? Does that make sense at all?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, absolutely. I found, as a musician that I learned from people with very different voices and that help me learn faster like Jump Studios. Like my teachers came from different universities that almost like your parents: go live with a foster parent for to learn something different, hangout with the babysitter, get in trouble for your parents later. I haven&#8217;t been coding long enough to do that yet, really but it&#8217;s easier, I think to see other people&#8217;s voices and know what&#8217;s different about them because I can&#8217;t just hop on different kinds of tutorial that come from different perspectives.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Does it work, though, in your opinion, Cheryl? Like there&#8217;s other really 10X people?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would say, they&#8217;re 10X teams and that&#8217;s the same with music like that rock star has, someone else is paying the bills at home and someone else running the music group and someone else handling the sound for them, like our fantastic MIDI. There’s somebody else is handling the sound, which makes them sound better and then somebody else is handling each part and as an aggregate, then they&#8217;re fantastic.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I see, so then why do we do this to ourselves? Why do we even have this as a concept? It seems like it&#8217;s just self-defeating.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The 10X thing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, the 10X thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Historical reasons. I think in development, there’s been a trope for a long time. There was some research &#8212; or I meant there&#8217;s was an article &#8212; that was published in one place and said that certain developers are 10 times more productive than other developers and that you should just hire these 10X developers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s a book out about fallacies that we believe in software development and it debunks this 10X myth, specifically it was published at one place and then cited in a thousand and then all those citations start citing each other so that it looks like there&#8217;s a lot of sources but he traced it to its roots and that was like this one study and that study was like not applicable or that good.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The 10X developer is a myth that has permeated our industry. Frankly, I observed when I was a young developer that I was 10 times more productive than some other people who were new developers. But as we advance and passed entry level, that is not the case anymore. I think we level up a lot. But maybe that&#8217;s one thing that makes it stick that you can look around and find a developer that is less than 10 times as productive as you at a lot of large organizations.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s a useful abstraction too. If I&#8217;m considering a sports team, I&#8217;m going to think of the quarterback. I&#8217;m not going to think of the whole team. I&#8217;m not going to think of all the coaches and that&#8217;s okay, as long as we don&#8217;t try and make ourselves be all 60 people. If you think of that team as that person is the symbol of the team, I think that kind of brings this up too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s a fallacy that results from looking at productivity, instead of generativity because sometimes that person who is not nearly as productive as I am. It could be if they knew what I knew, if they had my context, if they knew the people that I knew, if they had the background in the code or if they happen to have lucked out and their three computer science classes at college taught them C in Unix and that&#8217;s exactly what they wound up doing as a job.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How do we show that it&#8217;s if we&#8217;re working with non-technical managers? How do you show that your productivity in a generative way instead of saying, &#8220;I worked on these stories. I worked on this.&#8221; I mean, I&#8217;m going to be here the whole time. I&#8217;m not going to take a month off so that they can see what I would be like without me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What if this is the job of a manager? We&#8217;re talking about what are they even good for? What if part of their job is to recognize who is contributing in ways that are harder to see and giving them credit for that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that is a job of a good manager. When I&#8217;ve been a manager in other context, I really tried to spend my time helping to put the right people in the right places. We were doing a technical product but it wasn&#8217;t software but we had some people who were able to figure out the really tough stuff and they could only produce maybe two or three things each day, whereas versus another person who could go really fast at really easy stuff and produce 25.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But the return on having those really hard products created was high so it was worth taking the right person, who&#8217;s this was something they were good at and letting them move technically at a slower productivity. But to produce something that was high quality that we were going to really use and then have other people who were probably never going to be able do that job and let them just escape on the easy stuff and just trying things out because at the end of the of the month, they would balance out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It was better to have those people in the right position that they were all happy and then not have them feel like they all had to do the same thing because I think that&#8217;s where people start to feel really upset and they feel disillusioned because everybody is not the same. Their strengths are different and if you give them the same goal and then they&#8217;re going to measure themselves against other people, then they start to feel like, &#8220;Maybe I&#8217;m not as good. Maybe I can&#8217;t do this.&#8221; It just didn&#8217;t help. We had a morale issue when I started and by putting people in the right positions and then leaving them alone and then not let other people tell them like, &#8220;I&#8217;m better than you,&#8221; it actually helped a lot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think really, a good manager should be helping people be better at what they do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That kind of coordination and behind the scenes, sort of noticing who people are and what they can do and where the need is, that is hard and it&#8217;s time consuming.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, which is why I don&#8217;t understand. That’s why I asked my original question because it doesn&#8217;t seem like managers are doing that a lot in software teams. I&#8217;m not trying to hate on all the managers because I think they&#8217;re also getting tasked with the wrong things too. But I think that it would need to have, it&#8217;d be someone&#8217;s job so that actually help other people deal with their jobs that are better and not give them a whole bunch of business task and metrics crap because that doesn&#8217;t really help anything in the end. You’ll meet your goals if you&#8217;re actually taking care of your people. I think instead, they have more focus on these business goals, which doesn&#8217;t really include the people so there&#8217;s always a disconnect.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DARIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, that actually ties into my original question, which is that a lot of people who have the title of software manager are senior developers who didn&#8217;t want to be developers anymore and weren&#8217;t necessarily trained to be managers, which is a totally different skill set.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, or maybe they did want to be developers but the track ended at some point and the only way to make more money and to keep progressing, especially in an upper organization is to hop onto a different track. One of the reasons that I am absolutely horrified at the idea of ever personally becoming a manager is that I recognize that there is a completely different skill set. It&#8217;s one that I&#8217;m going to have to go back to being a newbie. I know that my brain is probably not predisposed to work well in those ways and the idea of being a newbie at something that I might not be inherently good at and having that responsibility for the welfare of other people, it&#8217;s just a horrifying concept to contemplate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think because you actually know that about yourself, Sam. You&#8217;d probably eventually make a good manager. I think &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe in five or ten years but &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A lot of the bad managers are the people who don&#8217;t even think like that. They’re just like, &#8220;I have a title. I get to run the world,&#8221; and they&#8217;re just so drunk with power and they&#8217;re railroading over people and they don&#8217;t even see it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is it different minds that, whether you got empathy or is it just opportunity?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, because you can learn a lot if you care about people. I think being a good manager is not something you can actually get trained to do. You can get trained on tools but it&#8217;s you either care about your staff as people or you don&#8217;t. If you care about them as people, then you&#8217;re going to take the time to notice like, &#8220;Look, this person&#8217;s been coming in. I noticed every day when we do our stand ups.&#8221; They&#8217;re not really giving much detail. They don&#8217;t seem to talk that much to their teammates because this is like their personality or is there something going on and they don&#8217;t feel comfortable saying in private group.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A good manager would try to like, &#8220;Let&#8217;s talk,&#8221; and not make it this your-job-is-on-the-line conversation but for somebody who doesn&#8217;t care, they&#8217;ll just&#8230; you know, whatever. That one little thing that could just be alleviated with a good discussion could grow into a huge team disruption. Then the manager will just [inaudible] the team.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to bring this back around to [inaudible] question, which is that he heard that it&#8217;s too much to ask for your manager to be your career mentor. We can get into what it means to be a career mentor versus a manager and whether this might or might not be compatible. What do you think?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think they should be your career mentors. My best managers were career mentors.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Where I am now is completely built on the idea that they are and that they can be. But I think you have to select for that when you&#8217;re looking for a job. I see myself continuing the next good things that I&#8217;ll be looking at doing that, that being an important thing like do I get to work at something fun? Does this have a future? Is there someone here who can mentor me in the tech and the things around the tech while I&#8217;m there?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think a lot of people crave that. I think the people who continually self-improve want that. I think it&#8217;s valuable to have career mentors that are outside your job too, though because you&#8217;re their managers, if you&#8217;re ever going to- it&#8217;s time to go.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Also, like you said about having multiple teachers that you find your voice when you have multiple sources of learning.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But I think there&#8217;s a difference between your personal growth as a software engineer and understanding the opportunities inside of the company that you would thrive in. I think that is something that your manager should be helping you do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I would say your manager only needs to be a mentor and even more than a mentor &#8212; a sponsor for you, if they want you to advance within the company. If they just assume you&#8217;ll leave, then no. The manager doesn&#8217;t need to be a career mentor.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Very good points.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Did Caroline just stepped in? Oh, hi!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hey, there. Remember me?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Who are you?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yay! Coraline. It&#8217;s been so long.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have missed the show so much. I&#8217;ve been travelling so much for the last few weeks and I just got back from South Africa where I can [inaudible] and it was amazing. Jet lag just caught up with me so I just slept for about 14 hours just now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right and let&#8217;s see if Coraline has any comment. The topic was should your manager be your career mentor.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, my God. My first impression of that is like what a terrible idea.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, we&#8217;ve now got representatives from all the parts of that spectrum.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess I have to express why I think that&#8217;s a terrible idea.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and maybe define what is a manager to you? What is a career mentor to you? What are those roles?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. A manager is tied to a job and a manager&#8217;s job itself is she has to represent the best interests of the company and your best interests and not to cause a conflict of interest. I think having someone that&#8217;s a career mentor who works for your company, they&#8217;re going to focus on things like retention when it may be best for your career to move on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There are so many possibilities for conflicts to arise that just strikes me so it&#8217;s a really bad idea. Given how mobile a lot of us in tech are and the fact that we take advantage of that mobility to get the salary bumps that companies don&#8217;t normally give us because no one likes to give raises anymore, it seems like you would be going through a new mentor every year and a half or two years. I see a mentoring relationship as a long term relationship. It has to outlast the job you&#8217;re at. I don&#8217;t really see a role for a manager in that process.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to distinguish components of mentoring because there&#8217;s mentoring like giving an advice and then there&#8217;s mentoring as sponsorship. As far as sponsoring you and your career advancement within the company, I think a manager absolutely has to do that or they&#8217;re failing. But you can also sponsor someone outside of the company as a mentor and like, &#8220;Have you seen this opportunity over here?&#8221; And, &#8220;I know this awesome developer. You should really interview her.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess for me, mentoring goes beyond like someone who&#8217;s giving you advice and it&#8217;s someone that you build a long term personal relationship with someone you have to trust deeply and mentoring is a two-way street. Both the mentor and the mentee have to get something out of it. That just seems to me to be in conflict with the responsibilities of a manager.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that is very different.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What would you suggest for those people who have made their first foray in tech that are turning their manager into their career mentor? Where should they go to find someone else to do that? Can they take some components from their manager and go find someone else to fulfill the other parts?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Probably so but I really think that, especially if you&#8217;re new in tech, you have to find two things. I think it is important to find a mentor to make sure that you&#8217;re on a path of learning and growth and that someone&#8217;s looking out for your future and sort of advising you on where to go from here. We have lots of great resources for getting people in the tech but not for keeping them there so finding someone like that, I think is really critical.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Another thing is finding a community of peers because someone who is further along in their field than you are, while they may have empathy for where you are, they may not have the memory of what it was like to be where you are so having that peer network to fall back on to say, &#8220;This is really hard, isn&#8217;t it?&#8221; then you hear people say, &#8220;Yes, it is and we can do this stuff.&#8221; I think it&#8217;s really important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Finding a mentor is difficult but if you&#8217;re new in tech, you should be networking and networking and networking. There are lots of people who are available and are willing to be mentors if you can find them. I think there&#8217;s been some websites and so on that have tried to create mentor-mentee networks that I don&#8217;t think any of them really gain traction. I really think it requires sort of in-person networking to find that right person and find that right match.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Coraline, I understand what you&#8217;re saying about the manager having the conflict of interest that you may have the retention. But one thing that I was thinking about as you were talking is that I have actually had managers who, I think encouraged me to leave the company, which was interesting. But I think maybe one of the difference is that, we were all in the same industry so they were kind of mentoring me from a position of I know what this industry is and I can see what you could be doing and you are have that opportunity here. That might be different in tech because I don&#8217;t know how many people are thinking about their tech career in terms of industry versus like acquisition of skills. Maybe, this is a unique issue in technology because I didn&#8217;t have the same kind of concern before.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it makes a lot of sense and I don&#8217;t want to say that a manager can&#8217;t be a mentor. I just don&#8217;t think they should be your first choice but obviously, my experience is skewed definitely toward tech.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I&#8217;ve personally had managers who were from various points along that spectrum as well. I have had managers like they had a very paternalistic style and just rubbed me the wrong way at every possible minute. I&#8217;ve had managers who are totally hands off. While that can be freeing, it&#8217;s also like, &#8220;Uhhh&#8230; Where do I go from here?&#8221; I had one manager who not only advised me to leave the company but left with me to go to the next job.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In my experience &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What? What? You mean, managers are people too?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know, right? That last one and I are still friends and we keep looking for other excuses to work together again. But in my experience, that is definitely in the minority. Most managers that I have worked for or near, they get distracted by the minutiae of the administration of the job. Or they don&#8217;t have a technical background and they don&#8217;t really understand what our particular needs are so they can&#8217;t really be effective mentors.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m coming from the mentor perspective. If there&#8217;s a tendency, I think and I&#8217;ve seen this in other places I work as well. Once other coworkers find out that this one person is good at mentoring and is willing to help, you get pigeonholed and a whole bunch of evil all come to you. There’s other people here as well who could do that would be willing to help but it&#8217;s like not knowing if they can do it. Maybe they feel that impostor syndrome, maybe I&#8217;m not ready for this and they don&#8217;t know how to make that jump.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And then you&#8217;ve got the problem that you referred to earlier of having 30 to 50 students.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t want to make it sound like I don&#8217;t like managers. I&#8217;ve had some really good managers. I don&#8217;t want to dismiss the role of the manager outright. I&#8217;ve a manager now which was really challenging me. Not technically because I&#8217;ve reached a certain point and I consider myself responsible for my own tactical learning at this point. She is challenging me to be diplomatic which is something that does not come easily be me, especially when I&#8217;m right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Which is always.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And being a sore winner is always so much worse than being a sore loser.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and she sort of pointed out to me that if I feel very strongly about something, all of my diplomacy just flies out the window and I&#8217;m very declarative and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;No, this is what we have to do because it&#8217;s the right thing to do,&#8221; and I shut down conversation and I alienate people. I keep doing this because I keep feeling really strongly about things and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;No, there&#8217;s no compromise. There&#8217;s only one way to move forward with this. I&#8217;m sorry. I don&#8217;t even say I&#8217;m sorry but &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m being challenged to work on that and that to me, makes her a great manager to me because she&#8217;s challenging me and I&#8217;m having to change in response to that. It’s really interesting and hard.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, but if you want, not only to be right but to spread that rightness. Diplomacy is important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I can&#8217;t be effective if I&#8217;m just right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can I make a book recommendation along those lines?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can I say no?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, of course.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, no. Please do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>All right. Well, fine. I&#8217;ll just keep it to myself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, please do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s a mystery.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things that I absolutely did not expect when I went back to college was to find a profound life altering text in 100-level writing class. But my textbook for one of those classes was called Everything’s an Argument. It&#8217;s by Andrea Lunsford, et al, I think. But this is basically a book on rhetoric but they don&#8217;t really talk about it in classical terms. It’s very modern, up to date. The cover of the edition that I had at the time was a Dilbert cartoon.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It basically talks about how all speech is persuasive speech and it talks about the thing that made me think of it, particularly for you Coraline is that it encourages you to go beyond the statements that people are making and try to figure out what the values are or what the goal that they&#8217;re trying to meet is that would make them make that statement. It can be a profound tool, essentially for starting your empathy. Also, if you can understand where somebody is coming from and what they value and what they want to get to, maybe you can figure out how to either change your message or possibly even change your mind because you realized that they value this other thing you hadn&#8217;t thought of.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s like requirements gathering?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I suppose.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You want me to do what? No, no, why. What problem are you trying to solve?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that is so helpful but maybe you are right but you&#8217;re right on the wrong context and somebody has seen from the world, from a different angle and there are going to be people who when confronted with that forceful statement just that and you lose their voices. Then there&#8217;s a whole level of involvement that we would lose.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s like being a rock in a stream &#8212; the water is just going to go around you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes and then you can be productive in your way but you&#8217;re not being generative.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay. This is the time in the show where we each decide something that we will take away or a call-to-action or something else that we say. Who want to go first?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I learned from Jessica&#8217;s perspective what&#8217;s the stuff for architect actually is supposed to be doing because I&#8217;ve asked this question several times and most of the times, the responses I get are they&#8217;re just software engineers who get paid more because they think they&#8217;re smarter than everybody else.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is not always wrong. There were so much interesting stuff in this call that I&#8217;m having trouble thinking of a specific thing so I&#8217;m going to cheat and say that my book recommendation to Coraline is a call-to-action to any listener with time on their hands who wants to get better at arguing and not in the shouting back and forth sense but in actually persuading people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m going to pledge to read that book.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really enjoyed this episode and my call-to-action is to propose that we do more surprise episodes like this.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hopefully our listeners enjoy it &#8212; the free form conversation.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, let us know on Twitter or you can email Panel@GreaterThanCode.com or even better, join our Community Slack. In fact, while we&#8217;re on the topic, if you become a patron of Greater Than Code at any amount, you get an invitation to our Greater Than Code Community Slack. Also, you get special patron-only content such as what we really talked about when Coraline popped in today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And you might even get invited to be on the show at random.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Darin, Cheryl, you have any takeaways?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>DARIN:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a couple, actually. The conversation around what it means to be senior and where to go next was really useful. I&#8217;m going to think less about me and more about the team around me. That&#8217;s going to be very useful. The other thing is that the mentorship conversation was very useful because I&#8217;ve never had a mentor. I think right now, I could really use one so I&#8217;m going to go and look in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>At least we have the whole internet to look in now, not just the local community.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks for bringing me on. I did miss Mission Taco for this but it was worth it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, man. That sounds good. We should go to lunch next week.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My commitments are isn&#8217;t my work, except she&#8217;s on leave for medical reasons. I too, will be mentor hunting. Maybe I should watch out for that conflict of interest.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s good to be back. I really miss you all and I&#8217;m looking forward to coming back to our regular schedule next episode.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome. Thank you for joining this episode of the Stone Cold Podcast. No, wait&#8230;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Did we change it again when I was gone? I like Greater Than Code. It’s so fitting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It comes back every time, Coraline. Don&#8217;t worry. It will be back next week.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What if it doesn&#8217;t?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Then you&#8217;ll just tell everybody that you&#8217;re right and then &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, I&#8217;m right. The podcast is called Greater Than Code. Stop it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you for listening to Greater Than Code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And that&#8217;s the way it is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Bye, everybody.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/york/obituary.aspx?n=melia-moore&amp;pid=183703504&amp;fhid=30387">This episode is in loving memory of Melia L. Moore</a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span> <a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href=" https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Panelists:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/darinwilson"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Darin Wilson</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span><a href="https://infinite.red/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Infinite Red</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and Keyboardist in </span><a href="https://twitter.com/4Minus1Trio"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@4Minus1Trio</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span></a><a href="https://twitter.com/CherylGSchaefer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cheryl Schaefer</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span><a href="https://www.launchcode.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Launch Code</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://www.launchcode.org/coder_girl"><span style="font-weight: 400;">CoderGirl</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:11 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What it means to be a Senior Engineer When You Don’t Want to Go Into Management</span></p>
<p><b>05:07</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Generativity: The difference between your team’s output with you on it and your team’s output without you.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://leanpub.com/37things"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gregor Hohpe: 37 Things One Architect Knows About IT Transformation</span></a></p>
<p><b>13:46</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – The Job of An Architect</span></p>
<p><b>22:09 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What are the managers doing? “It is too much to ask for your manager to be your career mentor?”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://a16z.com/2014/07/30/the-happy-demise-of-the-10x-engineer/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Gerstenzang: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/131908575X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=131908575X&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;linkId=d08b37c3206978c7992ae8c263c1f1dd"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Everything&#8217;s an Argument by Andrea A. Lunsford, et al.</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Takeaways:</b></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">From Jessica’s perspective, what a software architect actually is supposed to be doing.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/131908575X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=131908575X&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;linkId=d08b37c3206978c7992ae8c263c1f1dd"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Everything&#8217;s an Argument by Andrea A. Lunsford, et al.</span></a></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> I’m going to read ^ book.</span></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">More surprise episodes!</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/york/obituary.aspx?n=melia-moore&amp;pid=183703504&amp;fhid=30387">This episode is in loving memory of Melia L. Moore</a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span> <a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href=" https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Panelists:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/darinwilson"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Darin Wilson</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span><a href="https://infinite.red/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Infinite Red</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and Keyboardist in </span><a href="https://twitter.com/4Minus1Trio"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@4Minus1Trio</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span></a><a href="https://twitter.com/CherylGSchaefer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cheryl Schaefer</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span><a href="https://www.launchcode.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Launch Code</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://www.launchcode.org/coder_girl"><span style="font-weight: 400;">CoderGirl</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>01:11 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What it means to be a Senior Engineer When You Don’t Want to Go Into Management</span></p>
<p><b>05:07</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Generativity: The difference between your team’s output with you on it and your team’s output without you.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://leanpub.com/37things"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gregor Hohpe: 37 Things One Architect Knows About IT Transformation</span></a></p>
<p><b>13:46</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – The Job of An Architect</span></p>
<p><b>22:09 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– What are the managers doing? “It is too much to ask for your manager to be your career mentor?”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://a16z.com/2014/07/30/the-happy-demise-of-the-10x-engineer/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Gerstenzang: The Happy Demise of the 10X Engineer</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/131908575X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=131908575X&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;linkId=d08b37c3206978c7992ae8c263c1f1dd"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Everything&#8217;s an Argument by Andrea A. Lunsford, et al.</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Takeaways:</b></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">From Jessica’s perspective, what a software architect actually is supposed to be doing.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/131908575X/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=9325&amp;creativeASIN=131908575X&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=therubyrep-20&amp;linkId=d08b37c3206978c7992ae8c263c1f1dd"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Everything&#8217;s an Argument by Andrea A. Lunsford, et al.</span></a></p>
<p><b>Coraline:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> I’m going to read ^ book.</span></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">More surprise episodes!</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/code1200.jpg"></itunes:image>
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					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
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					<itunes:duration>51:58</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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					<title>Episode 018: Growing Your Team and Mentorship with Cheryl Schaefer</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-018-cheryl-schaefer/</link>
					<pubDate>Mon, 06 Feb 2017 15:51:48 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=366</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[An awesome conversation with Cheryl Schaefer, of LaunchCode, about growing your team and mentorship.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[An awesome conversation with Cheryl Schaefer, of LaunchCode, about growing your team and mentorship.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span> <a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jaybobo"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jay Bobo</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/CherylGSchaefer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cheryl Schaefer</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span><a href="https://launchcode.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Launch Code</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://www.launchcode.org/coder_girl"><span style="font-weight: 400;">CoderGirl</span></a></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Posted another patrons-only outtake from today&#8217;s precall with <a href="https://twitter.com/CherylGSchaefer">@CherylGSchaefer</a>! <a href="https://t.co/g4GZA9LWle">https://t.co/g4GZA9LWle</a></p>
<p>— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode/status/826895996042960896">February 1, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b></b><b>00:16</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Welcome to “Let’s Get this Ship on the Road!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:06 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Origin Story and Mentorship</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://confreaks.tv/videos/rubyconf2016-grow-your-team-in-90-days"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cheryl Gore Schaefer: Grow Your Team In 90 Days @ RubyConf 2016</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blog.launchcode.org/empowerment-through-mentorship/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Empowerment Through Mentorship</span></a></p>
<p><b>11:38</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Avoiding Burnout: “How can I show up better as a Mentee? How can you keep yourself from giving up and washing out? When you find your skills have atrophied, how do you find the resolve to try again?” ~ </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ariel_tweeting"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ariel Spear</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.spot2fish.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Spot2Fish</span></a></p>
<p><b>23:41</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – The Future of Tech Education</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/824831465745637376"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah Mei Computer Science Education Tweetstorm</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/819575574129676288"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah Mei People Who Apply for Opportunity Scholarships Tweetstorm</span></a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!</b></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Takeaways:</b></p>
<p><b>Cheryl: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">It’s valuable to have different viewpoints represented. Also, exposing people to fundamentals of tech is valuable as well.</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The RubyConf/RailsConf Opportunity Scholarships exist! Also, advice for mentees and mentors is the same.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Making a distinction between being a TA and being a mentor and giving the mentee ownership of their learning plan.</span></p>
<div id="Transcript" style="display: none;">
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello, good morning and welcome to Let’s Get this Ship on the Road! My name is Sam Livingston-Gray and here is Astrid Countee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hey! Hi, everyone. I am Astrid.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Just so you know, Jay. I&#8217;m Astrid. You&#8217;re Jay. Just want to make that clear. But we do have a guest today and I would like to introduce Cheryl Schaefer. Cheryl is a software engineer at LaunchCode, a nonprofit helping people get their first job in tech. She mentors in CoderGirl, a weekly meetup for women learning to code in St Louis. She has a master&#8217;s in music and taught music lessons before switching careers. She lives in Illinois near St Louis with her husband and three adorable cats. Hi, Cheryl. Welcome to the podcast.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, everyone. Thanks for inviting me to speak with you today. I&#8217;m super excited to be here. Let’s talk about learning and mentorship in tech.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, well first we&#8217;d like to get your origin story.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As you mentioned, I first studied music at university and I was performing and teaching lessons so I had lots of different day jobs while I was doing that. I&#8217;m still playing at an Irish session band sharing music. I was not writing code. I was playing video games. I wrote some macros for those and I did crafting and tinkering in other ways but I wasn&#8217;t writing code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> At some point, I decided I needed to switch to a career that was going to be a little more stable. So, I looked up some data on the Bureau of Labor&#8217;s website and surveyed a bunch of day one of university classes at the local school. Then writing programming and computer science seemed like a really good fit for me. I took a couple of classes there. I just jumped in feet first and said, &#8220;Let&#8217;s see what I can do with this.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I started attending CoderGirl, which had just started and that was the summer of 2014 and some of the local meetups, still at Ruby, [inaudible] where I met Jessica Kerr. Eventually about two years ago, Mike Menne took me on at LaunchCode as an apprentice. Just to come full meta in April, I took on an apprentice and since then hired full time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The circle of life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just would like to say, I really find it interesting that you went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics to try to figure out what you should do. I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve ever heard anybody say that before.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had no clue what I planned to do. When I first went to university when I was 17, I was going to double major in CS and music and one class have vested me of that plan and I dropped the whole thing. But I didn&#8217;t think of it when I thought, &#8220;I should do something else. I should do something that provides health insurance,&#8221; and that was my main criteria.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And that is totally okay.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I used to work for the Census Bureau so I knew the Bureau of Labor had taken the census statistics and sort of drilled down into it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is where your odd jobs came in handy?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Every step of the way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s really interesting, though that you originally wanted to do the double major because I&#8217;ve heard a lot of people opined that musicians tend to make good software developers. I think there&#8217;s also a studied correlation between music ability or music study and math, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I was good at math too at that time. Not so much science but math. There’s a lot of skills that transfer over like communication skills, iterative process as music is very much the iterative process of coding. I did the exact same thing when it came time to help other people in tech.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> After I&#8217;d finished the CS50 Harvard class online, there are a lot of other ladies that were like struggling through further back and I just kind of hang around at CoderGirl and I was volunteering to help them also finish the class. What I really found is that a lot of the techniques I was using to teach my, primarily high school girls with music were exactly the same when I was teaching a 30-year old how to write a website or how do pointers work. The learning is the same so that really helped a lot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cheryl, you had mentioned that you started taking some courses online when you decided that you were going to switch over to computer science for a career. What was it about those courses that kept you going since that first class in college kind of turned you off?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>College class was the only experience I had at that point with an auditorium class. It was the introductory class but there were an excess of 100 people there and there were just a lot of things about it that made me uncomfortable. I was able to complete the material just fine but also the university curriculum made it difficult to do both at the same time. I had scholarships to do music and it was engaging and it was fun so I focused on that first.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As far as completing the online classes, there&#8217;s a lot of things that I think set up for success. I scheduled that in every week. I con a friend into helping me and also taking it for a while. I talked a lot about the ways I used for myself and ways that you can use for yourself or someone you want to train. In that talk that I gave at RubyConf in Cincinnati in November, a lot of those techniques have been studied in education and we can really just like lean on that research and not repeat ourselves, if you see what I did there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I also kind of wrote it out in a blog post that I put on Blog.LaunchCode.com about how you can help empower someone with mentorship like there&#8217;s a lot of topics, just a survey to come and get you started. But I think the main thing for me is finding what it is for a one-on-one thing, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to try this one thing. Let&#8217;s experiment and try this one thing did that help this one person,&#8221; and if it did it, just explain and do everything that way. It’s just super fulfilling to see people spin up on something new. You can really change people&#8217;s lives.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Totally it changes people&#8217;s lives.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would definitely agree with that. I think sometimes with people don&#8217;t understand about mentoring is part of you&#8217;re giving yourself and it could be fulfilling, obviously but it&#8217;s also a lot of work. Sounds like you&#8217;re doing a lot of work in this area. You talk a lot about that side of it and also what&#8217;s needed in order to be a good mentor for someone out there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If you&#8217;re trying to be a good mentor, the main thing, the most important thing is just to be present. Schedule the time in so it becomes a priority. Don&#8217;t try and multitask and do it at the same time with something else. Just give that one person a devoted hour and you and I are going to work on this now and I&#8217;ve got to back.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Ultimately, they&#8217;re responsible for their own learning. Here are the guys. It&#8217;s really their journey but if you can give them that level of support, you’re really going to be responsible, ultimately for everything that they&#8217;re responsible for too. Help them with motivation and make sure they&#8217;re accountable and what they&#8217;re doing is actually achieving some of the goals they&#8217;re trying to reach.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Limit it to the most important things and burned out is a big issue too. It can have on either on the learner or the mentor. If you don&#8217;t say no when you need to, you&#8217;re probably not going to be as successful and neither is going to enjoy it. Like when you&#8217;re on a plane and they say, &#8220;Put the oxygen mask on yourself before you put it on your child,&#8221; that&#8217;s really important to think about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Another thing to think about too is really only do one at a time. I want to do everything. There&#8217;s so many interesting topics out there but maybe, this quarter let&#8217;s focus on Node and next quarter we can learn Spanish. If you&#8217;re try and do them both, it&#8217;s not likely to be successful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Who gets to choose that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Of course, you do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As the mentor?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, you as the learner. If you are the mentor, no [Laughs]. You, however can choose to extract yourself as a mentor, if it doesn&#8217;t align with your roles.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m traditionally limited in doing mentoring, even when I took on a group of about six or seven. I said, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to be your mentor and I&#8217;m going to help out.&#8221; We&#8217;re going to meet like three days a week and then I recognized that that was way too much for me because we had one-hour session that I was doing on this code review on top of it so over the years, I learned to connect people together and really focus on the code review.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m asking for a feedback but what do you think about that, as far as people wanting to mentor but they feel like, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to take on this huge burden.&#8221; Do you think it makes sense for people to say, &#8220;I&#8217;m just going to focus on something small,&#8221; like send me your code or push up a pull request and I&#8217;ll take a look at it for some open source project. What are your thoughts about kind of limiting your mentorship so you can make it a little bit more long-lasting?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s a wonderful idea, especially when there&#8217;s so many different aspects, it&#8217;s perfectly viable to say, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to help you on this narrow context,&#8221; and I think that&#8217;s really smart to do. That apprentice that I take on at work, you know what? I can&#8217;t apprentice on dev ops yet. I&#8217;m doing some of it but I just started two years ago.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When we come to a big architectural decision, now’s the time to kick that up to somebody else and let&#8217;s discuss it as a group or let&#8217;s bring one of the more senior people on this issue. It doesn&#8217;t mean you can&#8217;t help them. It just means you can&#8217;t do everything and who can really do everything, anyway?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I prefer on-going mentorship. If I&#8217;m going to help somebody, I want that accountability for myself and for them that we have a very specific goal and we&#8217;re going to reach that goal and our responsibility when we have achieved that goal is not released. We’re always buddies. I&#8217;m still your friend but we&#8217;ve made the goal that we&#8217;ve tried. The other models of mentorship like single serving occasional flyby. There’s really no way for you to know if that was successful. It’s great to have a conversation at a meetup and I suggest if you&#8217;re learning you do that. Go to meetups and ask question. But as a mentor, I don&#8217;t feel like that is as successful for me because I don&#8217;t get the positive feedback that keeps me going to mentoring.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m just speaking from my experience here but I think sometimes there needs to be a distinction between being a teacher&#8217;s assistant and then being a mentor because there&#8217;s so many little nuance parts of how you write your code that could be adjusted. It&#8217;s almost like some people are saying they want to mentor but what they really want is almost like a teacher&#8217;s assistant, which is too much for a lot of people. They don&#8217;t have the type of time and energy to be able to do that because they have other stuff going on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But I know that in my experience, some of the people who have been my best mentors have been people that I just feel comfortable asking them a question. It’s not always a specific technical question. It&#8217;s just, &#8220;I wonder should I apply to this job. Would do you think?&#8221; That type of stuff. Or, &#8220;Am I ready to try this new thing. Am I putting too much or should I try to do something beyond my scope? Am I ready for that?&#8221; I think that&#8217;s more like what a good mentor like good mentors I&#8217;ve had for years. There are people who I could call and ask a question like that. More and so than people who I could say, &#8220;I&#8217;m having problems with this method. I need you to help me with my code.&#8221; That I think is a little bit different.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, absolutely, Astrid. Thank you for bringing that up. I don&#8217;t think in the big picture outline like that. I&#8217;m thinking of what you&#8217;re trying to reach and where you&#8217;re trying to go and generally, like I review pull requests of course. But if you&#8217;re thinking of ways to pull that three lines down to one line, as long as there&#8217;s no bug, I&#8217;m probably less interested in that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Just individually from my personality, where somebody else might find that super engaging so I think learners and mentors accept that you need a whole community of people to learn from. The more the merrier. If you can get a different perspective from different people like when you&#8217;re a kid at home, mom said no, I&#8217;m going to go and ask dad. Go find out what the other person is most interested in and learn from most appropriate for each topic. I think people working in tech can and should as very early on, learn the small details themselves. Figure out and help them learn to read the API, help them learn how to read the man-pages and then set them free to figure that out on their own.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was we were talking about in the pre-call that turns out to be an absolutely essential skill for everybody, even very experienced developers, right? It’s good to teach that early on, I think.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We have a listener question, listener Ariel Spear asks, &#8220;How can I show up better as a mentee.&#8221; She goes on to say, &#8220;How can you keep yourself from giving up and washing out and when you find your skills have atrophied, how do you find the resolve to try again?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think whether you&#8217;re the learner or the mentor, a lot of the same advice applies &#8212; limit what you do to what&#8217;s most important so you are only working on one thing at a time. Like a CoderGirl, I see a lot of folks who come in and they want to be web developers so they&#8217;re taking a front end course and the back end course at the same time. I think that is madness.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Pick one thing at a time and even if the other thing is super important and engaging, just put it on the back burner, put it in a queue and you&#8217;ll do it next. When you&#8217;re coming back to something you&#8217;ve left for a long time, if you think it&#8217;s important, bring friends, get help, find a meetup, an online community and all of the resources that are available that you can possibly use. Find all of those things and see which help you the most and focus on that one.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you fail before you saw where you did do well and what possibly you can see what made you not do well. You know, if you got sick, that&#8217;s I think it happens and you just have to accept it and move on. This time you have a better shot. But if it&#8217;s, &#8220;Oh, well. I was busy staying up late playing video games,&#8221; maybe if you also quit the raid team, you will be a better this time around.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Unpossible.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Unpossible, that&#8217;s right. Astrid, you have some knowledge and wisdom to share on this stuff with your Rails Girls.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think sometimes it&#8217;s too high of an expectation. I think it&#8217;s okay to just, like you said learn one thing. I think it&#8217;s okay to spend time really getting familiar with your text editor. I think that&#8217;s fine. I think that&#8217;s a goal. I think it&#8217;s fine to feel like you know what you&#8217;re doing when it comes to one language in just certain context.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that sometimes, there&#8217;s this idea that you have to be able to do a whole lot of things before you can call yourself a name and say, &#8220;I&#8217;m a Ruby developer. I&#8217;m a web developer,&#8221; and I think it gets in the way because there&#8217;s so many opinions about what it takes to be that. When you&#8217;re really first starting out or even if you&#8217;ve been doing it for a while, it&#8217;s hard to discern what it means to be something.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think it makes people kind of freaked out. I think that&#8217;s where the burnout comes in because you&#8217;re trying to do so many things because you&#8217;re trying to reach this goal and this goal is kind of a goal that I think, at least for my experience, the more that I have been learning how to do things, the more I realized that there is no real one definition of what it means to be a senior developer. There’s no one definition of what it means to be a good front end dev. But you don&#8217;t know that in the beginning.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> You&#8217;re trying to learn all the JavaScript frameworks, which will make you want to kill yourself, anyway and you&#8217;re trying to be great with CSS and do all these animations and you realized you have to learn back end and you&#8217;re doing all these things. Instead, you should try to just say, &#8220;Can I do this one thing really well? I feel confident in this one thing,&#8221; and then allow that to be a goal. Then be able to reach for the next thing because I think sometimes like from the mentee perspective, it can be hard to tell the mentor what you want if you&#8217;re trying to do all those things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Instead of saying, &#8220;I want this goal. I&#8217;m trying to reach this place with Ruby and I&#8217;m having a hard time with these types of functions. Let me see if there&#8217;s something I&#8217;m missing, maybe those resources I don&#8217;t know about,&#8221; that type of thing. Than say, &#8220;I want to be a Ruby developer. Help me,&#8221; which is so much harder.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I absolutely agree, Astrid. I think assessment is so important when you&#8217;re trying to limit the scope of what you learn at that point. Can you look at what you did and see what is better than what you wrote three months ago? Can you recognize some of those invisible skills? Like, &#8220;I use grep excellently today and every time gold star, right on the board. Oh, yeah.&#8221; If you can use those kinds of things to recognize what you&#8217;ve done and just be compassionate with your past self, that really helps the burn out because then you can recognize what you have accomplished.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you say something vague like, &#8220;I want to be awesome Ruby developer,&#8221; well, you got that true. But you can never accomplish that because the goal keeps moving. When you learned more, you&#8217;re more awesome as a Ruby developer but now you know more unknowns from before, some of your unknown unknowns are now known and you recognized, &#8220;Now, I know some things I don&#8217;t know still,&#8221; and you&#8217;re never as awesome as some invisible possible goal. But actually the amount you could know is theoretically finite but practically infinite.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One thing that I have actually started doing that help me is to rebuild the same thing again because then you can actually see what you&#8217;ve learned. you may have gone off and tried to this new thing or trying to learn some new skill but if I try to rebuild a site that maybe I built six months ago, I can actually tell that I&#8217;ve picked up new skills, that I understand something much better than I did before. I think that feels like going backwards to people but it might actually help them better understand what they need.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s really fantastic. I recently did something similar to that where I just wrote a little toy game in Ruby a while ago. A couple coworkers of mine and I wrote a similar little game in Elm, just to learn Elm. It was just a lot of fun but it was learning a new topic and it was, &#8220;Now, I see all these things.&#8221; I didn&#8217;t really look at my Ruby code before we started writing the Elm code. Now, I&#8217;m looking back at that and say, &#8220;Oh, I could have done this, this or that.&#8221; But we had it work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that&#8217;s another point to be made that you were able to contribute from the beginning. As a mentor, you should try and ensure, especially that&#8217;s on the job training. Your trainee is doing stuff that matters from the beginning. They have a voice in how it&#8217;s done and they have a responsibility to meet the goal too. Then they can take some personal ownership for that. It&#8217;ll make it easier for you to let them form their own style. They don&#8217;t have to copy your style but it also just make you feel so much about it, that you can look back and be like, &#8220;I made a commit on the first day that went live.&#8221; Even if it&#8217;s just a text change on a splash page. But I did code it and it went live.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think both of what you were saying is so on point that I&#8217;ve seen a lot of people utilize that same model for learning. I kind of want to plug a site right now of a guy who used this quite a bit. His site called Spot2Fish. When he first wrote the site, he first put it together in Rails and I believe, when he got out of dev bootcamp. He turned around and he did it in Express, then he went back and build an iOS version and he continues to add stuff to it and add features to it but it&#8217;s been a big part.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I saw him do a talk here in Central Ohio about it and it&#8217;s just great. He talks about how it&#8217;s really helped him learn stuff. He has a mental model for the way things should look but he sees that evolving and changing as he goes and picks up, do languages and new libraries to work with and so on and so forth. I want to point that out and I highly recommend that to our listeners.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can you say the name again?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Spot2Fish. It&#8217;s a really great app that just gives you spots to fish at.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the reasons why I started doing it is because of what you had mentioned, Cheryl just getting burned out of like you&#8217;re learning and you&#8217;re trying to learn some new things and feeling like you&#8217;re not knowing what&#8217;s going on and if you&#8217;re actually improving. I&#8217;ve got an idea to do this just from, I watched I think it was The Practice or something with the New York City Ballet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> These are people who&#8217;ve been dancing, probably most of them since they were like eight or nine years old and they are doing it at the top of their craft. Every day, they come in and they do the same practices that you would do like the first day of ballet class. It made me remember something that I already knew, which is that if you&#8217;re really good at something, you have to practice all the time which is talked about. But when you&#8217;re doing something like that, your practice is the same practice, like you&#8217;re doing the same stuff that you would have done regardless of your skill level. But it&#8217;s important that you keep those muscles really warm and you can do more if you can do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It may be think of treating code like that like, &#8220;I know how to make a pretty simple Rails app but can I make it faster? Can I make it better? Can I keep tweaking it? Because if I can do that, then maybe I actually am learning. Then since it is the same app, then I can actually see my progress,&#8221; whereas like once you do something, then you go to the next level, it&#8217;s harder to tell how good you&#8217;re getting because you&#8217;re doing new stuff. It’s always going to be more challenging. It kind of distorts your thinking about how good you really are because you always feel like a novice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and music we talk about that in terms of learning portable skills, like you study intensely one style at a time and maybe three or four songs at once. But each song is in one style. It&#8217;s kind of like learning how to learn, you focus on the fundamentals and the things that you&#8217;ve learned in this one song, in this one style apply to other songs in that style. Also focusing on fundamentals scales and I&#8217;m sure there&#8217;s similar things for dance, where you are learning how things work under the hood and why you&#8217;re doing things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The next time you learn something else or the next project you work on, you can take that skill and just reapply it. That&#8217;s the kind of the value of the experience that you bring on when you&#8217;ve studied something else first and you&#8217;re just bringing it with you like if you enter another career. There&#8217;s also people want a career swap or reenter the workforce after parenting or military service or something. But those kinds of life skills you have from your previous career really show up in how you learn things on the technical side as well, just breaking things down into small steps and reapplying those steps in other cases.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That iterative approach of going back to the same app over time or as you were just saying, Cheryl learning one new style at a time ties into something that I&#8217;ve seen a lot in people who are learning their first programming language, which of course the problem is not that they&#8217;re learning their first programming language. They&#8217;re also learning the entire structure of programming. They’re learning how to think in those terms. They&#8217;re learning how to read parser errors and figure out what the heck is going on and where they missed their semicolons and they&#8217;re learning all kinds of other invisible skills like how to function on the command line and at least get the basic use out of your editor.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think a lot of people don&#8217;t realize all of the stuff that you have to learn your first time through. I see a lot of first timers run into that wall pretty hard so I really like that idea of just picking one thing, doing nothing and coming back. Every time you come back, you&#8217;re actually going through that same process again unless you go from Ruby to Python, where the languages are very, very similar. They do a lot of the same things. You’re going to be learning a new domain and you&#8217;re going to be learning to think about all the things in that domain. It’s not just a new syntax. I really like this approach of break it down, just do one thing at a time and eventually, if you do enough things then you get to be pretty good at it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s a great way to think about it. I think whether it&#8217;s your first language or a framework or a special editor or whatever you&#8217;re learning, that kind of plug-and-play Lego approach really help. If you are coming up from a place of being personally humble but just be fearless and pursuit of the knowledge: jumping, meet people, talk about your code, and just try something new.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve been dying to get into this topic since before we started the show, actually. What do you think, Cheryl about the future of tech education?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When we&#8217;re talking about what the future of tech education is, then we have to address the motivation for it. It’s all over the news all the time that there is a huge shortage in tech workers. Tech workers are not diverse. It&#8217;s very limited on who actually makes it all the way through the pipeline and ends up in these roles. But there&#8217;s a lot of reasons for it to be a great fill to go into, besides work conditions are generally safe and pleasant, the compensation is good and it&#8217;s exciting to build things people use. But you really have an opportunity to shape the future of what&#8217;s happening. I find that so exciting but it&#8217;s also totally okay to just focus on the fact that you can get health insurance when you feel like that lack of motivation is coming through.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that the tech education groups are going to be looking at that when they&#8217;re developing what they do so like just a survey what the current state is. We have universities pulling out people who really know their stuff and don&#8217;t have a lot of experience. Then you have bootcamps, which seemed like a relative new thing. I think it started in 2012. It was the first one. That was before I was in tech.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. The first one I was aware of was Hungry Academy and that started it in 2012. I think they started advertising it in 2011.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think Dev Bootcamp was in 2012 as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Community colleges are kind of moving towards that model as well in a lot of cases. I think it could be a good fit. I think it just depends on what individual you&#8217;re working with. I think you need to just be very self-aware and experiments. Be fearless, try something and measure your success. Different people are going to have access to these different levels of education. Unfortunately, that&#8217;s a fact of life. That works for your life situation if you have kids, if you have elder care that you&#8217;re responsible for. So many things in your life can affect what is possible for you to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think university study is a great option if you can afford college and if you know you&#8217;re interested. I think bootcamps are really great too, especially you did get a college degree but didn&#8217;t study CS or you have a CS degree but you couldn&#8217;t afford to take that internship, you need some experience practically in the field, I think is a really great option. But generally are full time and a lot of them cost under $15,000. That can create a lot of barrier for some people too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Places like LaunchCode and some community colleges are offering night classes in coding topics too now. The LaunchCode class, the LC101 class, I&#8217;m pretty involved with is more of a learn-at-night model. Two nights a week, you can still work your day job and support yourself and your family so it&#8217;s kind of in between a college class and a bootcamp. Then you get on the jobs immersive experience but you can still keep up with your life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> LaunchCode also offers a bootcamp periodically too. We’ve done job placements for a lot of people who actually really did just teach themselves how to code in the basement. Not a whole lot, like success rates on that are pretty low. It takes a lot of drive. It’s totally possible. It works best if you also paired up with another source of support. My thoughts on that, in the future I think all of those models are still going to exists and they&#8217;re going to continue to operate in tech training.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There are so many jobs in field that I don&#8217;t think that anyone is really going to get pushed out of the market. They’re just going to serve slightly different markets. I think it&#8217;s just awesome to jump into any of these things. But you just have to be aware of yourself and think which of these is going to work best for me, what city do I want to work in and is the market for this university or bootcamp is teaching me available? How good is the market in that city that I want to live in? Then once you have some of those decisions settled on, I think just jump in and try it. Who knows where you go once you get there?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When you first brought this up, I thought immediately of a tweet stormed by Sarah Mei. She has a lot of excellent tweets storms but this one was probably about five, six days ago. She starts out with the wonderful lead, &#8220;I&#8217;ve been into the wine so of course it&#8217;s time to talk about computer science education,&#8221; which if you know Sarah at all, you&#8217;re in for a fun Twitter rant.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But she talks about the comparison contrasts the traditional CS university curriculum with the people that she sees coming out of Code School. One of the things that she really clarified for me that I had in the back of my head but hadn&#8217;t really thought about but she really crystallized was this idea that one of the things that the different kinds of education emphasized or don&#8217;t is communication skills. She talks about people in poli-sci majors because of the way that the curriculum was structured and the way that the classes worked, they got a lot of practice in talking and debating and communicating with each other, whereas the CS programs tend to emphasize a lot more of solo work: you go home, you do your homework, and you turn it in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> She talks about how she&#8217;s seen Code Schoolers come out with a lot better communication skills and she finds that tends to dominate after she&#8217;s had like three, five years or so, where those people are doing demonstrably better in the field than the people who came out of a solo-oriented university career. Does that match with what you&#8217;ve seen?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, I love Sarah Mei&#8217;s tweet storms too. I actually had an opportunity when I spoke at RubyConf to meet her. We had a long conversation about this after dinner and there was wine involved.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m data driven most of the time. LaunchCode has not been around long enough to have really good stats on our success. We&#8217;re experiencing with different class format and I&#8217;m so excited to see what happens to these people three years down the road. But I don&#8217;t have a really good data about that yet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Anecdotally, I can say for me that was 100% true and I felt like I face a lot of pressure to jump into management roles and project management. I&#8217;ve been involved in that before and I already know how to train people. But I felt that would be a mistake for me to make career-wise before I can back that up with a proper tech skills.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think seeing my brother&#8217;s career unfold &#8212; he has a master’s in CS and has followed a more traditional path &#8212; I saw his career take off fast at first and then he had to learn those communication skills. He’s been working and doing well the whole time but to become senior, to have that ability to communicate and lead, he had built those skills on the job, whereas I did the reverse. I built communication skills and management skills and professionalism as just as you do working. Then kind of taught myself online and at work, tech skills so the curve is kind of the opposite direction but you end up in the same place.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As a person who went through a bootcamp, one of the things that I realized that I was a little bit sad about is that there wasn&#8217;t a lot of digital literacy period that I learned before learning how to be a software engineer. I do not think that you should have to try to be an engineer just to have a space to learn about how the internet works because I think [inaudible] by itself is actually a really great skill.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I also find it really ironic that part of the reason why there&#8217;s this big need for a lot of software engineers is because every industry uses software and technology and they&#8217;re doing a lot of work, they do online now and using the cloud, etcetera, etcetera. But you don&#8217;t get that training, not even a piece of that training, unless you&#8217;re actually specifically focused on a technology based major and I think that&#8217;s a problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the things that I feel like should change is that the way that you&#8217;re learning whatever discipline you&#8217;re learning should incorporate how this relates back to any type of digital online technology, even in the smallest sense because just understanding simple things like your browser is sending a call to a server and if there&#8217;s a problem that&#8217;s what those 404 is about. I think that would actually help a lot of people do their jobs better. Like for me, I was a social scientist and one of the first things that I realized is I don&#8217;t understand why we were learning SPSS, which is the statistical package program that you learn on how to use when you&#8217;re running statistics in your social science experiments and how you evaluate those stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I can do that in [inaudible]. I can use Python for that. Why did we learn those things as well? Because I don&#8217;t think that everybody needs to be a software engineer but I do think that if we&#8217;re going to live in this world, where so much of what we do is going to have software behind it, you should know something about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I totally agree, Astrid and I feel like we could have a whole another hour-long conversation and talk about non-coding technical jobs and how can we prepare people better for those. I think that speaks to partially like why so many people use QA or they use technical writing. I learned a lot of tech stuff just trying to fix the computers at a previous job. We had this old Windows system so the only computers that could run it were refurbs like you can buy a new computer and run this old software.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I just learned a lot because I needed it and you see people in that situation where they don&#8217;t need it until they&#8217;re adjacent to it and there&#8217;s no other opportunity to get to it. I don&#8217;t know what I don&#8217;t know and I don&#8217;t know that I don&#8217;t know that my Facebook just shows up when I click the button and why shouldn&#8217;t everyone have that literacy to know that you got an option.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So many people ask me all the time like, &#8220;Do you think I can do this?&#8221; I never know how to answer that question. It&#8217;s a long question to answer because my first response is, &#8220;Yeah, sure,&#8221; I want to be encouraging. Realistically, other people don&#8217;t want to and that&#8217;s totally okay. You may love it and you may not and you&#8217;re not going to know until you try it. It seems like the only way to try it is go through many of these things that&#8217;s aimed at engineering.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the websites now that do intro stuff: Code School, Code Academy, there&#8217;s a bunch of those that you can go on and just tinker a little bit and you&#8217;re not committing until months and months and change of your life. You&#8217;re just knowing the basics vocabulary.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I agree. I think even with those assets that are out there, unfortunately it still seems that people feel like, &#8220;That&#8217;s not for me if I don&#8217;t want to work in technology,&#8221; and I kind of feel like that&#8217;s just a failure of our whole system to just make technology a part of what you learn, like I don&#8217;t see why you wouldn&#8217;t.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We learned English grammar even though nobody speaks correct English but we learn it because you&#8217;re supposed to understand how you should be speaking or why can&#8217;t we learn how the internet works or what really happens when you press the button. Why can&#8217;t that just be a part of what people learn so they don&#8217;t have to actually seek it out themselves?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As somebody who&#8217;s gone through the traditional computer science route, it seems to me that a lot of the people with a lot of expert knowledge in that field tend to focus on people who are going to be just like them. I certainly have inadvertently picked up this bias myself and I didn&#8217;t even realize it until Sarah made another tweet storm where she was talking about people who apply to the Opportunity Scholarship Program at RubyConf and RailsConf. That’s something where people who are members of underrepresented groups can attend RubyConf and RailsConf for free and they get paired with a mentor who is somebody who is more familiar with the community and can introduce them around.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But anyway, she was talking about the selection process for this and how she hadn&#8217;t really thought about, whether she was selecting specifically for people who wanted to go into programming, as supposed to people who were curious about tech or might be artists that could benefit from knowing just a little bit about tech. I think we in the field have this all-or-nothing bias like we&#8217;re not going to waste our time teaching unless you&#8217;re going to go all the way. I think that probably plays into it somewhere.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think there is also an aspect of a speed of change. You’re talking about traditional schooling including that. It&#8217;s like you come on board, the amount of stuff they have to cram into the kids at each grade is just overwhelming and the tech stuff is so new, relatively it&#8217;s just hasn&#8217;t been included yet. The places where it has been included tend to just have a higher budget or somebody pushing that as a need.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Now, we need to have this for our kids. Especially in the United States, our schools aren&#8217;t universal anyway. It’s one of those priorities that just falls on the floor and like teacher education, it doesn&#8217;t teach them how to do that. They don&#8217;t know that topic either so how are they going to teach a thing if they need to teach themselves first or have someone help them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a lot of barriers in there and I do understand that when you start talking about the education system like that, that&#8217;s a conference by itself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or a Senate hearing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, sort of Senate hearing. But I guess it&#8217;s just something that the more that I learn, the more I become more passionate about because I think there needs to be an avenue for an alternate route. Everybody isn&#8217;t and everybody shouldn&#8217;t be a software engineer and that may not be their goal. They shouldn&#8217;t also be terrified of even looking at code, though and I feel like that&#8217;s what&#8217;s happened is that you&#8217;re either in or you&#8217;re not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For people to be freaked out by HTML, which is something that can be assessable, if it&#8217;s made assessable, I don&#8217;t think that should be the case. Also having had some experience working in a position where you are at odds with the software engineers or you&#8217;re on the other side of that as a software engineer, you&#8217;re at odds with the business side of the company, I think a half that conversation is because you aren&#8217;t speaking the same language.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It doesn&#8217;t mean that you have to learn everything but I think if you even knew what they were talking about in some capacity, it could help you better advocate for what you want because people are using word like, &#8220;The thing over here and the button that does this &#8211;&#8221; which just frustrates because software engineers are not necessarily trained to be your translator.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But then on the flip side of it, oftentimes when you&#8217;re that other person, you&#8217;re trying to figure out how to say what you really want but you don&#8217;t know and it&#8217;s not so much that you have to go learn a whole programming language but if you just have a little bit more understanding how this thing actually operates in general, it can help.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. I totally agree. We feel that shortage a lot at work at LaunchCode. You know, just always looking for a qualified instructors to help and [inaudible] even to help with the classes. Some people choose to just volunteer once a month or something like a lower commitment. It’s a lot to ask for a person still but if you can and it helps you learn and you help other people learn but without them, you can only do so much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s sort of a back door, though right? You&#8217;ve got places like Code School and Code Academy and Khan Academy and stuff, that if you knew to go to those sites, you could go and learn a lot of things without anyone holding your hand. You can just go check it out and then if you didn&#8217;t do well, no one could see you embarrass yourself. Although, it becomes unclear where to go if you have questions. There’s so many of them. If you&#8217;re at the very beginning, there&#8217;s just thousands and thousands and probably millions of links that you can find. We’ve put together a little learning tool on the LaunchCode.org site to help you pick which ones might be relevant for what you&#8217;re trying to do. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s really awesome but if you&#8217;re not trying to do a specific job, you don&#8217;t have any criteria upon which to select. Maybe you just try whatever one you&#8217;re on and see what you learn.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And iterate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Iterate! Now you know something. Something plus one will be better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;ve come to almost the very end of our show, which is when we like to do reflections, which are things that stood out to us, things that we&#8217;re going to take away from this conversation. They can be things that we want to challenge our listeners to do. Cheryl, it sounds like you&#8217;ve got some of those. Go for it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I actually had two takeaways from today&#8217;s conversation. The first is that I felt it&#8217;s really valuable to have different viewpoints represented. We didn&#8217;t talk about this in the episode but we have some of the traditional CS degree. We have someone who graduated a bootcamp and we have someone who was a self-taught. You&#8217;re going to like piecemeal together different resources. It all had slightly different perspectives on each of the topics, which I thought was really interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> My other take away was I tend not to focus much on exposing non-coder the fundamentals but I think Astrid&#8217;s point is about exposing people to fundamentals of tech is so valuable at every level.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s something that I have been coming to terms with as I raised my own daughter. Of course, when she was a baby I thought, &#8220;Oh, maybe she&#8217;ll grew up to be a programmer just like her papa.&#8221; It&#8217;s very clear that she wants to be a scientist or an artist so maybe someday I&#8217;ll get to pair program with her. I don&#8217;t know but in the meantime, I&#8217;m just trying to realize that I can be there to help explain stuff as she asks for it and she doesn&#8217;t have to grow up to be another mini Sam and that&#8217;s okay.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s helping me build empathy for other people outside my own mold as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But I bet you bought her that Ruby children&#8217;s book, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It is in her bed with a bookmark in it right now. She was so pleased like I bought it for her a year or two ago and she just happened to pick it up again and she was reading and I was like, &#8220;Oh, that&#8217;s so great.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But you&#8217;ll never know, Sam. She might end up being a programmer because I was like that as a kid. I love science and even right now, if I was able to go back again and do college again, I probably still wouldn&#8217;t pick computer science but I would learn the skills so you&#8217;ll never know.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m not sure I would advise her to pick computer science anyway.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the takeaways I had was something that you mentioned, Sam which was the opportunity scholarship because I did not know that existed. That&#8217;s news to me because I do want to go until the RubyConf or RailsConf so I&#8217;m going to look into that. But then also something else I took away was something you mentioned, Cheryl which was you were responding to a question and you said that the advice for the mentors and the mentees is the same and then you continued your response. I had never heard that before. Usually, it&#8217;s talked about as two different things but as you were explaining, it started to make me realize what you mean by that, which I thought was really eye opening and helpful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Astrid.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We usually like to give a listener shout out but this week we don&#8217;t have one. Instead, here’s a quick update on our funding situation. As panelists, we all volunteer our time to do this but we rely on Mandy Moore for editing and coordination. We all feel strongly that Mandy deserves to be paid fairly for her time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Right now, our listeners support has plateaued at a level that&#8217;s almost enough for us to produce two episodes a month. We’ve been recording every week since we started because we&#8217;ve booked a bunch of great guests. But in the long term, we need your help to sustain the show. You can support as at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode or if you know a company who would like to sponsor one or more episodes, Please put them in touch with us. We now return you to your regularly scheduled nerd fest.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of my takeaways from both watching your talk and then having this conversation is really just the idea that I&#8217;ve been really interested in being a mentor and it&#8217;s always been in the back of my head that I might like to teach someday in a formal classroom setting. But even before I get to that, there&#8217;s a lot of mentorship that I can do and that I want to do. But I&#8217;ve been coming at it very haphazardly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There have been a couple of things that we&#8217;ve talked about today that I think really helped clarify for me the role of the mentor and one of those, Astrid was from you. You were talking about making a distinction between being a TA and being a mentor. Then, Cheryl the thing I took from your talk was something you said about giving the mentee ownership of their learning plan, which of course you can provide input on. You can make suggestions but it&#8217;s really up to the mentee to own. Both of those I think really helped to clarify a model that I should be working towards. Thank you both.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you very much for having me today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah. This is fun.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, this has been another great conversation. Thanks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really enjoyed it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks listeners. We&#8217;ll talk to you again next week.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
</div>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello, good morning and welcome to Let’s Get this Ship on the Road! My name is Sam Livingston-Gray and here is Astrid Countee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hey! Hi, everyone. I am Astrid.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Just so you know, Jay. I&#8217;m Astrid. You&#8217;re Jay. Just want to make that clear. But we do have a guest today and I would like to introduce Cheryl Schaefer. Cheryl is a software engineer at LaunchCode, a nonprofit helping people get their first job in tech. She mentors in CoderGirl, a weekly meetup for women learning to code in St Louis. She has a master&#8217;s in music and taught music lessons before switching careers. She lives in Illinois near St Louis with her husband and three adorable cats. Hi, Cheryl. Welcome to the podcast.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi, everyone. Thanks for inviting me to speak with you today. I&#8217;m super excited to be here. Let’s talk about learning and mentorship in tech.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, well first we&#8217;d like to get your origin story.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As you mentioned, I first studied music at university and I was performing and teaching lessons so I had lots of different day jobs while I was doing that. I&#8217;m still playing at an Irish session band sharing music. I was not writing code. I was playing video games. I wrote some macros for those and I did crafting and tinkering in other ways but I wasn&#8217;t writing code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> At some point, I decided I needed to switch to a career that was going to be a little more stable. So, I looked up some data on the Bureau of Labor&#8217;s website and surveyed a bunch of day one of university classes at the local school. Then writing programming and computer science seemed like a really good fit for me. I took a couple of classes there. I just jumped in feet first and said, &#8220;Let&#8217;s see what I can do with this.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I started attending CoderGirl, which had just started and that was the summer of 2014 and some of the local meetups, still at Ruby, [inaudible] where I met Jessica Kerr. Eventually about two years ago, Mike Menne took me on at LaunchCode as an apprentice. Just to come full meta in April, I took on an apprentice and since then hired full time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The circle of life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just would like to say, I really find it interesting that you went to the Bureau of Labor Statistics to try to figure out what you should do. I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve ever heard anybody say that before.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had no clue what I planned to do. When I first went to university when I was 17, I was going to double major in CS and music and one class have vested me of that plan and I dropped the whole thing. But I didn&#8217;t think of it when I thought, &#8220;I should do something else. I should do something that provides health insurance,&#8221; and that was my main criteria.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And that is totally okay.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I used to work for the Census Bureau so I knew the Bureau of Labor had taken the census statistics and sort of drilled down into it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is where your odd jobs came in handy?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Every step of the way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s really interesting, though that you originally wanted to do the double major because I&#8217;ve heard a lot of people opined that musicians tend to make good software developers. I think there&#8217;s also a studied correlation between music ability or music study and math, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I was good at math too at that time. Not so much science but math. There’s a lot of skills that transfer over like communication skills, iterative process as music is very much the iterative process of coding. I did the exact same thing when it came time to help other people in tech.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> After I&#8217;d finished the CS50 Harvard class online, there are a lot of other ladies that were like struggling through further back and I just kind of hang around at CoderGirl and I was volunteering to help them also finish the class. What I really found is that a lot of the techniques I was using to teach my, primarily high school girls with music were exactly the same when I was teaching a 30-year old how to write a website or how do pointers work. The learning is the same so that really helped a lot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cheryl, you had mentioned that you started taking some courses online when you decided that you were going to switch over to computer science for a career. What was it about those courses that kept you going since that first class in college kind of turned you off?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>College class was the only experience I had at that point with an auditorium class. It was the introductory class but there were an excess of 100 people there and there were just a lot of things about it that made me uncomfortable. I was able to complete the material just fine but also the university curriculum made it difficult to do both at the same time. I had scholarships to do music and it was engaging and it was fun so I focused on that first.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As far as completing the online classes, there&#8217;s a lot of things that I think set up for success. I scheduled that in every week. I con a friend into helping me and also taking it for a while. I talked a lot about the ways I used for myself and ways that you can use for yourself or someone you want to train. In that talk that I gave at RubyConf in Cincinnati in November, a lot of those techniques have been studied in education and we can really just like lean on that research and not repeat ourselves, if you see what I did there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I also kind of wrote it out in a blog post that I put on Blog.LaunchCode.com about how you can help empower someone with mentorship like there&#8217;s a lot of topics, just a survey to come and get you started. But I think the main thing for me is finding what it is for a one-on-one thing, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to try this one thing. Let&#8217;s experiment and try this one thing did that help this one person,&#8221; and if it did it, just explain and do everything that way. It’s just super fulfilling to see people spin up on something new. You can really change people&#8217;s lives.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Totally it changes people&#8217;s lives.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would definitely agree with that. I think sometimes with people don&#8217;t understand about mentoring is part of you&#8217;re giving yourself and it could be fulfilling, obviously but it&#8217;s also a lot of work. Sounds like you&#8217;re doing a lot of work in this area. You talk a lot about that side of it and also what&#8217;s needed in order to be a good mentor for someone out there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If you&#8217;re trying to be a good mentor, the main thing, the most important thing is just to be present. Schedule the time in so it becomes a priority. Don&#8217;t try and multitask and do it at the same time with something else. Just give that one person a devoted hour and you and I are going to work on this now and I&#8217;ve got to back.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Ultimately, they&#8217;re responsible for their own learning. Here are the guys. It&#8217;s really their journey but if you can give them that level of support, you’re really going to be responsible, ultimately for everything that they&#8217;re responsible for too. Help them with motivation and make sure they&#8217;re accountable and what they&#8217;re doing is actually achieving some of the goals they&#8217;re trying to reach.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Limit it to the most important things and burned out is a big issue too. It can have on either on the learner or the mentor. If you don&#8217;t say no when you need to, you&#8217;re probably not going to be as successful and neither is going to enjoy it. Like when you&#8217;re on a plane and they say, &#8220;Put the oxygen mask on yourself before you put it on your child,&#8221; that&#8217;s really important to think about that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Another thing to think about too is really only do one at a time. I want to do everything. There&#8217;s so many interesting topics out there but maybe, this quarter let&#8217;s focus on Node and next quarter we can learn Spanish. If you&#8217;re try and do them both, it&#8217;s not likely to be successful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Who gets to choose that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Of course, you do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As the mentor?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, you as the learner. If you are the mentor, no [Laughs]. You, however can choose to extract yourself as a mentor, if it doesn&#8217;t align with your roles.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m traditionally limited in doing mentoring, even when I took on a group of about six or seven. I said, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to be your mentor and I&#8217;m going to help out.&#8221; We&#8217;re going to meet like three days a week and then I recognized that that was way too much for me because we had one-hour session that I was doing on this code review on top of it so over the years, I learned to connect people together and really focus on the code review.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I&#8217;m asking for a feedback but what do you think about that, as far as people wanting to mentor but they feel like, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to take on this huge burden.&#8221; Do you think it makes sense for people to say, &#8220;I&#8217;m just going to focus on something small,&#8221; like send me your code or push up a pull request and I&#8217;ll take a look at it for some open source project. What are your thoughts about kind of limiting your mentorship so you can make it a little bit more long-lasting?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s a wonderful idea, especially when there&#8217;s so many different aspects, it&#8217;s perfectly viable to say, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to help you on this narrow context,&#8221; and I think that&#8217;s really smart to do. That apprentice that I take on at work, you know what? I can&#8217;t apprentice on dev ops yet. I&#8217;m doing some of it but I just started two years ago.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When we come to a big architectural decision, now’s the time to kick that up to somebody else and let&#8217;s discuss it as a group or let&#8217;s bring one of the more senior people on this issue. It doesn&#8217;t mean you can&#8217;t help them. It just means you can&#8217;t do everything and who can really do everything, anyway?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I prefer on-going mentorship. If I&#8217;m going to help somebody, I want that accountability for myself and for them that we have a very specific goal and we&#8217;re going to reach that goal and our responsibility when we have achieved that goal is not released. We’re always buddies. I&#8217;m still your friend but we&#8217;ve made the goal that we&#8217;ve tried. The other models of mentorship like single serving occasional flyby. There’s really no way for you to know if that was successful. It’s great to have a conversation at a meetup and I suggest if you&#8217;re learning you do that. Go to meetups and ask question. But as a mentor, I don&#8217;t feel like that is as successful for me because I don&#8217;t get the positive feedback that keeps me going to mentoring.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m just speaking from my experience here but I think sometimes there needs to be a distinction between being a teacher&#8217;s assistant and then being a mentor because there&#8217;s so many little nuance parts of how you write your code that could be adjusted. It&#8217;s almost like some people are saying they want to mentor but what they really want is almost like a teacher&#8217;s assistant, which is too much for a lot of people. They don&#8217;t have the type of time and energy to be able to do that because they have other stuff going on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But I know that in my experience, some of the people who have been my best mentors have been people that I just feel comfortable asking them a question. It’s not always a specific technical question. It&#8217;s just, &#8220;I wonder should I apply to this job. Would do you think?&#8221; That type of stuff. Or, &#8220;Am I ready to try this new thing. Am I putting too much or should I try to do something beyond my scope? Am I ready for that?&#8221; I think that&#8217;s more like what a good mentor like good mentors I&#8217;ve had for years. There are people who I could call and ask a question like that. More and so than people who I could say, &#8220;I&#8217;m having problems with this method. I need you to help me with my code.&#8221; That I think is a little bit different.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, absolutely, Astrid. Thank you for bringing that up. I don&#8217;t think in the big picture outline like that. I&#8217;m thinking of what you&#8217;re trying to reach and where you&#8217;re trying to go and generally, like I review pull requests of course. But if you&#8217;re thinking of ways to pull that three lines down to one line, as long as there&#8217;s no bug, I&#8217;m probably less interested in that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Just individually from my personality, where somebody else might find that super engaging so I think learners and mentors accept that you need a whole community of people to learn from. The more the merrier. If you can get a different perspective from different people like when you&#8217;re a kid at home, mom said no, I&#8217;m going to go and ask dad. Go find out what the other person is most interested in and learn from most appropriate for each topic. I think people working in tech can and should as very early on, learn the small details themselves. Figure out and help them learn to read the API, help them learn how to read the man-pages and then set them free to figure that out on their own.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was we were talking about in the pre-call that turns out to be an absolutely essential skill for everybody, even very experienced developers, right? It’s good to teach that early on, I think.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We have a listener question, listener Ariel Spear asks, &#8220;How can I show up better as a mentee.&#8221; She goes on to say, &#8220;How can you keep yourself from giving up and washing out and when you find your skills have atrophied, how do you find the resolve to try again?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think whether you&#8217;re the learner or the mentor, a lot of the same advice applies &#8212; limit what you do to what&#8217;s most important so you are only working on one thing at a time. Like a CoderGirl, I see a lot of folks who come in and they want to be web developers so they&#8217;re taking a front end course and the back end course at the same time. I think that is madness.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Pick one thing at a time and even if the other thing is super important and engaging, just put it on the back burner, put it in a queue and you&#8217;ll do it next. When you&#8217;re coming back to something you&#8217;ve left for a long time, if you think it&#8217;s important, bring friends, get help, find a meetup, an online community and all of the resources that are available that you can possibly use. Find all of those things and see which help you the most and focus on that one.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you fail before you saw where you did do well and what possibly you can see what made you not do well. You know, if you got sick, that&#8217;s I think it happens and you just have to accept it and move on. This time you have a better shot. But if it&#8217;s, &#8220;Oh, well. I was busy staying up late playing video games,&#8221; maybe if you also quit the raid team, you will be a better this time around.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Unpossible.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Unpossible, that&#8217;s right. Astrid, you have some knowledge and wisdom to share on this stuff with your Rails Girls.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think sometimes it&#8217;s too high of an expectation. I think it&#8217;s okay to just, like you said learn one thing. I think it&#8217;s okay to spend time really getting familiar with your text editor. I think that&#8217;s fine. I think that&#8217;s a goal. I think it&#8217;s fine to feel like you know what you&#8217;re doing when it comes to one language in just certain context.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that sometimes, there&#8217;s this idea that you have to be able to do a whole lot of things before you can call yourself a name and say, &#8220;I&#8217;m a Ruby developer. I&#8217;m a web developer,&#8221; and I think it gets in the way because there&#8217;s so many opinions about what it takes to be that. When you&#8217;re really first starting out or even if you&#8217;ve been doing it for a while, it&#8217;s hard to discern what it means to be something.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think it makes people kind of freaked out. I think that&#8217;s where the burnout comes in because you&#8217;re trying to do so many things because you&#8217;re trying to reach this goal and this goal is kind of a goal that I think, at least for my experience, the more that I have been learning how to do things, the more I realized that there is no real one definition of what it means to be a senior developer. There’s no one definition of what it means to be a good front end dev. But you don&#8217;t know that in the beginning.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> You&#8217;re trying to learn all the JavaScript frameworks, which will make you want to kill yourself, anyway and you&#8217;re trying to be great with CSS and do all these animations and you realized you have to learn back end and you&#8217;re doing all these things. Instead, you should try to just say, &#8220;Can I do this one thing really well? I feel confident in this one thing,&#8221; and then allow that to be a goal. Then be able to reach for the next thing because I think sometimes like from the mentee perspective, it can be hard to tell the mentor what you want if you&#8217;re trying to do all those things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Instead of saying, &#8220;I want this goal. I&#8217;m trying to reach this place with Ruby and I&#8217;m having a hard time with these types of functions. Let me see if there&#8217;s something I&#8217;m missing, maybe those resources I don&#8217;t know about,&#8221; that type of thing. Than say, &#8220;I want to be a Ruby developer. Help me,&#8221; which is so much harder.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I absolutely agree, Astrid. I think assessment is so important when you&#8217;re trying to limit the scope of what you learn at that point. Can you look at what you did and see what is better than what you wrote three months ago? Can you recognize some of those invisible skills? Like, &#8220;I use grep excellently today and every time gold star, right on the board. Oh, yeah.&#8221; If you can use those kinds of things to recognize what you&#8217;ve done and just be compassionate with your past self, that really helps the burn out because then you can recognize what you have accomplished.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you say something vague like, &#8220;I want to be awesome Ruby developer,&#8221; well, you got that true. But you can never accomplish that because the goal keeps moving. When you learned more, you&#8217;re more awesome as a Ruby developer but now you know more unknowns from before, some of your unknown unknowns are now known and you recognized, &#8220;Now, I know some things I don&#8217;t know still,&#8221; and you&#8217;re never as awesome as some invisible possible goal. But actually the amount you could know is theoretically finite but practically infinite.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One thing that I have actually started doing that help me is to rebuild the same thing again because then you can actually see what you&#8217;ve learned. you may have gone off and tried to this new thing or trying to learn some new skill but if I try to rebuild a site that maybe I built six months ago, I can actually tell that I&#8217;ve picked up new skills, that I understand something much better than I did before. I think that feels like going backwards to people but it might actually help them better understand what they need.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s really fantastic. I recently did something similar to that where I just wrote a little toy game in Ruby a while ago. A couple coworkers of mine and I wrote a similar little game in Elm, just to learn Elm. It was just a lot of fun but it was learning a new topic and it was, &#8220;Now, I see all these things.&#8221; I didn&#8217;t really look at my Ruby code before we started writing the Elm code. Now, I&#8217;m looking back at that and say, &#8220;Oh, I could have done this, this or that.&#8221; But we had it work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that&#8217;s another point to be made that you were able to contribute from the beginning. As a mentor, you should try and ensure, especially that&#8217;s on the job training. Your trainee is doing stuff that matters from the beginning. They have a voice in how it&#8217;s done and they have a responsibility to meet the goal too. Then they can take some personal ownership for that. It&#8217;ll make it easier for you to let them form their own style. They don&#8217;t have to copy your style but it also just make you feel so much about it, that you can look back and be like, &#8220;I made a commit on the first day that went live.&#8221; Even if it&#8217;s just a text change on a splash page. But I did code it and it went live.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think both of what you were saying is so on point that I&#8217;ve seen a lot of people utilize that same model for learning. I kind of want to plug a site right now of a guy who used this quite a bit. His site called Spot2Fish. When he first wrote the site, he first put it together in Rails and I believe, when he got out of dev bootcamp. He turned around and he did it in Express, then he went back and build an iOS version and he continues to add stuff to it and add features to it but it&#8217;s been a big part.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I saw him do a talk here in Central Ohio about it and it&#8217;s just great. He talks about how it&#8217;s really helped him learn stuff. He has a mental model for the way things should look but he sees that evolving and changing as he goes and picks up, do languages and new libraries to work with and so on and so forth. I want to point that out and I highly recommend that to our listeners.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Can you say the name again?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Spot2Fish. It&#8217;s a really great app that just gives you spots to fish at.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the reasons why I started doing it is because of what you had mentioned, Cheryl just getting burned out of like you&#8217;re learning and you&#8217;re trying to learn some new things and feeling like you&#8217;re not knowing what&#8217;s going on and if you&#8217;re actually improving. I&#8217;ve got an idea to do this just from, I watched I think it was The Practice or something with the New York City Ballet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> These are people who&#8217;ve been dancing, probably most of them since they were like eight or nine years old and they are doing it at the top of their craft. Every day, they come in and they do the same practices that you would do like the first day of ballet class. It made me remember something that I already knew, which is that if you&#8217;re really good at something, you have to practice all the time which is talked about. But when you&#8217;re doing something like that, your practice is the same practice, like you&#8217;re doing the same stuff that you would have done regardless of your skill level. But it&#8217;s important that you keep those muscles really warm and you can do more if you can do that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It may be think of treating code like that like, &#8220;I know how to make a pretty simple Rails app but can I make it faster? Can I make it better? Can I keep tweaking it? Because if I can do that, then maybe I actually am learning. Then since it is the same app, then I can actually see my progress,&#8221; whereas like once you do something, then you go to the next level, it&#8217;s harder to tell how good you&#8217;re getting because you&#8217;re doing new stuff. It’s always going to be more challenging. It kind of distorts your thinking about how good you really are because you always feel like a novice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and music we talk about that in terms of learning portable skills, like you study intensely one style at a time and maybe three or four songs at once. But each song is in one style. It&#8217;s kind of like learning how to learn, you focus on the fundamentals and the things that you&#8217;ve learned in this one song, in this one style apply to other songs in that style. Also focusing on fundamentals scales and I&#8217;m sure there&#8217;s similar things for dance, where you are learning how things work under the hood and why you&#8217;re doing things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The next time you learn something else or the next project you work on, you can take that skill and just reapply it. That&#8217;s the kind of the value of the experience that you bring on when you&#8217;ve studied something else first and you&#8217;re just bringing it with you like if you enter another career. There&#8217;s also people want a career swap or reenter the workforce after parenting or military service or something. But those kinds of life skills you have from your previous career really show up in how you learn things on the technical side as well, just breaking things down into small steps and reapplying those steps in other cases.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That iterative approach of going back to the same app over time or as you were just saying, Cheryl learning one new style at a time ties into something that I&#8217;ve seen a lot in people who are learning their first programming language, which of course the problem is not that they&#8217;re learning their first programming language. They&#8217;re also learning the entire structure of programming. They’re learning how to think in those terms. They&#8217;re learning how to read parser errors and figure out what the heck is going on and where they missed their semicolons and they&#8217;re learning all kinds of other invisible skills like how to function on the command line and at least get the basic use out of your editor.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think a lot of people don&#8217;t realize all of the stuff that you have to learn your first time through. I see a lot of first timers run into that wall pretty hard so I really like that idea of just picking one thing, doing nothing and coming back. Every time you come back, you&#8217;re actually going through that same process again unless you go from Ruby to Python, where the languages are very, very similar. They do a lot of the same things. You’re going to be learning a new domain and you&#8217;re going to be learning to think about all the things in that domain. It’s not just a new syntax. I really like this approach of break it down, just do one thing at a time and eventually, if you do enough things then you get to be pretty good at it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s a great way to think about it. I think whether it&#8217;s your first language or a framework or a special editor or whatever you&#8217;re learning, that kind of plug-and-play Lego approach really help. If you are coming up from a place of being personally humble but just be fearless and pursuit of the knowledge: jumping, meet people, talk about your code, and just try something new.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;ve been dying to get into this topic since before we started the show, actually. What do you think, Cheryl about the future of tech education?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When we&#8217;re talking about what the future of tech education is, then we have to address the motivation for it. It’s all over the news all the time that there is a huge shortage in tech workers. Tech workers are not diverse. It&#8217;s very limited on who actually makes it all the way through the pipeline and ends up in these roles. But there&#8217;s a lot of reasons for it to be a great fill to go into, besides work conditions are generally safe and pleasant, the compensation is good and it&#8217;s exciting to build things people use. But you really have an opportunity to shape the future of what&#8217;s happening. I find that so exciting but it&#8217;s also totally okay to just focus on the fact that you can get health insurance when you feel like that lack of motivation is coming through.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that the tech education groups are going to be looking at that when they&#8217;re developing what they do so like just a survey what the current state is. We have universities pulling out people who really know their stuff and don&#8217;t have a lot of experience. Then you have bootcamps, which seemed like a relative new thing. I think it started in 2012. It was the first one. That was before I was in tech.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. The first one I was aware of was Hungry Academy and that started it in 2012. I think they started advertising it in 2011.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think Dev Bootcamp was in 2012 as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Community colleges are kind of moving towards that model as well in a lot of cases. I think it could be a good fit. I think it just depends on what individual you&#8217;re working with. I think you need to just be very self-aware and experiments. Be fearless, try something and measure your success. Different people are going to have access to these different levels of education. Unfortunately, that&#8217;s a fact of life. That works for your life situation if you have kids, if you have elder care that you&#8217;re responsible for. So many things in your life can affect what is possible for you to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think university study is a great option if you can afford college and if you know you&#8217;re interested. I think bootcamps are really great too, especially you did get a college degree but didn&#8217;t study CS or you have a CS degree but you couldn&#8217;t afford to take that internship, you need some experience practically in the field, I think is a really great option. But generally are full time and a lot of them cost under $15,000. That can create a lot of barrier for some people too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Places like LaunchCode and some community colleges are offering night classes in coding topics too now. The LaunchCode class, the LC101 class, I&#8217;m pretty involved with is more of a learn-at-night model. Two nights a week, you can still work your day job and support yourself and your family so it&#8217;s kind of in between a college class and a bootcamp. Then you get on the jobs immersive experience but you can still keep up with your life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> LaunchCode also offers a bootcamp periodically too. We’ve done job placements for a lot of people who actually really did just teach themselves how to code in the basement. Not a whole lot, like success rates on that are pretty low. It takes a lot of drive. It’s totally possible. It works best if you also paired up with another source of support. My thoughts on that, in the future I think all of those models are still going to exists and they&#8217;re going to continue to operate in tech training.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There are so many jobs in field that I don&#8217;t think that anyone is really going to get pushed out of the market. They’re just going to serve slightly different markets. I think it&#8217;s just awesome to jump into any of these things. But you just have to be aware of yourself and think which of these is going to work best for me, what city do I want to work in and is the market for this university or bootcamp is teaching me available? How good is the market in that city that I want to live in? Then once you have some of those decisions settled on, I think just jump in and try it. Who knows where you go once you get there?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When you first brought this up, I thought immediately of a tweet stormed by Sarah Mei. She has a lot of excellent tweets storms but this one was probably about five, six days ago. She starts out with the wonderful lead, &#8220;I&#8217;ve been into the wine so of course it&#8217;s time to talk about computer science education,&#8221; which if you know Sarah at all, you&#8217;re in for a fun Twitter rant.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But she talks about the comparison contrasts the traditional CS university curriculum with the people that she sees coming out of Code School. One of the things that she really clarified for me that I had in the back of my head but hadn&#8217;t really thought about but she really crystallized was this idea that one of the things that the different kinds of education emphasized or don&#8217;t is communication skills. She talks about people in poli-sci majors because of the way that the curriculum was structured and the way that the classes worked, they got a lot of practice in talking and debating and communicating with each other, whereas the CS programs tend to emphasize a lot more of solo work: you go home, you do your homework, and you turn it in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> She talks about how she&#8217;s seen Code Schoolers come out with a lot better communication skills and she finds that tends to dominate after she&#8217;s had like three, five years or so, where those people are doing demonstrably better in the field than the people who came out of a solo-oriented university career. Does that match with what you&#8217;ve seen?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know, I love Sarah Mei&#8217;s tweet storms too. I actually had an opportunity when I spoke at RubyConf to meet her. We had a long conversation about this after dinner and there was wine involved.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m data driven most of the time. LaunchCode has not been around long enough to have really good stats on our success. We&#8217;re experiencing with different class format and I&#8217;m so excited to see what happens to these people three years down the road. But I don&#8217;t have a really good data about that yet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Anecdotally, I can say for me that was 100% true and I felt like I face a lot of pressure to jump into management roles and project management. I&#8217;ve been involved in that before and I already know how to train people. But I felt that would be a mistake for me to make career-wise before I can back that up with a proper tech skills.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think seeing my brother&#8217;s career unfold &#8212; he has a master’s in CS and has followed a more traditional path &#8212; I saw his career take off fast at first and then he had to learn those communication skills. He’s been working and doing well the whole time but to become senior, to have that ability to communicate and lead, he had built those skills on the job, whereas I did the reverse. I built communication skills and management skills and professionalism as just as you do working. Then kind of taught myself online and at work, tech skills so the curve is kind of the opposite direction but you end up in the same place.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As a person who went through a bootcamp, one of the things that I realized that I was a little bit sad about is that there wasn&#8217;t a lot of digital literacy period that I learned before learning how to be a software engineer. I do not think that you should have to try to be an engineer just to have a space to learn about how the internet works because I think [inaudible] by itself is actually a really great skill.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I also find it really ironic that part of the reason why there&#8217;s this big need for a lot of software engineers is because every industry uses software and technology and they&#8217;re doing a lot of work, they do online now and using the cloud, etcetera, etcetera. But you don&#8217;t get that training, not even a piece of that training, unless you&#8217;re actually specifically focused on a technology based major and I think that&#8217;s a problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the things that I feel like should change is that the way that you&#8217;re learning whatever discipline you&#8217;re learning should incorporate how this relates back to any type of digital online technology, even in the smallest sense because just understanding simple things like your browser is sending a call to a server and if there&#8217;s a problem that&#8217;s what those 404 is about. I think that would actually help a lot of people do their jobs better. Like for me, I was a social scientist and one of the first things that I realized is I don&#8217;t understand why we were learning SPSS, which is the statistical package program that you learn on how to use when you&#8217;re running statistics in your social science experiments and how you evaluate those stuff.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I can do that in [inaudible]. I can use Python for that. Why did we learn those things as well? Because I don&#8217;t think that everybody needs to be a software engineer but I do think that if we&#8217;re going to live in this world, where so much of what we do is going to have software behind it, you should know something about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I totally agree, Astrid and I feel like we could have a whole another hour-long conversation and talk about non-coding technical jobs and how can we prepare people better for those. I think that speaks to partially like why so many people use QA or they use technical writing. I learned a lot of tech stuff just trying to fix the computers at a previous job. We had this old Windows system so the only computers that could run it were refurbs like you can buy a new computer and run this old software.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I just learned a lot because I needed it and you see people in that situation where they don&#8217;t need it until they&#8217;re adjacent to it and there&#8217;s no other opportunity to get to it. I don&#8217;t know what I don&#8217;t know and I don&#8217;t know that I don&#8217;t know that my Facebook just shows up when I click the button and why shouldn&#8217;t everyone have that literacy to know that you got an option.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> So many people ask me all the time like, &#8220;Do you think I can do this?&#8221; I never know how to answer that question. It&#8217;s a long question to answer because my first response is, &#8220;Yeah, sure,&#8221; I want to be encouraging. Realistically, other people don&#8217;t want to and that&#8217;s totally okay. You may love it and you may not and you&#8217;re not going to know until you try it. It seems like the only way to try it is go through many of these things that&#8217;s aimed at engineering.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the websites now that do intro stuff: Code School, Code Academy, there&#8217;s a bunch of those that you can go on and just tinker a little bit and you&#8217;re not committing until months and months and change of your life. You&#8217;re just knowing the basics vocabulary.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I agree. I think even with those assets that are out there, unfortunately it still seems that people feel like, &#8220;That&#8217;s not for me if I don&#8217;t want to work in technology,&#8221; and I kind of feel like that&#8217;s just a failure of our whole system to just make technology a part of what you learn, like I don&#8217;t see why you wouldn&#8217;t.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We learned English grammar even though nobody speaks correct English but we learn it because you&#8217;re supposed to understand how you should be speaking or why can&#8217;t we learn how the internet works or what really happens when you press the button. Why can&#8217;t that just be a part of what people learn so they don&#8217;t have to actually seek it out themselves?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As somebody who&#8217;s gone through the traditional computer science route, it seems to me that a lot of the people with a lot of expert knowledge in that field tend to focus on people who are going to be just like them. I certainly have inadvertently picked up this bias myself and I didn&#8217;t even realize it until Sarah made another tweet storm where she was talking about people who apply to the Opportunity Scholarship Program at RubyConf and RailsConf. That’s something where people who are members of underrepresented groups can attend RubyConf and RailsConf for free and they get paired with a mentor who is somebody who is more familiar with the community and can introduce them around.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But anyway, she was talking about the selection process for this and how she hadn&#8217;t really thought about, whether she was selecting specifically for people who wanted to go into programming, as supposed to people who were curious about tech or might be artists that could benefit from knowing just a little bit about tech. I think we in the field have this all-or-nothing bias like we&#8217;re not going to waste our time teaching unless you&#8217;re going to go all the way. I think that probably plays into it somewhere.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think there is also an aspect of a speed of change. You’re talking about traditional schooling including that. It&#8217;s like you come on board, the amount of stuff they have to cram into the kids at each grade is just overwhelming and the tech stuff is so new, relatively it&#8217;s just hasn&#8217;t been included yet. The places where it has been included tend to just have a higher budget or somebody pushing that as a need.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Now, we need to have this for our kids. Especially in the United States, our schools aren&#8217;t universal anyway. It’s one of those priorities that just falls on the floor and like teacher education, it doesn&#8217;t teach them how to do that. They don&#8217;t know that topic either so how are they going to teach a thing if they need to teach themselves first or have someone help them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a lot of barriers in there and I do understand that when you start talking about the education system like that, that&#8217;s a conference by itself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or a Senate hearing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, sort of Senate hearing. But I guess it&#8217;s just something that the more that I learn, the more I become more passionate about because I think there needs to be an avenue for an alternate route. Everybody isn&#8217;t and everybody shouldn&#8217;t be a software engineer and that may not be their goal. They shouldn&#8217;t also be terrified of even looking at code, though and I feel like that&#8217;s what&#8217;s happened is that you&#8217;re either in or you&#8217;re not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For people to be freaked out by HTML, which is something that can be assessable, if it&#8217;s made assessable, I don&#8217;t think that should be the case. Also having had some experience working in a position where you are at odds with the software engineers or you&#8217;re on the other side of that as a software engineer, you&#8217;re at odds with the business side of the company, I think a half that conversation is because you aren&#8217;t speaking the same language.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It doesn&#8217;t mean that you have to learn everything but I think if you even knew what they were talking about in some capacity, it could help you better advocate for what you want because people are using word like, &#8220;The thing over here and the button that does this &#8211;&#8221; which just frustrates because software engineers are not necessarily trained to be your translator.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But then on the flip side of it, oftentimes when you&#8217;re that other person, you&#8217;re trying to figure out how to say what you really want but you don&#8217;t know and it&#8217;s not so much that you have to go learn a whole programming language but if you just have a little bit more understanding how this thing actually operates in general, it can help.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. I totally agree. We feel that shortage a lot at work at LaunchCode. You know, just always looking for a qualified instructors to help and [inaudible] even to help with the classes. Some people choose to just volunteer once a month or something like a lower commitment. It’s a lot to ask for a person still but if you can and it helps you learn and you help other people learn but without them, you can only do so much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s sort of a back door, though right? You&#8217;ve got places like Code School and Code Academy and Khan Academy and stuff, that if you knew to go to those sites, you could go and learn a lot of things without anyone holding your hand. You can just go check it out and then if you didn&#8217;t do well, no one could see you embarrass yourself. Although, it becomes unclear where to go if you have questions. There’s so many of them. If you&#8217;re at the very beginning, there&#8217;s just thousands and thousands and probably millions of links that you can find. We’ve put together a little learning tool on the LaunchCode.org site to help you pick which ones might be relevant for what you&#8217;re trying to do. </span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s really awesome but if you&#8217;re not trying to do a specific job, you don&#8217;t have any criteria upon which to select. Maybe you just try whatever one you&#8217;re on and see what you learn.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And iterate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Iterate! Now you know something. Something plus one will be better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;ve come to almost the very end of our show, which is when we like to do reflections, which are things that stood out to us, things that we&#8217;re going to take away from this conversation. They can be things that we want to challenge our listeners to do. Cheryl, it sounds like you&#8217;ve got some of those. Go for it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I actually had two takeaways from today&#8217;s conversation. The first is that I felt it&#8217;s really valuable to have different viewpoints represented. We didn&#8217;t talk about this in the episode but we have some of the traditional CS degree. We have someone who graduated a bootcamp and we have someone who was a self-taught. You&#8217;re going to like piecemeal together different resources. It all had slightly different perspectives on each of the topics, which I thought was really interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> My other take away was I tend not to focus much on exposing non-coder the fundamentals but I think Astrid&#8217;s point is about exposing people to fundamentals of tech is so valuable at every level.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s something that I have been coming to terms with as I raised my own daughter. Of course, when she was a baby I thought, &#8220;Oh, maybe she&#8217;ll grew up to be a programmer just like her papa.&#8221; It&#8217;s very clear that she wants to be a scientist or an artist so maybe someday I&#8217;ll get to pair program with her. I don&#8217;t know but in the meantime, I&#8217;m just trying to realize that I can be there to help explain stuff as she asks for it and she doesn&#8217;t have to grow up to be another mini Sam and that&#8217;s okay.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s helping me build empathy for other people outside my own mold as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But I bet you bought her that Ruby children&#8217;s book, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It is in her bed with a bookmark in it right now. She was so pleased like I bought it for her a year or two ago and she just happened to pick it up again and she was reading and I was like, &#8220;Oh, that&#8217;s so great.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But you&#8217;ll never know, Sam. She might end up being a programmer because I was like that as a kid. I love science and even right now, if I was able to go back again and do college again, I probably still wouldn&#8217;t pick computer science but I would learn the skills so you&#8217;ll never know.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m not sure I would advise her to pick computer science anyway.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the takeaways I had was something that you mentioned, Sam which was the opportunity scholarship because I did not know that existed. That&#8217;s news to me because I do want to go until the RubyConf or RailsConf so I&#8217;m going to look into that. But then also something else I took away was something you mentioned, Cheryl which was you were responding to a question and you said that the advice for the mentors and the mentees is the same and then you continued your response. I had never heard that before. Usually, it&#8217;s talked about as two different things but as you were explaining, it started to make me realize what you mean by that, which I thought was really eye opening and helpful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Astrid.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We usually like to give a listener shout out but this week we don&#8217;t have one. Instead, here’s a quick update on our funding situation. As panelists, we all volunteer our time to do this but we rely on Mandy Moore for editing and coordination. We all feel strongly that Mandy deserves to be paid fairly for her time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Right now, our listeners support has plateaued at a level that&#8217;s almost enough for us to produce two episodes a month. We’ve been recording every week since we started because we&#8217;ve booked a bunch of great guests. But in the long term, we need your help to sustain the show. You can support as at Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode or if you know a company who would like to sponsor one or more episodes, Please put them in touch with us. We now return you to your regularly scheduled nerd fest.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of my takeaways from both watching your talk and then having this conversation is really just the idea that I&#8217;ve been really interested in being a mentor and it&#8217;s always been in the back of my head that I might like to teach someday in a formal classroom setting. But even before I get to that, there&#8217;s a lot of mentorship that I can do and that I want to do. But I&#8217;ve been coming at it very haphazardly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There have been a couple of things that we&#8217;ve talked about today that I think really helped clarify for me the role of the mentor and one of those, Astrid was from you. You were talking about making a distinction between being a TA and being a mentor. Then, Cheryl the thing I took from your talk was something you said about giving the mentee ownership of their learning plan, which of course you can provide input on. You can make suggestions but it&#8217;s really up to the mentee to own. Both of those I think really helped to clarify a model that I should be working towards. Thank you both.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you very much for having me today.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah. This is fun.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, this has been another great conversation. Thanks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CHERYL:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I really enjoyed it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks listeners. We&#8217;ll talk to you again next week.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span> <a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jaybobo"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jay Bobo</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/CherylGSchaefer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cheryl Schaefer</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span><a href="https://launchcode.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Launch Code</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://www.launchcode.org/coder_girl"><span style="font-weight: 400;">CoderGirl</span></a></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Posted another patrons-only outtake from today&#8217;s precall with <a href="https://twitter.com/CherylGSchaefer">@CherylGSchaefer</a>! <a href="https://t.co/g4GZA9LWle">https://t.co/g4GZA9LWle</a></p>
<p>— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode/status/826895996042960896">February 1, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b></b><b>00:16</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Welcome to “Let’s Get this Ship on the Road!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:06 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Origin Story and Mentorship</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://confreaks.tv/videos/rubyconf2016-grow-your-team-in-90-days"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cheryl Gore Schaefer: Grow Your Team In 90 Days @ RubyConf 2016</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blog.launchcode.org/empowerment-through-mentorship/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Empowerment Through Mentorship</span></a></p>
<p><b>11:38</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Avoiding Burnout: “How can I show up better as a Mentee? How can you keep yourself from giving up and washing out? When you find your skills have atrophied, how do you find the resolve to try again?” ~ </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ariel_tweeting"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ariel Spear</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.spot2fish.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Spot2Fish</span></a></p>
<p><b>23:41</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – The Future of Tech Education</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/824831465745637376"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah Mei Computer Science Education Tweetstorm</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/819575574129676288"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah Mei People Who Apply for Opportunity Scholarships Tweetstorm</span></a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!</b></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Takeaways:</b></p>
<p><b>Cheryl: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">It’s valuable to have different viewpoints represented. Also, exposing people to fundamentals of tech is valuable as well.</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The RubyConf/RailsConf Opportunity Scholarships exist! Also, advice for mentees and mentors is the same.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Making a distinction between being a TA and being a mentor and giving the mentee ownership of their learning plan.</span></p>
<div id="Transcript" style="display: none;">
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-conve]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span> <a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jaybobo"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jay Bobo</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/CherylGSchaefer"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cheryl Schaefer</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span><a href="https://launchcode.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Launch Code</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://www.launchcode.org/coder_girl"><span style="font-weight: 400;">CoderGirl</span></a></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">Posted another patrons-only outtake from today&#8217;s precall with <a href="https://twitter.com/CherylGSchaefer">@CherylGSchaefer</a>! <a href="https://t.co/g4GZA9LWle">https://t.co/g4GZA9LWle</a></p>
<p>— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode/status/826895996042960896">February 1, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b></b><b>00:16</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Welcome to “Let’s Get this Ship on the Road!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:06 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Origin Story and Mentorship</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://confreaks.tv/videos/rubyconf2016-grow-your-team-in-90-days"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Cheryl Gore Schaefer: Grow Your Team In 90 Days @ RubyConf 2016</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blog.launchcode.org/empowerment-through-mentorship/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Empowerment Through Mentorship</span></a></p>
<p><b>11:38</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Avoiding Burnout: “How can I show up better as a Mentee? How can you keep yourself from giving up and washing out? When you find your skills have atrophied, how do you find the resolve to try again?” ~ </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ariel_tweeting"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ariel Spear</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.spot2fish.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Spot2Fish</span></a></p>
<p><b>23:41</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – The Future of Tech Education</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/824831465745637376"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah Mei Computer Science Education Tweetstorm</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/sarahmei/status/819575574129676288"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sarah Mei People Who Apply for Opportunity Scholarships Tweetstorm</span></a></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!</b></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Takeaways:</b></p>
<p><b>Cheryl: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">It’s valuable to have different viewpoints represented. Also, exposing people to fundamentals of tech is valuable as well.</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">The RubyConf/RailsConf Opportunity Scholarships exist! Also, advice for mentees and mentors is the same.</span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><br />
</span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Making a distinction between being a TA and being a mentor and giving the mentee ownership of their learning plan.</span></p>
<div id="Transcript" style="display: none;">
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-conve]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Cheryl-1.jpg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Cheryl-1.jpg"></googleplay:image>
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					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>44:32</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>Episode 017: Ruby Together with André Arko and Carina C. Zona</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-017-andre-arko-and-carina-c-zona-of-ruby-together/</link>
					<pubDate>Tue, 31 Jan 2017 18:49:10 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=355</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[André Arko and Carina C. Zona join us for a discussion about Ruby Together.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[André Arko and Carina C. Zona join us for a discussion about Ruby Together.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span> <a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jaybobo"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jay Bobo</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/cczona"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Carina C. Zona</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span><a href="http://www.callbackwomen.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@CallbackWomen</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/indirect"><span style="font-weight: 400;">André Arko</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">of the </span><a href="http://bundler.io/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Bundler</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://rubygems.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">RubyGems</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Team</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Welcome to “Cyberpunk Dystopia” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:45 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Origin Stories</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://qntm.org/gay"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://andre.arko.net/2013/03/24/falsehoods-programmers-believe/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">André Arko: Falsehoods programmers believe</span></a></p>
<p><b>11:38</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="https://rubytogether.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ruby Together</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">; Membership and Benefits</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/eotopick03.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">501(C)(6)</span></a></p>
<p><b>22:06</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Ensuring the Future of Ruby</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Thank you to our first corporate sponsor, </span><a href="https://www.atomist.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Atomist</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, for sponsoring this episode! Check them out:</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.atomist.com/"><img class="alignnone wp-image-359" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/atomist01.jpg" width="401" height="301" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/atomist01.jpg 800w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/atomist01-300x225.jpg 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/atomist01-768x576.jpg 768w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/atomist01-400x300.jpg 400w" sizes="(max-width: 401px) 100vw, 401px" /></a></p>
<p><b>27:39</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Fair Pay and Getting Developers/Companies to Pay for Stuff</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.defstartup.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">RethinkDB: why we failed</span></a></p>
<p><b>39:46</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="http://andre.arko.net/2015/04/28/how-does-bundler-work-anyway/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">How Does Bundler Work, Anyway?</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> [blog post]</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DqzaqeeMgY"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Andre Arko: How does Bundler work, anyway? @ RubyConf 2015</span></a></p>
<p><b>44:16</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Sharing and Reusing Code</span></p>
<p><b>52:26</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="https://github.com/bundler/gemstash"><span style="font-weight: 400;">gemstash</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> vs </span><a href="https://github.com/geminabox/geminabox"><span style="font-weight: 400;">geminabox</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.openssl.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">OpenSSL</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://heartbleed.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Heartbleed</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>We are also listener supported! Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Get instant access to our Slack Channel!<br />
</b><b>Thank you, </b><a href="https://twitter.com/N3rdyTeacher"><b>Polly Schandorf</b></a><b>, for your support!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Takeaways:</b></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Be a member-friend of Ruby Together!</span></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ruby Together is an advancement in the software industry as a whole to form a trade organization that is a business related to supporting all businesses and people and making our software infrastructure maintainable.</span></p>
<p><b>Carina: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">OpenSSL is back to being insufficiently funded. Support other projects like Ruby Together too. See: </span><a href="http://www.fordfoundation.org/library/reports-and-studies/roads-and-bridges-the-unseen-labor-behind-our-digital-infrastructure"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">. </span></p>
<p><b>André: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hope that devs and companies that listen to this show with join Ruby Together.</span></p>
<p><b>Jay: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">It’s smart business for businesses to support organizations like Ruby Together. Software companies have large profit margins. Monies that would be spent on taxes can be put back into our community to support key infrastructure &amp; tooling. My call to action is that our listeners support Ruby Together and get their companies to support Ruby Together and similar organizations.</span></p>
<div id="Transcript" style="display: none;">
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning. As we record, this is January 25, 2017 and I would like to personally welcome you to our Cyberpunk Dystopia. I&#8217;m Sam Livingston-Gray.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sam, that&#8217;s a little too close to the truth. Can we just be Greater Than Code?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Greater Than Code it is. Welcome to Greater Than Code, everybody.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you and I am thrilled to be here today with Jay Bobo.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Booo!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m so excited to be back. I know I&#8217;ve been gone for a while but I&#8217;m here. It&#8217;s going to be a great podcast because all of our podcasts are amazing. We have André Arko and Carina C Zona.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Great to be here, Jay.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I&#8217;m really excited about getting to be on Greater Than code. Thanks for having us on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Carina C Zona is a developer advocate and certified sex educator. She spent a lot of time thinking about the unexpected cultural effects of our decisions as programmers. Carina is also the founder of CallbackWomen, which is on a mission to radically increase gender diversity at the podium of professional programmer’s conferences.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>André Arko has been writing Ruby since 2004, created the jQuery Rails Gem and joined the Bundler core team before 1.0. He founded and runs Ruby Together, the Ruby developer trade association and today he leads the combined Bundler and Ruby Gems team. Welcome to the show, Carina and André.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks. It&#8217;s great to be here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m actually super excited to be on Greater Than Code because this means that Amy can no longer hold her show over me. Now, we each have a show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, unless hers is better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m sure, it is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, Amy Wibowo?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>She&#8217;s my partner.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, cool. Origin stories! Origin stories!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, please. Who are you people?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How did you gain your superpowers, meaning learning how to code and everything else that you are proud of?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And you may say to our listeners as well, how did I get here?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I regularly asked myself, &#8220;How do I get here?&#8221; I guess as you just mentioned in my bio, I started doing Ruby in 2004, when it was completely useless. With no reason to Ruby at all, Rails didn&#8217;t exist. Libraries were scarce on the ground. If you wanted to reuse someone else&#8217;s Ruby code, you had to find their home page and download a tarball and stuff it into site Ruby yourself. That was fun times. But I was in college and doing a CS degree undergrad and I just really wanted to write some code that was more enjoyable to write than C++, which is what all my classes were in &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hear, hear.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; And so I guess at the time it felt like obscure and/or unusual languages. Ruby just struck me as incredibly enjoyable to write and incredibly enjoyable to read and I love how much it felt like a fun activity so I started doing a ton of Ruby. I read through the entire Pickaxe twice before I even had the Ruby Interpreter installed on my machine. It was fun times.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then after I&#8217;d been playing really enthusiastically with Ruby for a while, I think my very exciting and meaningful project was I tried to copy the interface of iTunes in a web browser as a CGI script. Then on the backend, it executed Apple scripts to control iTunes on my [inaudible] server. It was very exciting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So you ported iTunes to the browser?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, no. It&#8217;s just the interface window, like it listed songs, then it let you filter and it let you play, pause, skip, back, change volume. It never worked that great but it looked a lot like iTunes and as long as you were okay with the delay of running everything via OC script on the command line, which is four seconds and it worked. Then I saw this email on the Ruby talk mailing list from this weird Danish guy named David-something and he was like, &#8220;I just released &#8211;&#8221; I think it was Rail 0.10 and I was like, &#8220;Oh, that sounds cool. I&#8217;ve been struggling with Ruby CGI scripts. I would like something that was easier than that,&#8221; and then I started using Rails and swore a lot to myself as I started using it and it was amazing. I guess, history and inevitability let us here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But they were good swears, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I said a lot of good oh-wow-this-is-amazing swears as I tried out Rails.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, so it was like, &#8220;This was a holy shit.&#8221; Not, &#8220;What the fuck do I have supposed to do here?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I said holy shit to myself a lot as I was trying out Rails, in comparison to that CGI script that I had been using. Then, it&#8217;s history and inevitability. Now, I still write Ruby because I really enjoy writing Ruby and I still pay my bills by writing Rails apps really.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Carina, origin story.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How I got started is that I have a very eclectic background, meandering through various college majors and careers. I started off working my way through college by doing office work and found that there was a lot of need for various database stuff. I was doing a lot database development, got into relational databases. It was totally all about, &#8220;Oh, my God. You can do that. You can link things together like this,&#8221; and start doing scripting for those until finally I reached a point where I needed true programming in order to accomplish things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I started learning purely to solve those basic business office problems that were going on and little by little, I started inching my way into this being something that I could do for a living. The funny thing is that in college, I was actually studying theater but I was at a school that had a very good theater department and a really good CS department. I found that at night, I was hanging out with my great CS buddies instead of my great theater buddies. That’s a little cue about where my real interest probably are.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Although, now as a developer evangelist, I think it really circles back to using both of those that I&#8217;m able to use my theater background and my programming background and my passion for both to really be able to talk to people about things that I think really matter and that aren&#8217;t getting as much attention as I really believe that they should. At this point, I have I think some reputation as a speaker and that wouldn&#8217;t be possible without having that convergence of both backgrounds. I love where I come from. I love those roots.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In the meantime, also because I just love to do too many things at once, I was also in my spare time doing work as a sex educator. That slowly became things where I was getting certifications and that&#8217;s also really merged. If you look closely at my talks, almost all of them have a thread of sex education influences going through so it&#8217;s really my way of sneaking in that knowledge to people as well that it&#8217;s about things like how we think about gender as programmers, how we think about people&#8217;s relationships, how we think about a lot of things about the human side and make assumptions that aren&#8217;t nearly as valid as we think they are until we have a good grounding in sex education and realize the world is a lot more complex than we initially imagine, so taking some of the limitations of our education because so many of us are very grounded in CS and not nearly grounded enough at broader range of subjects and really trying to introduce more of the social sciences side of things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s awesome. In sex education, you must think about culture a lot. There’s a lot of dealing with what is a scientific fact what is a cultural&#8230; I don&#8217;t want to say decision. What is a cultural &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Norm or default, perhaps?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would say both of those words. There’s norms and there&#8217;s decisions that we make about what we think as a norm or what we think should be a norm. Certainly, that&#8217;s sometimes the case. As programmers, we&#8217;re deciding, &#8220;Well, that&#8217;s too much of an edge case so regardless of whether this exists, I&#8217;ve decided the norm for this code base is &#8211;&#8221; so you&#8217;re going beyond acceptance of what is typical and saying this has to be typical.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right and there are ways that we can design things that deliberately include or exclude certain cases like how we design our database schemas around marriage modeling, for example. It’s one topic I&#8217;ve seen you use a lot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, there&#8217;s that really classic term of the title but it&#8217;s &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Schemas for the real world, I think it was?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, the article. But it&#8217;s called &#8216;Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective&#8217; and it is at a link that we will provide on the website for this episode.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s definitely a classic of the genre at this point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It goes through every possibility. It winds up with Graph Theory, which is the first time I learned about Graph Theory. But he just breaks it down so well or she actually, I&#8217;m not really sure what was wrote it. But it&#8217;s one of those things that made my jaw drop for the first time and realized, A, this is legitimate topic in programming and B, I could actually talk to other people so they&#8217;d care too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Have you mentioned that you got excited about relational databases because you can link these things together and certainly, graph databases are like that too, in another level. I just learned Neo4j like a week ago so I&#8217;m having fun with that. I stopped halfway through the tutorial and changed my little program so it will drive dependency graph of the various repositories that I have downloaded.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s amazing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, while we&#8217;re on this topic of super important, yet also interesting and entertaining links, one thing I ran across recently was that somebody has gone and collected a bunch of falsehoods programmers believe about X articles and collected them into a meta list called &#8216;Awesome Falsehoods&#8217; and I&#8217;ll put that link in the show notes as well. It’s really cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am a big fan of that. I guess this predates people putting lists of things on GitHub but I created a meta list of falsehoods programmers believe and put it on my blog in, I think in 2012. I definitely am a fan of this genre of things to think about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wonder if has anything to do with the fact that you have an accent in your name.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That definitely helps me run into some of the falsehoods that programmers believe on a regular basis. I went to a Meetup at Stripe last night and my pre-printed name tag said A-N-D-R, Unicode thing that stands up and down and then have an intersecting halfway line and then the meta character that represents return at the end of a line, it was pretty amazing. I&#8217;ve never seen that one before.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s fantastic. I get some decent ones as a hyphenated but yeah, the accent must be even more exciting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am intimately familiar with what happens when you render the Unicode accent with ‘e’ entity in the Windows Latin 1 Encoding, which is capital A with the tilde sign over it and then a copyright symbol.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One comment on your perspective origin stories, I thought it was interesting that Carina got into programming driven by the problems she wanted to solve and André was in it just for the fun, at least in Ruby. &#8220;I read the book twice before I will write a program.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Those was amazing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Carina, what exactly is Ruby Together?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Ruby Together is a nonprofit trade organization. It’s incorporated in the US. It&#8217;s a 501(C)(6), which is not the same as a more commonly known 501(C)(3), which is a charitable organization. This is a trade association. The idea here is that everyone in the industry is pursuing a common goal, shared needs, shared interests, and shared investment solving those problems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Ruby Together&#8217;s mission is to support the development of core Ruby infrastructure projects that are open source and to make sure it&#8217;s financially viable to keep those going, to be not just maintained and secure but also moving forward, adding new features including things like gemstash and ultimately, in the long-term to be able to pay developers to work full time, not just the infrastructure projects but even eventually things like having a full time community paid developer on Ruby core, on Rails core. That’s a future that we envision. It’s going to take a while but we&#8217;ve definitely made progress in just the year and a half that Ruby Together has existed.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That’s the short term where we are and that the long term where we want to be is that some things are just too important for the whole community to be controlled by one or a few companies. We need to make sure that we can always be putting community needs first when you&#8217;re talking about infrastructure. That’s why it needs to be a community-based organization but we feel really strongly that it&#8217;d be something that&#8217;s widespread community funding, not dependent on one or a few companies.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you think about potential, if you&#8217;re only funded by one or a few companies, if the industry experiences a downturn or one company has problems and starts having to slash its budget, we cannot allow Ruby infrastructure to just suddenly be having problems. There has to be a wide enough funding base that no individual company&#8217;s problems become a disaster for the whole community. That&#8217;s the kind of where we&#8217;re coming from is there is a part that&#8217;s ethical and there&#8217;s a part that&#8217;s just plain all business sense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s worth pointing out that this is not a theoretical thing. This has already happened. There was a time a couple years ago when several members of the Ruby core team and one person who was also a member of the Rails core team were all working at AT&amp;T Interactive and then there was a re-org. Suddenly, all of those people had to find new jobs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Fortunately, I think at the time it was Heroku who has stepped in and started hiring some people. A couple of those people went to other companies as well. But we&#8217;re still kind of in that same situation where as far as I know, we&#8217;ve got a couple of Ruby core people working at Heroku and other people may be scattered elsewhere. But we&#8217;re still highly dependent as a community on corporations who are willing to pay somebody to work full time on language infrastructure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So for Ruby Together, a company can contribute to Ruby infrastructure without the cost of a full time, highly paid developer?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Speaking of contributions, you mentioned that it&#8217;s a 501(C)(6) not a (C)(3), does it still have that same tax exempt status? Oh, sorry. Does it still have the same property where if I, as an individual donate the contribution is tax deductible?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a really good question, Sam. To answer the first half of that question, yes we are a non-profit, at least in the US. The IRS said that we meet their criteria for a non-profit organization and to answer with second half of the question, yes it&#8217;s tax deductible &#8212; asterisk, footnote &#8212; It&#8217;s not a donation because we&#8217;re not a charity and you need to be a person or company that uses Ruby to become a member of our trade association. If you give us a donation &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A contribution maybe?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, internally they&#8217;re classified as a membership fees. You become a member by paying us a fee and we use those membership fees to fund work that benefits everyone in our sector of Ruby developers. As a result, the way a trade organizations are structured, at least under US tax law is that it&#8217;s a business expense for a Ruby developer or a Ruby company.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Shared infrastructure is a business expense, in the same way that you buying a software tool is a business expense. If you&#8217;re not in the US, I guess I am not a lawyer or an accountant so I can&#8217;t offer you a guarantee, but I have heard back from developers in Europe, Australia and New Zealand that it can, at least be considered a business expense, according to some companies&#8217; lawyers and accountants. But if you&#8217;re outside the US, I would say honestly, you need to check with your own lawyer or accountant.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think you just said that if I get a membership in Ruby Together, it is not a tax deductible donation but it could be considered a business expense for me?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is correct. It is a tax deductible business expense for you to be a member of Ruby Together and then we don&#8217;t have to give up a big chunk of that money that you just gave us in taxes. We&#8217;re able to spend the whole amount of that money on Ruby developers and infrastructure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If I were to become a member of Ruby Together, what and how often would I pay for that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The answer to that is that fees are charged on a monthly basis. Although, you are welcome to pay on any longer basis if you want. A couple of companies just pay once a year because frankly, it&#8217;s easier for their accounting department to write one check, rather than deal with it every month. We’re happy to take money in larger chunks of time, if that makes more sense for individual company. But it&#8217;s charged on month to month basis.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That was really a very deliberate choice so that unlike, say something like a Kickstarter, where you&#8217;re funding based on faith in the future, that thing that I&#8217;m funding, I hope will pan out, whereas with Ruby Together, if you don&#8217;t see at the end of the month that this is going the way you think it should, you can cancel your membership. But we believe that with our transparency every month reporting on what we&#8217;re doing, how much money we&#8217;re taking in, how much we&#8217;re spending, what has been able to fund, what progress we&#8217;re making toward the next goal that you will want to next month, continue to pay your membership fees.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The structure is really about faith in the community. You put faith in us and we put faith in you. I think that&#8217;s very different than most of the structures you see for there&#8217;s so many different ways to fund open source. There are dozens and these choices have been made really deliberately around certain principles. That’s a core one.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s various different levels that you can contribute. For individuals, it&#8217;s really low. It starts as little as, I think $10. Business membership start as little as $50 a month and we encourage companies to consider the upper-tiers like $2000 per month, there&#8217;s $5000 per month. For large companies that are making a lot of profit off of essentially complete dependency on Ruby to work, I think that things like $5000 per month, there are a lot of companies for whom that is a blip on their budget and the cost of say, another hack of RubyGems.org or something of equal impact in the future cost so much more than that so if we&#8217;re looking at the tradeoffs and be thinking about the idea of what is a suitable amount to come in and that reflects the value to the company, it reflects the amount of dependency the company has.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> What is Ruby Together membership get you? I think, André take that one because we do have a variety of tradeoffs and benefits that we have as part of membership.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks, Carina. The benefits for individual devs at the $10-level is a warm and fuzzy feeling that you&#8217;re helping us. At the $40-level, you then become a full-on member of Ruby Together and what that means is we send you an invite to our private member&#8217;s only Slack and you then have a vote in the yearly election for the board of directors.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The board of directors includes basically very community-minded Ruby developers who set our priorities for what we&#8217;re going to take our budget and try to accomplish. Our current members includes Steve Klabnik, Sarah Mei, Terence Lee, the director of the Ruby platform at Heroku. Coraline, who I hear that some of you have heard of and I guess, just joined the board, Camille Baldock. She works on the data team at Heroku.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Really what we&#8217;re aiming for with this is to have representatives of individual agencies, representatives of fiercely individual communitarian mindset and representatives of the largest, most platform-y, kind of like use of Ruby.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Of one thing that I like about this concept is that sometimes, when we talk about the community, we think only about individuals. But Ruby Together explicitly acknowledges that the community is a combination of companies and individuals.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. We’ve actually structured the company governance to reflect that and individual members and companies each get a vote in the board elections. While it&#8217;s very true that companies make more money and depend more heavily on this infrastructure for their businesses to function and profit, individuals have more say in what it is that we&#8217;re actually going to work on by virtue of there being more individuals that we have as members of the companies that we have as members and that was a deliberate choice that we made while we were setting up how the voting will work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m thinking to ask exactly what it is that Ruby Together supports in the interest of ensuring the future of Ruby.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The reason we want to fund these projects is right now, we need them to be stable. We&#8217;ve talked a bit about things like what happens when a person&#8217;s life changes. I mean, the people who are maintaining these projects now, eventually are going to have jobs that have more demands on their time or their family life is going to change or they just burn out on it for whatever reasons, people come and go. Part of Ruby Together&#8217;s work is to make sure that there are a new generation of people who are going to have the interest, and hopefully skills to be able to participate in these kinds of projects and have an interest in getting involved with them in the longer term.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the things that we do with that money along with funding current developers is we&#8217;ve been involved in both Rails Girl Summer of Code and Google Summer of Code that provides funding and mentorship for, essentially newcomers to the field to work on practical open source projects for several months at a time and really get their hands on the code and really get to spend time with experienced developers as their mentors. André, you want to tell a little bit more about what that&#8217;s been for us?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, absolutely. Ruby Together as it&#8217;s grown, we&#8217;ve kind of gone for the breadth over depth approach and this was another decision that we made early on, where we want the lottery winning number to be very high and we need a lot of people to win the lottery for all of Ruby infrastructure to collapse. Instead of hiring a single person to be a full time dev across all of these projects, what we&#8217;ve done is basically contracted out for five hours a week with a bunch of devs. I am one of the devs so I do work on Bundler and on Ruby Gems and sometimes on RubyGems.org.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s David Radcliffe. His main job is at Shopify, doing ops work and he spends his Ruby Together time working on RubyGems.org. There’s Samuel Giddins. He&#8217;s a student at University of Chicago right now but he spends his time on Bundler and on Ruby Gems. He’s actually also on the CocoaPods team. He wrote the underlying dependency resolver that CocoaPods and Ruby Gems and Bundler all use to figure out which versions of packages can work together successfully.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As we talked about in this month&#8217;s newsletter, we actually just hired Liz Abinante whose main jobs is at New Relic. She&#8217;s working on documentation. We gave her the title Empress of Documentation. As Bundler and Ruby Gems come closer together, we’re going to need more work to consolidate and integrate all of that scattered documentation that has accreted over the years.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s Ellen Marie Dash, who&#8217;s been working on Ruby Gems and working on some of our internal tooling that we use to keep an eye on open source projects. I think, they&#8217;re working on called &#8216;how_is&#8217;. It’s basically like, &#8220;How is this open source project doing? What should we be looking at? What’s getting neglected? What&#8217;s getting taken care well?&#8221; I have really high hopes that that tooling, once it&#8217;s complete, will actually be super helpful for us as a team, as we&#8217;re trying to coordinate across all of these different projects and across all of these different people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> To summarize, we have around five or six people doing around five hours of work per week, across the projects that we&#8217;re able to afford to pay for work on right now, which are Bundler, Ruby Gems like the gem command itself and RubyGems.org, the Rails app that runs all of the downloads made by both the gem command and by Bundler and gemstash, the server that we&#8217;ll probably talk more about later.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, so Ruby Together is able to pay a few people for their time. I love that because it&#8217;s so much more inclusive. There&#8217;s only a certain number of people who can give free time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s absolutely been one of our goals. Honestly, at this point I think I&#8217;m the only person who would be able to give time for free, if we were able to pay for it. As a college student, say I&#8217;m in definitely needs some kind of job to pay for things that he wants to take care of. He actually initially got involved in the project because of a grant from Stripe and that&#8217;s how he wrote the resolver that wound up going into CocoaPods and then into Bundler and then I &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is that part of Summer of Code?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, it was part of Stripe&#8217;s open source grants program, where they select a few people and give them some money to work on open source for a while. Then afterwards, I was able to say, &#8220;Ruby Together can actually pay you to continue helping with this,&#8221; and he said, &#8220;Oh, okay cool. I will keep doing that then.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Now, it&#8217;s time to a shout out for our supporters. Speaking of both companies and individuals are part of our community, the cost of this episode have been covered by Atomist. Atomist is my employer now and I&#8217;m super excited to be there because we are building developer automation tool such that every company can develop with smooth processes that save them time without having a whole team of full time people dedicated to developer tooling. Check it out and Atomist.com.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>To me among other things, it&#8217;s an issue that I&#8217;ve been an advocate for quite a while which is fair pay. Usually, the contacts when we talk about fair pay is things like the gender pay gap. But the bottom line is that everyone deserves fair pay and this is a really common one to treat programmers as, &#8220;As an industry we&#8217;re well paid so stuff that you do for your own love of the community and the benefit the whole community somehow should be things that are done for free.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It&#8217;s a really unusual perspective that few other industries share the idea that incredibly valuable work that benefits everyone should be unlimited free labor is really not consistent frankly with capitalism, in general. Although, it is consistent with the idea of large companies capitalizing off of free labor so it&#8217;s somewhat consistent with capitalism.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But overall, it also makes some big assumptions about individuals &#8212; not everyone in programming is making bundles of money off of it. Certainly, not everyone works for a startup. Not everyone is working in San Francisco. Lots of people are working at very different wages across the world so fair pay includes making sure that everyone&#8217;s work is valued for what it is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think this is something that I really value about Ruby Together is that perspective that contributions of open source need to be fairly paid and that benefits everybody. That’s not just an ethical stance, it&#8217;s a really I think just sensible stance for the whole community to have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Amen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That raises a really interesting question, which is it can be really, really hard to get developers to pay for stuff like I make a six figure salary and when I see some bit of software that&#8217;s like $30, I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Do I really need that? I don&#8217;t know.&#8221; How do you overcome that developer inertia and that instinct to be like, &#8220;I just write the shit myself.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s been a really interesting challenge to be honest. The biggest thing that helps overcome the inertia is that programmers just feel an intense amount of positive things about Ruby and about gems and about sharing their code with other developers and getting to use code written by other developers. Honestly, I feel like the majority of response from individual devs has been, &#8220;Wow. Oh, my God. Holy shit. It cost that much to keep this up and going.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Actually, I really want that to stay up and keep going because I use it all the time and I care about it a lot. I guess that is important to me, it turns out as you mentioned it. That’s actually been really nice to get feedback from individual Ruby developers. But I guess, the flip side of that is that companies don&#8217;t have feelings and that makes it much harder to convince companies that they also want to give us large piles of money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m going to make a distinction there because I think what&#8217;s interesting to me that I&#8217;ve observe is how much smaller companies, particularly agencies and consultancies have been much more willing to step up because my theory on this is that they&#8217;re much more attuned to the dollar value of an hour&#8217;s work so they notice any time they&#8217;re doing non-billable work and what the cost of that is. It’s much easier to look at something like Ruby Together and say, &#8220;Wow, you can save us money on not doing non-billable work and I know exactly what this cost the company and I&#8217;d be willing to pay some amount of that to not cost the company this. This is like a great idea.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Whereas, in large corporations, there&#8217;s a sort of like budget as a slush fund or everything has some sort of line item and as long as Ruby Together is perceived as a charity, rather than a business trade association that&#8217;s there for business purposes to serve profitability, I think it&#8217;s really hard to have that conversation with large companies because they don&#8217;t have a line item for charity. They don&#8217;t see it as a conversation to have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But Ruby Together is not a charity and I think that&#8217;s a major misconception that everyone can really help to dispel because when we go in to have those conversations with them, that&#8217;s the first thing that we have to overcome is this idea that it&#8217;s a donation, rather than it&#8217;s an investment.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things that you mentioned André is that once you said, &#8220;It cost this much,&#8221; then individual developers like, &#8220;Of course, we should support this.&#8221; But my question to you would be is do you think that we&#8217;re all for individual developers were all like, &#8220;We can help you offset this amount of money that&#8217;s going out the door but if you&#8217;re going to start making a profit off of this, we don&#8217;t want to support you in the amount of time spent on this.&#8221; We&#8217;re talking about server cost. That’s something completely different. Do you feel that it&#8217;s happening there?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like there&#8217;s a limited amount of that. I guess honestly at this point, I&#8217;ve been working on Bundler as an open source project for about six or seven years now. I mostly get the sense that developers are kind of mentally calculating that even if I keep doing this for another five years, I&#8217;m not going to ever have made enough money to pay for the hours that I spent over the last six or seven years.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think the equation ends up making it look like, &#8220;I&#8217;m still doing this out of caring about the community, rather than trying to make a buck,&#8221; and &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s nice to have the excuse to tell your partner, though that this time is actually also bringing an income for the family.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely true. Actually, that&#8217;s a pattern that we&#8217;ve seen play out multiple times in the people that we have working on open source. Our goal as an organization is to fund development on the open source infrastructure that the Ruby language needs and that makes it both incredibly easy to get people excited about supporting it because they have such positive feelings about the Ruby language and Ruby infrastructure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But also it means that when we are actually paying money to support that development work, suddenly people with small kids who would otherwise be giving up on donating their free time to keeping Ruby Gems up are like, &#8220;This actually helps me underwrite the new cost that just cropped up as a result of this kid and this is now extremely valuable to me to do and now RubyGems.org gets security patches applied on a regular basis, rather than on an as possible in our spare time around the requirements of the rest of my life with free work at the lowest priority.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This is played out for real in, I guess 2013, when there was a security issue. We knew about the security issue. All of us had it as soon as we have some time to do free work, we’ll fix it and none of us had time to do free work before a hacker figured out how to exploit it and Ruby Gems was down for like two weeks because we had to throw away the servers, we had to re-download every gem and check some of it to make sure it hadn&#8217;t been replaced with a Trojan. It just took so much time and effort to recover from that hack.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I guess obviously, I can&#8217;t guarantee that we won&#8217;t get hacked now but I have high confidence that everything that we know about is fixed because we&#8217;re paying someone to fix everything that we know about as part of their high priority, &#8220;I&#8217;m getting paid time,&#8221; rather than as part of their lowest priority. This is fun but it&#8217;s just like throwing away free time for no good reason.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was such a great example. This is something I&#8217;m passionate about. I do a lot of training stuff here in Central Ohio. If I get another to developer who has tons of experience, who were working on some sort and [inaudible] something and they pull up Sublime Text and they just like, &#8220;I know I don&#8217;t want to pay for the license.&#8221; [inaudible] button and pops up some Sublime, like I would go crazy because dude, you&#8217;ve been in the industry for a while and what is this? This is something that I see like on a smaller scale but it happens so often like, &#8220;You know what? You should probably just go ahead pay for that,&#8221; in addition to having brought in a number of speakers locally and having to also fight for like, &#8220;Yeah, I don&#8217;t care. If Sandy Metz wants X or Michael Feathers wants X or whomever want X, like this person is making contributions to our community and making our community better,&#8221; I&#8217;ve definitely seen it where companies are like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t think so. Do they should just come by for free and they should get this infrastructure for free.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In you guys case, it is something I&#8217;ve seen quite a bit. It&#8217;s not really a question at all but it is one of those things that really kind of the ticks me off because I feel like once you hit a certain threshold, we have to really enable, I think people like you two to continue working on stuff because it&#8217;s meaningful and there&#8217;s a lot of people making money off of it. There&#8217;s that too. Come on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s another thing about it. Also, as a small business owner and someone who was more or less well-off financially, looking at software companies when you&#8217;re in this business that you had this huge profit margin and we pay a ton of money in taxes. If your company&#8217;s doing well, just ask what your tax bill was last year, unless you have some weird inversions thing going on. We have opportunities here to definitely support organizations like Ruby Together but for whatever reason, we just don&#8217;t. I&#8217;m sorry, I know that&#8217;s not a question but it&#8217;s something that really, really ticks me off.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Totally. Hear, hear.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks for the rant.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, absolutely and it&#8217;s really is something that we&#8217;ve seen. My theory so far is that it&#8217;s just like the very strong status quo like programmers build these services for themselves and then companies expect to be able to use them because they&#8217;re there and they&#8217;re free because programmers want to make them free to other programmers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There is a good article that came out recently, retrospective on RethinkDB and it pointed out that the developer tools market is like a terrible market to be in. One reason is because people will do it for free because we&#8217;re developers and to be like developing things that we use so we&#8217;ll published those.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The other reason is that reluctance of companies and developers to pay for things that there&#8217;s actually very little willingness to turn out money for this. This is just a personal perception because I now work for a company developing developer tools, which is awesome because I love developing tools for myself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Totally. I guess we now fall into that same bucket. It is actually pretty enjoyable to be able to fix things in Ruby Gems or in Bundler when there&#8217;s a problem. But I guess in a similar way, there are companies that I&#8217;ve talked to who felt like it was worth it to assign a full time salaried employee to work for six months, rather than give us a few hundred dollars and take advantage of some work that we had already done.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Now, you&#8217;re going to be like the budget vagaries of I could pay a person because I&#8217;ve got that authorized and that comes out of this budget versus paying another company which would come out of a totally different budget then we get back to that bit about small companies are more willing, Carina I think you said.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Sam said that companies don&#8217;t have feelings. Well, companies don&#8217;t make decisions, people do. In small companies, you&#8217;ve got individual people that looked like more power to make those decisions and they do have feelings and foresight, in some cases so that might contribute to a small company &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; Foresight is a nice thing. We could use more company [inaudible] with foresight, I think.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that might be a theme this season.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If I can actually offer just a moment of hindsight as well, I&#8217;m old enough to remember what Ruby and Rails development was like before Bundler came along and &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s very kind of you to remember.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was vendoring everything and if that didn&#8217;t work, hoping like heck that you could figure out the magical combination of all the version numbers of all the gems and plug ins that you depended on. Then RVM came along and made that slightly easier because you could use a gem set and then not have these gem versions interfering with those gem versions but still &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was less than ideal but I absolutely feel what you were just saying. In fact, I did an entire conference talk on just that. As a person who&#8217;s been doing Ruby since way back when and as a person who&#8217;s worked on Bundler, I basically took all of that historical experience and said, &#8220;I could actually give a conference talk about not just what exactly is Bundler doing anyway but why is it about? Why is it doing that specific thing?&#8221; So I have an entire conference talk that I gave at, it must have been RailsConf because it wasn&#8217;t the RubyConf that just happened. It&#8217;s called &#8216;How Does Bundler Work, Anyway?&#8217; I have a blog post version of it as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But it&#8217;s basically like how does it require work? How does loading things into the load path work? How does Ruby Gems work? How does Bundler work? And walking through like, what problems do you have when you&#8217;re here that leads you to the next solution and then what problems does the next solution create that lead you to the solution after that? It turns out and I didn&#8217;t even realize this at the time until I was working on the talk as background for Bundler but it&#8217;s almost like a blindingly, bright and clear path of like, &#8220;I have solved this problem and this has created a &#8211;&#8221; It takes me like 10 seconds of using the new solution to be like, &#8220;I really have this new problem,&#8221; and that walks you through 10 years of Ruby dev tools history in 30 minutes because like, &#8220;Actually, now that you have that, you definitely have this new problem that needs solving.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess, the short version of all of that and starting from my rant is like, &#8220;You kids don&#8217;t know how good you have it these days.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe I should have included that at the end of my talk.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Old man shout at cloud.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m curious are there problems uncovered or problems created? Now, suddenly it&#8217;s easy to download things so you could get past that and you find the next problem. It&#8217;s easy to download things. Now, I&#8217;ve screwed myself by introducing thousands of dependencies.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s absolutely both. I do talked about that a little bit in my talk but that is an interesting question and something that I didn&#8217;t focus on. Ultimately, I think you uncovered the next most painful problem and suddenly that&#8217;s your newest, most painful problem. At the same time by making that last generation problem go away, you’ve allowed yourself to do things that weren&#8217;t possible before that create new painful problems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Just because it was possible, it doesn&#8217;t mean a good idea.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s true. I guess I would certainly rather be in a world where there are thousands of gems than a world where there&#8217;s a little 10 gems because they&#8217;re so hard to install.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, André, now give us the number of how many gems there actually are.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, okay. There’s around 120,000 gems now. That’s by name. It&#8217;s not every version. It’s just a gem with a name. There&#8217;s around 120,000 and then if you count every single version that&#8217;s ever been released of those 120,000 gems, we&#8217;re pushing about 1.2 million gems right now. It’s really a large number like it&#8217;s taken off in a big way and Ruby have felt very empowered to make gems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Definitely, I guess even related to that, I don&#8217;t talk about this in my talk at all but one of the things that Bundler did was ship with a standard library level way to create a new gem and a new gem skeleton and be able to run a rake release and suddenly it&#8217;s on RubyGems.org. We saw a really big spike in people creating their own gems because all they had to do was run Bundler gem and throw some code in a file and now they had a gem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What you make easy, people will do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely true.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was struck, André in your origin story. You said that Ruby was useless in 2004 because reuse was so hard. You had to go download somebody tarball off their website in order to reuse that code and people credit Rails with the thing that made the difference for Ruby, between being useless or not. Certainly, Rails was super important but without a package manager, without Bundler and Ruby Gems, it&#8217;s not the language, it&#8217;s the language system that we work in, including libraries like Rails. But the package manager is super important for exactly the reason you just enunciated that if you make it easy for people to share and build on each other work, they will.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely and I honestly feel like that has historically been one of the biggest strengths of the entire Ruby community because even back when it was ridiculously hard to share code, people were still super enthusiastic about it. I guess at that point in the ecosystem that we had, considering how hard it was, people were just unreasonably excited about sharing and reusing Ruby code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I feel like that kind of like ethos has carried through both into the creation of Ruby Gems, which I think the very first beta of Ruby Gems launched in 2000 through 2004. Then it really started getting by and use around 2005. I remember the first Ruby conference I ever went to was in 2005 and I got to see these people show up and stare at them in total awe because they were on the Rails core team or they were creating Ruby Gems and be like, &#8220;Oh, my God. This is amazing. How did they get so smart and so capable and so accomplished?&#8221; This seems impossible as whatever I was at the time, a college junior. I feel like just that excitement of sharing things, really led to Ruby Gems, led to Bundler, led to the GitHub Ruby ecosystem that we have because Ruby is just excited about sharing code with each other.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We really are. I think going back to Jessica&#8217;s point about solving one set of problems allows us to essentially create whole new ones. The upside is that we&#8217;ve got those 1.2 million packages sitting on RubyGems.org. The downside of that is that the traffic for all of that is enormous. It was a year ago&#8230; Let&#8217;s see, I think it was 280 terabytes per month and that has continued to skyrocket. Ten months later, it was already 460 terabyte, which is about 60% growth in 10 months so you can see that already, the numbers are just enormous and they&#8217;re growing so much bigger.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s this myth that essentially Ruby is in decline and when you look at those kind the numbers, not only as Ruby not in decline but our most troubling problem is that Ruby is still growing and growing and growing and there is financial cost to the community that right now is not being borne by the community for that. André, what is the server bill for RubyGems.org at this point?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess to be clear, the server bill is currently covered by a combination of actual dollars from Ruby Together members, actual dollars from the Ruby central non-profit and donated services from Fastly. But if there were a single entity covering the entire server bill in one place, it would theoretically cost something like $40,000 a month.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Today?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, that&#8217;s today with clearly increasing usage and expected higher costs over time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do we think that this is like natural, organic interest in Ruby or is it something else? Like it&#8217;s individual kids and like, &#8220;I want to get into Ruby and I&#8217;m doing stuff,&#8221; or do we think this is more corporate usage. Any idea about that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s both. At this exact moment in our infrastructure life, it&#8217;s very hard to tell who exactly it is that&#8217;s asking us for gems because data centers don&#8217;t differentiate between people like we know that US east downloads a bajillion gems. But we don&#8217;t know who are the individual people that are renting computers for Amazon are. That’s something that we&#8217;re interested in trying to get better at figuring out but the overall story seems to be everyone is really excited about using a lot of Ruby. Even if people are talking about how Ruby is the newest, coolest stuff anymore at the moment, there are still a huge amount of Ruby developers, more than there ever have been before and they&#8217;re writing and deploying a huge amount of Ruby code more than there ever has been for.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My sense is that there are a lot of companies for a while there, Rails was pretty much synonymous with a certain type of Silicon Valley startup. If you were doing a startup, you were hiring as many Rails developers as you could find. But there&#8217;s a spectrum from individual enthusiast just learning to program all the way up to a giant corporate entity using Rails and 50 gems. Only towards the very big end of that spectrum does it make sense for an organization to stand up its own private gem&#8217;s server so I would imagine that a whole lot of that traffic is coming from that middle section of companies that are big enough to have a couple of Rails developers but not big enough to have bothered spending the time setting up a private gem server.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess, interestingly anecdotal evidence from employees at the very biggest end of companies is that mid-end companies as they grow are like, &#8220;We should stand up in an internal gem server,&#8221; and then as they grow again, they&#8217;re like, &#8220;It&#8217;s not worth the huge amount of operational costs to run own internal gem servers. Ruby gems actually does a really good job of running a worldwide infrastructure that allows all of our data centers fast access. Why don&#8217;t we just get it from them?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So never mind?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess I would say not never mind. that is absolutely true and then there&#8217;s an additional life cycle step beyond that where they outgrow their own ops team and the ops team says, &#8220;It&#8217;s no longer worth it to spend our time on this. We could just make the RubyGems.org ops team take care of it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And not pay for it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For instance, Stripe totally has their own Ruby Gems server and the reason for that is security because you want control over that code that is getting to play out to all of your production side. If you had Ruby Gems, with this infrastructure to make it possible to download gems throughout the world, and also you had an organization backing it that had resources to make certain states secure, that would be ideal.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That would be ideal and Stripe is basically the Ruby&#8217;s founding member of Ruby Together. They turned over money to the Bundler project when that actually meant writing André a personal check. I, then took the money from Stripe that they were giving me for no particular benefit to themselves. They didn&#8217;t put any strings on it. They just said like, &#8220;We use and like Bundler and if giving you money will help make it better, here’s some money.&#8221; I took that money and used it to pay for lawyers and pay for incorporation costs and get the IRS to give us non-profit status.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Stripes, still to this day is by dollar amount, the highest contributor to Ruby Together on every single one. I, very much feel like Stripe as a company that recognizes how good it is for them to be supporting that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good job, Stripe. Yay!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Now, that lead on Stripe for being the biggest contributor. Hey, every other company, wouldn&#8217;t you like to out-best them? Come on, you want to come and hire, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, this should be at the top of their list.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, like we&#8217;re competitive industry. Come on y&#8217;all, come compete.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a question about gemstash. At my place at work, we use geminabox, which meets our needs. What are some differences? Geminabox has been around for a while?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Geminabox is a private gem server. You stand it up, you create private gems that you don&#8217;t want to push to public Ruby gems and then you put those in geminabox. Then you can add that geminabox server to your gem file as a source and say, &#8220;I want these gems to come from this source, geminabox over here.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That way, you can have your own gems that are internal but you get the versioning benefits, you get the speed of installation of a tarball versus a Git repo benefits and everyone can see the promises you&#8217;re making via version packages, rather than running alongside the bleeding edge Git repo.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Gemstash is a product that Ruby Together funded the development as a direct response to talking to companies that we&#8217;re giving Ruby Together money. It’s both a private gem server like geminaboxes but it&#8217;s also a caching Ruby Gems mirror. This is really the thing that makes gemstash interesting because you can run gemstash on your laptop. Once you&#8217;ve installed a gem from Ruby Gems, you will never download it again.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> You can run gemstash in your office and tell Bundler that when it sees Ruby.Gems.org, it should instead look at your in-office mirror and now the 50 dev boxes in your office, only have to talk to Ruby Gems once and after that Bundler was installed as a local operation on the local network.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Man, I need that for Elm.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In retrospect, it&#8217;s such a good idea. Then like the last and big one is that if you have a data center and it&#8217;s very common to have like 50 or 100 separate apps servers in a data center, you can run a single gemstash in that data center and you just like solved the, &#8220;It&#8217;s really expensive to fetch the same gem a hundred times from the internet problem,&#8221; without having to check a giant tar or gzip or blob into your Git repo, which has been the traditional solution for that. It’s miserable.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Gemstash, I guess is both an effort for us to support that private gem infrastructure in a way that looks just like Ruby Gems so like gemstash supports gem push and gem yank, where geminabox is like written its own client infrastructure so you use a separate geminabox command to push a private gem. The way gemstash is written. It uses the same public API as RubyGems.org so you say gem push to this server and now you have it in your gemstash. Then I was saying that secondary factor of like a pass through cache/mirror of RubyGems.org is a really powerful thing under certain circumstances.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That’s why we built gemstash to address that pain point that we heard from companies where, honestly kind of like big companies. We talked to them and every single one of them said, &#8220;Yeah, we&#8217;ve assigned a full time employee for months to solve this local internal gem server/Ruby Gems mirror problem,&#8221; and so we said, &#8220;Well, we can solve that better than you and we can solve it in less work than you because we&#8217;re already familiar with the problem.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think a really concrete example that we can look to in the past is Heartbleed and OpenSSL. Before Heartbleed happened, OpenSSL was getting something like about $2000 per year of total contributions to support a handful of developers to work on OpenSSL. Now, the entire industry depends on OpenSSL and nobody was thinking about it at all. Clearly, not financially but in general so much infrastructure that we just take for granted.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The moment we stopped taking it for granted was when Heartbleed happened and suddenly, every company had to scramble and the amount of lost time, the amount of I think in many cases was lost goodwill. You know, customers don&#8217;t always understand why something isn&#8217;t working. They may just look at your company and say, &#8220;Well, this product isn&#8217;t working. Your server is down. Clearly, your company is terrible. Why should I do business with you?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There was all this cost of doing support, there was developer time. Altogether, the industry lost over a half a billion dollars on just cleaning up after Heartbleed. Now, you look at that kind of thing and you say, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know what the number would be if a similar situation happened within the Ruby community but you can&#8217;t send an individual company basis, what would be the cost of a major security breach again of something like RubyGems.org. What was the cost when it happened last time? You can look at those and come up with some real world numbers of what is the value to our company in making sure that these projects are stable, that they&#8217;re secure, that they&#8217;re understanding community wide problems and addressing them? It matters.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Compare that to the cost of a monthly membership in Ruby Together and Ruby Together looks like a really good idea along with SSL together and who knows what else. It also gets to the point that you like to think that software is [inaudible] once used it forever. But very few programs are like that. Software is an ongoing expense, just using software is an ongoing expense. It is not a capital expenditure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, definitely. One of the big outcomes of Heartbleed was that people suddenly cared enough about OpenSSL to donate money to the project. There are very succinct and clear write ups of what the outcomes and results from that are. Heartbleed led to enough donations to cover the cost of working on OpenSSL for exactly one year. That year is now over.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Open SSL no longer has funds to sustain ongoing development. If there is another Heartbleed hiding inside OpenSSL somewhere that no one has found yet, it won&#8217;t get fixed until it&#8217;s out in the wild because no one has the money to actively work on it right now. Seeing that happen basically served as a giant wake up call for me to say, &#8220;This needs to be not something where I go to a company and say, please give me a pile of money and I&#8217;ll go away.&#8221; This needs to be something where I go to a company and say, &#8220;This is a danger to you and your company and a huge potentially cost every single day that you&#8217;re in business and we need to keep preventing it from costing you money, basically as long as this matters to you.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, the question I get asked on a fairly regular basis is why are you doing things this way. It seems like it&#8217;s hard. Why don&#8217;t you just go to a couple of companies and get a big fat grant? The answer, first of all is that there aren&#8217;t that many companies that are offering big fat grants but a bigger problem is just sustainability. You&#8217;re going to need to go back next year and hope that again you can get fat grant from them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We need a base of ongoing contributions, not a one-time infusion. In the Django community, they had one of those one-time infusions, they used to pay a developer to work on Django, the money ran out after a couple of months and then what? You got someone who was working full time, who has taken time out of their life and career. When the money runs out, what is the project do? What is the individual do? We have to be able to make promises that developer can depend on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As André said, we&#8217;re paying for about five hours per week to various developers. When you can make a promise that that&#8217;s going to happen every week, then they can also make an arrangement with their employers to say this is the promise I&#8217;m making to you too. I&#8217;m only available 35 hours a week for this job or whatever it is because I&#8217;ve made a commitment to five hours a week somewhere else. It’s about making things really logistically possible as well. When we make a commitment to developers, they&#8217;re able to make a commitment to their family and their employers so one-time versus sustainability matters for a lot of different reasons.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For subscription model totally works for software and when you have community infrastructure that&#8217;s helping everyone, then your subscription can be very small as part of a large group of subscriptions. But it&#8217;s still if you&#8217;re not paying for software maintenance, you’re not getting maintained software.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely and that&#8217;s really what we&#8217;re hoping for is that a large enough number of people will be able to chip in and a large enough number of companies will be able to chip in that we cannot just keep this from falling over but actively make it better for everyone who uses Ruby.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and we talked earlier about how one reason, it&#8217;s hard to get people to pay for development tools is that developers will develop them for free. But that&#8217;s not sustainable because either, they become abandonware as the developers or developing them are done with developing them &#8212; I want to say the word development several more times in the sentence &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Steve Ballmer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; Or that tool that I developed that I was so proud of becomes a burden to the individual until I choose to give it up so yeah, buy your Sublime license and ask your company to join Ruby Together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think this is an interesting example because some things are harder than others to make. When somebody looks at that license fee for Sublime and says, &#8220;I don&#8217;t want to pay for it.&#8221; Okay, well you have other options. You can use lots of free other options like say, Vim or Emacs. The person&#8217;s answer is usually is, &#8220;Oh, that&#8217;s hard. It would take me time to learn to use that. This is so much faster and easier.&#8221; Well, yes it takes time. What is your time worth? It’s probably definitely worth the cost of that licensing fee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Similarly, you could in theory make another Bundler. How much time and expertise do you think it would take to be a person who can create another Bundler and maintain it? These are hard niche problems and there&#8217;s only a few people in the Ruby community who have currently the expertise to be able to pull that off.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It makes so much more sense to pay people to do stuff that they&#8217;re good at, rather than have so many people inside companies kind of chipping away at problems with this, that they don&#8217;t know as well how to solve. They’re spending a lot of time and stuff that isn&#8217;t the company&#8217;s core competence, their core product and they can&#8217;t do it nearly as cost effectively as people who are working on these projects already. It’s just silly the way that we&#8217;re approaching things right now as an industry. What is the value of your time invested in making a semi-good-ish result? It doesn&#8217;t make sense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s time for a listener shout out. Today&#8217;s shout out goes to Polly Schandorf. Polly is @N3rdyTeacher &#8212; that&#8217;s nerdy with a three &#8212; on Twitter and as you might guess from that, she&#8217;s a former school teacher who has made the switch to a programming career. I paired with Polly at Ruby Geek Camp a few months ago and I can personally attest that she is indeed a very cool person. Thanks very much for your support, Polly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We want this to be a 100% listener-supported show. If you feel inspired to help us out like Polly does, head over to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. Any donation will get you into our supporters only Slack and we may have some other perks as well that you can see on our Patreon page but any amount is definitely appreciated. Thanks, listeners.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We would like to end the show with a period of short reflection and that can be a call to action or something you&#8217;re going to take away from this or something that really surprised you and it&#8217;s going to stick with you on the way home or whatever. There’s been so much that we&#8217;ve talked about today that has my brain buzzing. It’s hard to pick one thing so I&#8217;ll go with the easy route, which is that during this call, I have officially become a friend of Ruby Together and I&#8217;m donating now. Thank you for reminding me to get off my butt and actually do that because the stuff is really important and thank you for your work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome. Thank you, Sam.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sam, that&#8217;s awesome, except it&#8217;s not donating &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Damn it!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; You&#8217;ve joined Ruby Together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am a member friend or something.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Before this podcast, I didn&#8217;t know what Ruby Together was. Based on the name, I thought it was going to be another warm, fuzzy Ruby thing but it&#8217;s much more important than that. This is an advancement in the software industry as a whole to form a trade organization that is a business, related to supporting all businesses and people and making our software infrastructure sustainable. As in the Heartbleed and OpenSSL example, this is something that many, many more software communities desperately need. I hope that Ruby Together is the front wave of an innovation that gives us a sustainable software infrastructure even more widely than Ruby.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would love to see that happen. That&#8217;s definitely kind of the underlying idea is hopefully that this model can apply to other situations and I know that there are some echoes of this kind of situation happening in the Python community. Although, I&#8217;m much less familiar with it than I am with the Ruby community. While I am only prepared to make this this kind of situation happen for Ruby, I really hope that other developers and other communities will try to figure out if this is something that they can make sustainable as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My take away today is that OpenSSL is back to being insufficiently funded. I did not know that and that scares the pants off of me. Ruby Together is an important project for this community &#8212; for Ruby community &#8212; but there&#8217;s so many other projects need something supporting them too. There’s things like the Linux Foundation. There are so many different models out there for how to do that but there&#8217;s so many projects that have insufficient or no funding at all and we&#8217;re all relying on them. That scares me a lot. I think it’s part of the reason why I care so much about Ruby Together is because these kinds of things have to exist. We just can&#8217;t be gambling like this. That’s really frightening to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I will say that there is a great report on that bigger picture called &#8216;Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure&#8217;. It was written for the Ford Foundation by Nadia Eghbal who has been doing a great series of talks, drawing on the knowledge that she developed for this. It&#8217;s a real long read and it&#8217;s a really worthwhile read that gives a great insight into just how many problems we have with depending on open source infrastructure. Not because the dependency is bad but because it&#8217;s the unpaid open source infrastructure that we&#8217;re so reliant on and where that shifts the burden that companies are making on all of these projects. I really recommend reading or at least, skimming it and seeing some of Nadia&#8217;s talk where the most recent was a keynote at linux.conf.au just a week or so ago.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m going to take the easy way out and say that my reflection is that I really hope that this is very convincing and I really hope that the devs and companies that listen to the show and care about Ruby will join as members and will help us keep doing this work to actually keep all of Ruby Gems and all of the code-sharing ecosystem that is such a big part of what makes Ruby great continuing to work into the future.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Join Ruby Together. Tell your manager why your company should join Ruby Together and tell them why it should be at an aggressively high level that really reflects the value and importance and profitability of their dependence on Ruby and Ruby infrastructure projects so come in and come in at a level that really can help us to do important work that you think is worthwhile and know is necessary.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, please. Thank you, everybody. This has been a really informative and illuminating show, as always. It was wonderful to talk to you all and listeners, we will be back at you next time.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
</div>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning. As we record, this is January 25, 2017 and I would like to personally welcome you to our Cyberpunk Dystopia. I&#8217;m Sam Livingston-Gray.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sam, that&#8217;s a little too close to the truth. Can we just be Greater Than Code?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Greater Than Code it is. Welcome to Greater Than Code, everybody.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you and I am thrilled to be here today with Jay Bobo.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Booo!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m so excited to be back. I know I&#8217;ve been gone for a while but I&#8217;m here. It&#8217;s going to be a great podcast because all of our podcasts are amazing. We have André Arko and Carina C Zona.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Great to be here, Jay.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I&#8217;m really excited about getting to be on Greater Than code. Thanks for having us on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Carina C Zona is a developer advocate and certified sex educator. She spent a lot of time thinking about the unexpected cultural effects of our decisions as programmers. Carina is also the founder of CallbackWomen, which is on a mission to radically increase gender diversity at the podium of professional programmer’s conferences.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>André Arko has been writing Ruby since 2004, created the jQuery Rails Gem and joined the Bundler core team before 1.0. He founded and runs Ruby Together, the Ruby developer trade association and today he leads the combined Bundler and Ruby Gems team. Welcome to the show, Carina and André.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks. It&#8217;s great to be here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m actually super excited to be on Greater Than Code because this means that Amy can no longer hold her show over me. Now, we each have a show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, unless hers is better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m sure, it is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, Amy Wibowo?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>She&#8217;s my partner.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, cool. Origin stories! Origin stories!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, please. Who are you people?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How did you gain your superpowers, meaning learning how to code and everything else that you are proud of?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And you may say to our listeners as well, how did I get here?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I regularly asked myself, &#8220;How do I get here?&#8221; I guess as you just mentioned in my bio, I started doing Ruby in 2004, when it was completely useless. With no reason to Ruby at all, Rails didn&#8217;t exist. Libraries were scarce on the ground. If you wanted to reuse someone else&#8217;s Ruby code, you had to find their home page and download a tarball and stuff it into site Ruby yourself. That was fun times. But I was in college and doing a CS degree undergrad and I just really wanted to write some code that was more enjoyable to write than C++, which is what all my classes were in &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hear, hear.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; And so I guess at the time it felt like obscure and/or unusual languages. Ruby just struck me as incredibly enjoyable to write and incredibly enjoyable to read and I love how much it felt like a fun activity so I started doing a ton of Ruby. I read through the entire Pickaxe twice before I even had the Ruby Interpreter installed on my machine. It was fun times.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then after I&#8217;d been playing really enthusiastically with Ruby for a while, I think my very exciting and meaningful project was I tried to copy the interface of iTunes in a web browser as a CGI script. Then on the backend, it executed Apple scripts to control iTunes on my [inaudible] server. It was very exciting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So you ported iTunes to the browser?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, no. It&#8217;s just the interface window, like it listed songs, then it let you filter and it let you play, pause, skip, back, change volume. It never worked that great but it looked a lot like iTunes and as long as you were okay with the delay of running everything via OC script on the command line, which is four seconds and it worked. Then I saw this email on the Ruby talk mailing list from this weird Danish guy named David-something and he was like, &#8220;I just released &#8211;&#8221; I think it was Rail 0.10 and I was like, &#8220;Oh, that sounds cool. I&#8217;ve been struggling with Ruby CGI scripts. I would like something that was easier than that,&#8221; and then I started using Rails and swore a lot to myself as I started using it and it was amazing. I guess, history and inevitability let us here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But they were good swears, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I said a lot of good oh-wow-this-is-amazing swears as I tried out Rails.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, so it was like, &#8220;This was a holy shit.&#8221; Not, &#8220;What the fuck do I have supposed to do here?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I said holy shit to myself a lot as I was trying out Rails, in comparison to that CGI script that I had been using. Then, it&#8217;s history and inevitability. Now, I still write Ruby because I really enjoy writing Ruby and I still pay my bills by writing Rails apps really.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Carina, origin story.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How I got started is that I have a very eclectic background, meandering through various college majors and careers. I started off working my way through college by doing office work and found that there was a lot of need for various database stuff. I was doing a lot database development, got into relational databases. It was totally all about, &#8220;Oh, my God. You can do that. You can link things together like this,&#8221; and start doing scripting for those until finally I reached a point where I needed true programming in order to accomplish things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I started learning purely to solve those basic business office problems that were going on and little by little, I started inching my way into this being something that I could do for a living. The funny thing is that in college, I was actually studying theater but I was at a school that had a very good theater department and a really good CS department. I found that at night, I was hanging out with my great CS buddies instead of my great theater buddies. That’s a little cue about where my real interest probably are.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Although, now as a developer evangelist, I think it really circles back to using both of those that I&#8217;m able to use my theater background and my programming background and my passion for both to really be able to talk to people about things that I think really matter and that aren&#8217;t getting as much attention as I really believe that they should. At this point, I have I think some reputation as a speaker and that wouldn&#8217;t be possible without having that convergence of both backgrounds. I love where I come from. I love those roots.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In the meantime, also because I just love to do too many things at once, I was also in my spare time doing work as a sex educator. That slowly became things where I was getting certifications and that&#8217;s also really merged. If you look closely at my talks, almost all of them have a thread of sex education influences going through so it&#8217;s really my way of sneaking in that knowledge to people as well that it&#8217;s about things like how we think about gender as programmers, how we think about people&#8217;s relationships, how we think about a lot of things about the human side and make assumptions that aren&#8217;t nearly as valid as we think they are until we have a good grounding in sex education and realize the world is a lot more complex than we initially imagine, so taking some of the limitations of our education because so many of us are very grounded in CS and not nearly grounded enough at broader range of subjects and really trying to introduce more of the social sciences side of things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s awesome. In sex education, you must think about culture a lot. There’s a lot of dealing with what is a scientific fact what is a cultural&#8230; I don&#8217;t want to say decision. What is a cultural &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Norm or default, perhaps?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would say both of those words. There’s norms and there&#8217;s decisions that we make about what we think as a norm or what we think should be a norm. Certainly, that&#8217;s sometimes the case. As programmers, we&#8217;re deciding, &#8220;Well, that&#8217;s too much of an edge case so regardless of whether this exists, I&#8217;ve decided the norm for this code base is &#8211;&#8221; so you&#8217;re going beyond acceptance of what is typical and saying this has to be typical.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right and there are ways that we can design things that deliberately include or exclude certain cases like how we design our database schemas around marriage modeling, for example. It’s one topic I&#8217;ve seen you use a lot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, there&#8217;s that really classic term of the title but it&#8217;s &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Schemas for the real world, I think it was?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, the article. But it&#8217;s called &#8216;Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective&#8217; and it is at a link that we will provide on the website for this episode.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s definitely a classic of the genre at this point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It goes through every possibility. It winds up with Graph Theory, which is the first time I learned about Graph Theory. But he just breaks it down so well or she actually, I&#8217;m not really sure what was wrote it. But it&#8217;s one of those things that made my jaw drop for the first time and realized, A, this is legitimate topic in programming and B, I could actually talk to other people so they&#8217;d care too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Have you mentioned that you got excited about relational databases because you can link these things together and certainly, graph databases are like that too, in another level. I just learned Neo4j like a week ago so I&#8217;m having fun with that. I stopped halfway through the tutorial and changed my little program so it will drive dependency graph of the various repositories that I have downloaded.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s amazing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, while we&#8217;re on this topic of super important, yet also interesting and entertaining links, one thing I ran across recently was that somebody has gone and collected a bunch of falsehoods programmers believe about X articles and collected them into a meta list called &#8216;Awesome Falsehoods&#8217; and I&#8217;ll put that link in the show notes as well. It’s really cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am a big fan of that. I guess this predates people putting lists of things on GitHub but I created a meta list of falsehoods programmers believe and put it on my blog in, I think in 2012. I definitely am a fan of this genre of things to think about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I wonder if has anything to do with the fact that you have an accent in your name.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That definitely helps me run into some of the falsehoods that programmers believe on a regular basis. I went to a Meetup at Stripe last night and my pre-printed name tag said A-N-D-R, Unicode thing that stands up and down and then have an intersecting halfway line and then the meta character that represents return at the end of a line, it was pretty amazing. I&#8217;ve never seen that one before.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s fantastic. I get some decent ones as a hyphenated but yeah, the accent must be even more exciting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am intimately familiar with what happens when you render the Unicode accent with ‘e’ entity in the Windows Latin 1 Encoding, which is capital A with the tilde sign over it and then a copyright symbol.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One comment on your perspective origin stories, I thought it was interesting that Carina got into programming driven by the problems she wanted to solve and André was in it just for the fun, at least in Ruby. &#8220;I read the book twice before I will write a program.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Those was amazing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Carina, what exactly is Ruby Together?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Ruby Together is a nonprofit trade organization. It’s incorporated in the US. It&#8217;s a 501(C)(6), which is not the same as a more commonly known 501(C)(3), which is a charitable organization. This is a trade association. The idea here is that everyone in the industry is pursuing a common goal, shared needs, shared interests, and shared investment solving those problems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Ruby Together&#8217;s mission is to support the development of core Ruby infrastructure projects that are open source and to make sure it&#8217;s financially viable to keep those going, to be not just maintained and secure but also moving forward, adding new features including things like gemstash and ultimately, in the long-term to be able to pay developers to work full time, not just the infrastructure projects but even eventually things like having a full time community paid developer on Ruby core, on Rails core. That’s a future that we envision. It’s going to take a while but we&#8217;ve definitely made progress in just the year and a half that Ruby Together has existed.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That’s the short term where we are and that the long term where we want to be is that some things are just too important for the whole community to be controlled by one or a few companies. We need to make sure that we can always be putting community needs first when you&#8217;re talking about infrastructure. That’s why it needs to be a community-based organization but we feel really strongly that it&#8217;d be something that&#8217;s widespread community funding, not dependent on one or a few companies.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If you think about potential, if you&#8217;re only funded by one or a few companies, if the industry experiences a downturn or one company has problems and starts having to slash its budget, we cannot allow Ruby infrastructure to just suddenly be having problems. There has to be a wide enough funding base that no individual company&#8217;s problems become a disaster for the whole community. That&#8217;s the kind of where we&#8217;re coming from is there is a part that&#8217;s ethical and there&#8217;s a part that&#8217;s just plain all business sense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s worth pointing out that this is not a theoretical thing. This has already happened. There was a time a couple years ago when several members of the Ruby core team and one person who was also a member of the Rails core team were all working at AT&amp;T Interactive and then there was a re-org. Suddenly, all of those people had to find new jobs.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Fortunately, I think at the time it was Heroku who has stepped in and started hiring some people. A couple of those people went to other companies as well. But we&#8217;re still kind of in that same situation where as far as I know, we&#8217;ve got a couple of Ruby core people working at Heroku and other people may be scattered elsewhere. But we&#8217;re still highly dependent as a community on corporations who are willing to pay somebody to work full time on language infrastructure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So for Ruby Together, a company can contribute to Ruby infrastructure without the cost of a full time, highly paid developer?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Speaking of contributions, you mentioned that it&#8217;s a 501(C)(6) not a (C)(3), does it still have that same tax exempt status? Oh, sorry. Does it still have the same property where if I, as an individual donate the contribution is tax deductible?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a really good question, Sam. To answer the first half of that question, yes we are a non-profit, at least in the US. The IRS said that we meet their criteria for a non-profit organization and to answer with second half of the question, yes it&#8217;s tax deductible &#8212; asterisk, footnote &#8212; It&#8217;s not a donation because we&#8217;re not a charity and you need to be a person or company that uses Ruby to become a member of our trade association. If you give us a donation &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>A contribution maybe?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, internally they&#8217;re classified as a membership fees. You become a member by paying us a fee and we use those membership fees to fund work that benefits everyone in our sector of Ruby developers. As a result, the way a trade organizations are structured, at least under US tax law is that it&#8217;s a business expense for a Ruby developer or a Ruby company.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Shared infrastructure is a business expense, in the same way that you buying a software tool is a business expense. If you&#8217;re not in the US, I guess I am not a lawyer or an accountant so I can&#8217;t offer you a guarantee, but I have heard back from developers in Europe, Australia and New Zealand that it can, at least be considered a business expense, according to some companies&#8217; lawyers and accountants. But if you&#8217;re outside the US, I would say honestly, you need to check with your own lawyer or accountant.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think you just said that if I get a membership in Ruby Together, it is not a tax deductible donation but it could be considered a business expense for me?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is correct. It is a tax deductible business expense for you to be a member of Ruby Together and then we don&#8217;t have to give up a big chunk of that money that you just gave us in taxes. We&#8217;re able to spend the whole amount of that money on Ruby developers and infrastructure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If I were to become a member of Ruby Together, what and how often would I pay for that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The answer to that is that fees are charged on a monthly basis. Although, you are welcome to pay on any longer basis if you want. A couple of companies just pay once a year because frankly, it&#8217;s easier for their accounting department to write one check, rather than deal with it every month. We’re happy to take money in larger chunks of time, if that makes more sense for individual company. But it&#8217;s charged on month to month basis.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That was really a very deliberate choice so that unlike, say something like a Kickstarter, where you&#8217;re funding based on faith in the future, that thing that I&#8217;m funding, I hope will pan out, whereas with Ruby Together, if you don&#8217;t see at the end of the month that this is going the way you think it should, you can cancel your membership. But we believe that with our transparency every month reporting on what we&#8217;re doing, how much money we&#8217;re taking in, how much we&#8217;re spending, what has been able to fund, what progress we&#8217;re making toward the next goal that you will want to next month, continue to pay your membership fees.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The structure is really about faith in the community. You put faith in us and we put faith in you. I think that&#8217;s very different than most of the structures you see for there&#8217;s so many different ways to fund open source. There are dozens and these choices have been made really deliberately around certain principles. That’s a core one.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There’s various different levels that you can contribute. For individuals, it&#8217;s really low. It starts as little as, I think $10. Business membership start as little as $50 a month and we encourage companies to consider the upper-tiers like $2000 per month, there&#8217;s $5000 per month. For large companies that are making a lot of profit off of essentially complete dependency on Ruby to work, I think that things like $5000 per month, there are a lot of companies for whom that is a blip on their budget and the cost of say, another hack of RubyGems.org or something of equal impact in the future cost so much more than that so if we&#8217;re looking at the tradeoffs and be thinking about the idea of what is a suitable amount to come in and that reflects the value to the company, it reflects the amount of dependency the company has.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> What is Ruby Together membership get you? I think, André take that one because we do have a variety of tradeoffs and benefits that we have as part of membership.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks, Carina. The benefits for individual devs at the $10-level is a warm and fuzzy feeling that you&#8217;re helping us. At the $40-level, you then become a full-on member of Ruby Together and what that means is we send you an invite to our private member&#8217;s only Slack and you then have a vote in the yearly election for the board of directors.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The board of directors includes basically very community-minded Ruby developers who set our priorities for what we&#8217;re going to take our budget and try to accomplish. Our current members includes Steve Klabnik, Sarah Mei, Terence Lee, the director of the Ruby platform at Heroku. Coraline, who I hear that some of you have heard of and I guess, just joined the board, Camille Baldock. She works on the data team at Heroku.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Really what we&#8217;re aiming for with this is to have representatives of individual agencies, representatives of fiercely individual communitarian mindset and representatives of the largest, most platform-y, kind of like use of Ruby.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Of one thing that I like about this concept is that sometimes, when we talk about the community, we think only about individuals. But Ruby Together explicitly acknowledges that the community is a combination of companies and individuals.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely. We’ve actually structured the company governance to reflect that and individual members and companies each get a vote in the board elections. While it&#8217;s very true that companies make more money and depend more heavily on this infrastructure for their businesses to function and profit, individuals have more say in what it is that we&#8217;re actually going to work on by virtue of there being more individuals that we have as members of the companies that we have as members and that was a deliberate choice that we made while we were setting up how the voting will work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m thinking to ask exactly what it is that Ruby Together supports in the interest of ensuring the future of Ruby.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The reason we want to fund these projects is right now, we need them to be stable. We&#8217;ve talked a bit about things like what happens when a person&#8217;s life changes. I mean, the people who are maintaining these projects now, eventually are going to have jobs that have more demands on their time or their family life is going to change or they just burn out on it for whatever reasons, people come and go. Part of Ruby Together&#8217;s work is to make sure that there are a new generation of people who are going to have the interest, and hopefully skills to be able to participate in these kinds of projects and have an interest in getting involved with them in the longer term.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> One of the things that we do with that money along with funding current developers is we&#8217;ve been involved in both Rails Girl Summer of Code and Google Summer of Code that provides funding and mentorship for, essentially newcomers to the field to work on practical open source projects for several months at a time and really get their hands on the code and really get to spend time with experienced developers as their mentors. André, you want to tell a little bit more about what that&#8217;s been for us?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, absolutely. Ruby Together as it&#8217;s grown, we&#8217;ve kind of gone for the breadth over depth approach and this was another decision that we made early on, where we want the lottery winning number to be very high and we need a lot of people to win the lottery for all of Ruby infrastructure to collapse. Instead of hiring a single person to be a full time dev across all of these projects, what we&#8217;ve done is basically contracted out for five hours a week with a bunch of devs. I am one of the devs so I do work on Bundler and on Ruby Gems and sometimes on RubyGems.org.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s David Radcliffe. His main job is at Shopify, doing ops work and he spends his Ruby Together time working on RubyGems.org. There’s Samuel Giddins. He&#8217;s a student at University of Chicago right now but he spends his time on Bundler and on Ruby Gems. He’s actually also on the CocoaPods team. He wrote the underlying dependency resolver that CocoaPods and Ruby Gems and Bundler all use to figure out which versions of packages can work together successfully.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As we talked about in this month&#8217;s newsletter, we actually just hired Liz Abinante whose main jobs is at New Relic. She&#8217;s working on documentation. We gave her the title Empress of Documentation. As Bundler and Ruby Gems come closer together, we’re going to need more work to consolidate and integrate all of that scattered documentation that has accreted over the years.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s Ellen Marie Dash, who&#8217;s been working on Ruby Gems and working on some of our internal tooling that we use to keep an eye on open source projects. I think, they&#8217;re working on called &#8216;how_is&#8217;. It’s basically like, &#8220;How is this open source project doing? What should we be looking at? What’s getting neglected? What&#8217;s getting taken care well?&#8221; I have really high hopes that that tooling, once it&#8217;s complete, will actually be super helpful for us as a team, as we&#8217;re trying to coordinate across all of these different projects and across all of these different people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> To summarize, we have around five or six people doing around five hours of work per week, across the projects that we&#8217;re able to afford to pay for work on right now, which are Bundler, Ruby Gems like the gem command itself and RubyGems.org, the Rails app that runs all of the downloads made by both the gem command and by Bundler and gemstash, the server that we&#8217;ll probably talk more about later.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, so Ruby Together is able to pay a few people for their time. I love that because it&#8217;s so much more inclusive. There&#8217;s only a certain number of people who can give free time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s absolutely been one of our goals. Honestly, at this point I think I&#8217;m the only person who would be able to give time for free, if we were able to pay for it. As a college student, say I&#8217;m in definitely needs some kind of job to pay for things that he wants to take care of. He actually initially got involved in the project because of a grant from Stripe and that&#8217;s how he wrote the resolver that wound up going into CocoaPods and then into Bundler and then I &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Is that part of Summer of Code?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, it was part of Stripe&#8217;s open source grants program, where they select a few people and give them some money to work on open source for a while. Then afterwards, I was able to say, &#8220;Ruby Together can actually pay you to continue helping with this,&#8221; and he said, &#8220;Oh, okay cool. I will keep doing that then.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Now, it&#8217;s time to a shout out for our supporters. Speaking of both companies and individuals are part of our community, the cost of this episode have been covered by Atomist. Atomist is my employer now and I&#8217;m super excited to be there because we are building developer automation tool such that every company can develop with smooth processes that save them time without having a whole team of full time people dedicated to developer tooling. Check it out and Atomist.com.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>To me among other things, it&#8217;s an issue that I&#8217;ve been an advocate for quite a while which is fair pay. Usually, the contacts when we talk about fair pay is things like the gender pay gap. But the bottom line is that everyone deserves fair pay and this is a really common one to treat programmers as, &#8220;As an industry we&#8217;re well paid so stuff that you do for your own love of the community and the benefit the whole community somehow should be things that are done for free.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It&#8217;s a really unusual perspective that few other industries share the idea that incredibly valuable work that benefits everyone should be unlimited free labor is really not consistent frankly with capitalism, in general. Although, it is consistent with the idea of large companies capitalizing off of free labor so it&#8217;s somewhat consistent with capitalism.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But overall, it also makes some big assumptions about individuals &#8212; not everyone in programming is making bundles of money off of it. Certainly, not everyone works for a startup. Not everyone is working in San Francisco. Lots of people are working at very different wages across the world so fair pay includes making sure that everyone&#8217;s work is valued for what it is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think this is something that I really value about Ruby Together is that perspective that contributions of open source need to be fairly paid and that benefits everybody. That’s not just an ethical stance, it&#8217;s a really I think just sensible stance for the whole community to have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Amen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That raises a really interesting question, which is it can be really, really hard to get developers to pay for stuff like I make a six figure salary and when I see some bit of software that&#8217;s like $30, I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Do I really need that? I don&#8217;t know.&#8221; How do you overcome that developer inertia and that instinct to be like, &#8220;I just write the shit myself.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s been a really interesting challenge to be honest. The biggest thing that helps overcome the inertia is that programmers just feel an intense amount of positive things about Ruby and about gems and about sharing their code with other developers and getting to use code written by other developers. Honestly, I feel like the majority of response from individual devs has been, &#8220;Wow. Oh, my God. Holy shit. It cost that much to keep this up and going.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Actually, I really want that to stay up and keep going because I use it all the time and I care about it a lot. I guess that is important to me, it turns out as you mentioned it. That’s actually been really nice to get feedback from individual Ruby developers. But I guess, the flip side of that is that companies don&#8217;t have feelings and that makes it much harder to convince companies that they also want to give us large piles of money.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m going to make a distinction there because I think what&#8217;s interesting to me that I&#8217;ve observe is how much smaller companies, particularly agencies and consultancies have been much more willing to step up because my theory on this is that they&#8217;re much more attuned to the dollar value of an hour&#8217;s work so they notice any time they&#8217;re doing non-billable work and what the cost of that is. It’s much easier to look at something like Ruby Together and say, &#8220;Wow, you can save us money on not doing non-billable work and I know exactly what this cost the company and I&#8217;d be willing to pay some amount of that to not cost the company this. This is like a great idea.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Whereas, in large corporations, there&#8217;s a sort of like budget as a slush fund or everything has some sort of line item and as long as Ruby Together is perceived as a charity, rather than a business trade association that&#8217;s there for business purposes to serve profitability, I think it&#8217;s really hard to have that conversation with large companies because they don&#8217;t have a line item for charity. They don&#8217;t see it as a conversation to have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But Ruby Together is not a charity and I think that&#8217;s a major misconception that everyone can really help to dispel because when we go in to have those conversations with them, that&#8217;s the first thing that we have to overcome is this idea that it&#8217;s a donation, rather than it&#8217;s an investment.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of the things that you mentioned André is that once you said, &#8220;It cost this much,&#8221; then individual developers like, &#8220;Of course, we should support this.&#8221; But my question to you would be is do you think that we&#8217;re all for individual developers were all like, &#8220;We can help you offset this amount of money that&#8217;s going out the door but if you&#8217;re going to start making a profit off of this, we don&#8217;t want to support you in the amount of time spent on this.&#8221; We&#8217;re talking about server cost. That’s something completely different. Do you feel that it&#8217;s happening there?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I feel like there&#8217;s a limited amount of that. I guess honestly at this point, I&#8217;ve been working on Bundler as an open source project for about six or seven years now. I mostly get the sense that developers are kind of mentally calculating that even if I keep doing this for another five years, I&#8217;m not going to ever have made enough money to pay for the hours that I spent over the last six or seven years.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think the equation ends up making it look like, &#8220;I&#8217;m still doing this out of caring about the community, rather than trying to make a buck,&#8221; and &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s nice to have the excuse to tell your partner, though that this time is actually also bringing an income for the family.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely true. Actually, that&#8217;s a pattern that we&#8217;ve seen play out multiple times in the people that we have working on open source. Our goal as an organization is to fund development on the open source infrastructure that the Ruby language needs and that makes it both incredibly easy to get people excited about supporting it because they have such positive feelings about the Ruby language and Ruby infrastructure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But also it means that when we are actually paying money to support that development work, suddenly people with small kids who would otherwise be giving up on donating their free time to keeping Ruby Gems up are like, &#8220;This actually helps me underwrite the new cost that just cropped up as a result of this kid and this is now extremely valuable to me to do and now RubyGems.org gets security patches applied on a regular basis, rather than on an as possible in our spare time around the requirements of the rest of my life with free work at the lowest priority.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This is played out for real in, I guess 2013, when there was a security issue. We knew about the security issue. All of us had it as soon as we have some time to do free work, we’ll fix it and none of us had time to do free work before a hacker figured out how to exploit it and Ruby Gems was down for like two weeks because we had to throw away the servers, we had to re-download every gem and check some of it to make sure it hadn&#8217;t been replaced with a Trojan. It just took so much time and effort to recover from that hack.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I guess obviously, I can&#8217;t guarantee that we won&#8217;t get hacked now but I have high confidence that everything that we know about is fixed because we&#8217;re paying someone to fix everything that we know about as part of their high priority, &#8220;I&#8217;m getting paid time,&#8221; rather than as part of their lowest priority. This is fun but it&#8217;s just like throwing away free time for no good reason.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was such a great example. This is something I&#8217;m passionate about. I do a lot of training stuff here in Central Ohio. If I get another to developer who has tons of experience, who were working on some sort and [inaudible] something and they pull up Sublime Text and they just like, &#8220;I know I don&#8217;t want to pay for the license.&#8221; [inaudible] button and pops up some Sublime, like I would go crazy because dude, you&#8217;ve been in the industry for a while and what is this? This is something that I see like on a smaller scale but it happens so often like, &#8220;You know what? You should probably just go ahead pay for that,&#8221; in addition to having brought in a number of speakers locally and having to also fight for like, &#8220;Yeah, I don&#8217;t care. If Sandy Metz wants X or Michael Feathers wants X or whomever want X, like this person is making contributions to our community and making our community better,&#8221; I&#8217;ve definitely seen it where companies are like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t think so. Do they should just come by for free and they should get this infrastructure for free.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> In you guys case, it is something I&#8217;ve seen quite a bit. It&#8217;s not really a question at all but it is one of those things that really kind of the ticks me off because I feel like once you hit a certain threshold, we have to really enable, I think people like you two to continue working on stuff because it&#8217;s meaningful and there&#8217;s a lot of people making money off of it. There&#8217;s that too. Come on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s another thing about it. Also, as a small business owner and someone who was more or less well-off financially, looking at software companies when you&#8217;re in this business that you had this huge profit margin and we pay a ton of money in taxes. If your company&#8217;s doing well, just ask what your tax bill was last year, unless you have some weird inversions thing going on. We have opportunities here to definitely support organizations like Ruby Together but for whatever reason, we just don&#8217;t. I&#8217;m sorry, I know that&#8217;s not a question but it&#8217;s something that really, really ticks me off.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Totally. Hear, hear.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thanks for the rant.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, absolutely and it&#8217;s really is something that we&#8217;ve seen. My theory so far is that it&#8217;s just like the very strong status quo like programmers build these services for themselves and then companies expect to be able to use them because they&#8217;re there and they&#8217;re free because programmers want to make them free to other programmers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There is a good article that came out recently, retrospective on RethinkDB and it pointed out that the developer tools market is like a terrible market to be in. One reason is because people will do it for free because we&#8217;re developers and to be like developing things that we use so we&#8217;ll published those.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The other reason is that reluctance of companies and developers to pay for things that there&#8217;s actually very little willingness to turn out money for this. This is just a personal perception because I now work for a company developing developer tools, which is awesome because I love developing tools for myself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Totally. I guess we now fall into that same bucket. It is actually pretty enjoyable to be able to fix things in Ruby Gems or in Bundler when there&#8217;s a problem. But I guess in a similar way, there are companies that I&#8217;ve talked to who felt like it was worth it to assign a full time salaried employee to work for six months, rather than give us a few hundred dollars and take advantage of some work that we had already done.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Now, you&#8217;re going to be like the budget vagaries of I could pay a person because I&#8217;ve got that authorized and that comes out of this budget versus paying another company which would come out of a totally different budget then we get back to that bit about small companies are more willing, Carina I think you said.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Sam said that companies don&#8217;t have feelings. Well, companies don&#8217;t make decisions, people do. In small companies, you&#8217;ve got individual people that looked like more power to make those decisions and they do have feelings and foresight, in some cases so that might contribute to a small company &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; Foresight is a nice thing. We could use more company [inaudible] with foresight, I think.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that might be a theme this season.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If I can actually offer just a moment of hindsight as well, I&#8217;m old enough to remember what Ruby and Rails development was like before Bundler came along and &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s very kind of you to remember.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was vendoring everything and if that didn&#8217;t work, hoping like heck that you could figure out the magical combination of all the version numbers of all the gems and plug ins that you depended on. Then RVM came along and made that slightly easier because you could use a gem set and then not have these gem versions interfering with those gem versions but still &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was less than ideal but I absolutely feel what you were just saying. In fact, I did an entire conference talk on just that. As a person who&#8217;s been doing Ruby since way back when and as a person who&#8217;s worked on Bundler, I basically took all of that historical experience and said, &#8220;I could actually give a conference talk about not just what exactly is Bundler doing anyway but why is it about? Why is it doing that specific thing?&#8221; So I have an entire conference talk that I gave at, it must have been RailsConf because it wasn&#8217;t the RubyConf that just happened. It&#8217;s called &#8216;How Does Bundler Work, Anyway?&#8217; I have a blog post version of it as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But it&#8217;s basically like how does it require work? How does loading things into the load path work? How does Ruby Gems work? How does Bundler work? And walking through like, what problems do you have when you&#8217;re here that leads you to the next solution and then what problems does the next solution create that lead you to the solution after that? It turns out and I didn&#8217;t even realize this at the time until I was working on the talk as background for Bundler but it&#8217;s almost like a blindingly, bright and clear path of like, &#8220;I have solved this problem and this has created a &#8211;&#8221; It takes me like 10 seconds of using the new solution to be like, &#8220;I really have this new problem,&#8221; and that walks you through 10 years of Ruby dev tools history in 30 minutes because like, &#8220;Actually, now that you have that, you definitely have this new problem that needs solving.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess, the short version of all of that and starting from my rant is like, &#8220;You kids don&#8217;t know how good you have it these days.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe I should have included that at the end of my talk.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Old man shout at cloud.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m curious are there problems uncovered or problems created? Now, suddenly it&#8217;s easy to download things so you could get past that and you find the next problem. It&#8217;s easy to download things. Now, I&#8217;ve screwed myself by introducing thousands of dependencies.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s absolutely both. I do talked about that a little bit in my talk but that is an interesting question and something that I didn&#8217;t focus on. Ultimately, I think you uncovered the next most painful problem and suddenly that&#8217;s your newest, most painful problem. At the same time by making that last generation problem go away, you’ve allowed yourself to do things that weren&#8217;t possible before that create new painful problems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Just because it was possible, it doesn&#8217;t mean a good idea.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s true. I guess I would certainly rather be in a world where there are thousands of gems than a world where there&#8217;s a little 10 gems because they&#8217;re so hard to install.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, André, now give us the number of how many gems there actually are.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, okay. There’s around 120,000 gems now. That’s by name. It&#8217;s not every version. It’s just a gem with a name. There&#8217;s around 120,000 and then if you count every single version that&#8217;s ever been released of those 120,000 gems, we&#8217;re pushing about 1.2 million gems right now. It’s really a large number like it&#8217;s taken off in a big way and Ruby have felt very empowered to make gems.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Definitely, I guess even related to that, I don&#8217;t talk about this in my talk at all but one of the things that Bundler did was ship with a standard library level way to create a new gem and a new gem skeleton and be able to run a rake release and suddenly it&#8217;s on RubyGems.org. We saw a really big spike in people creating their own gems because all they had to do was run Bundler gem and throw some code in a file and now they had a gem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What you make easy, people will do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely true.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was struck, André in your origin story. You said that Ruby was useless in 2004 because reuse was so hard. You had to go download somebody tarball off their website in order to reuse that code and people credit Rails with the thing that made the difference for Ruby, between being useless or not. Certainly, Rails was super important but without a package manager, without Bundler and Ruby Gems, it&#8217;s not the language, it&#8217;s the language system that we work in, including libraries like Rails. But the package manager is super important for exactly the reason you just enunciated that if you make it easy for people to share and build on each other work, they will.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely and I honestly feel like that has historically been one of the biggest strengths of the entire Ruby community because even back when it was ridiculously hard to share code, people were still super enthusiastic about it. I guess at that point in the ecosystem that we had, considering how hard it was, people were just unreasonably excited about sharing and reusing Ruby code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I feel like that kind of like ethos has carried through both into the creation of Ruby Gems, which I think the very first beta of Ruby Gems launched in 2000 through 2004. Then it really started getting by and use around 2005. I remember the first Ruby conference I ever went to was in 2005 and I got to see these people show up and stare at them in total awe because they were on the Rails core team or they were creating Ruby Gems and be like, &#8220;Oh, my God. This is amazing. How did they get so smart and so capable and so accomplished?&#8221; This seems impossible as whatever I was at the time, a college junior. I feel like just that excitement of sharing things, really led to Ruby Gems, led to Bundler, led to the GitHub Ruby ecosystem that we have because Ruby is just excited about sharing code with each other.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We really are. I think going back to Jessica&#8217;s point about solving one set of problems allows us to essentially create whole new ones. The upside is that we&#8217;ve got those 1.2 million packages sitting on RubyGems.org. The downside of that is that the traffic for all of that is enormous. It was a year ago&#8230; Let&#8217;s see, I think it was 280 terabytes per month and that has continued to skyrocket. Ten months later, it was already 460 terabyte, which is about 60% growth in 10 months so you can see that already, the numbers are just enormous and they&#8217;re growing so much bigger.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There&#8217;s this myth that essentially Ruby is in decline and when you look at those kind the numbers, not only as Ruby not in decline but our most troubling problem is that Ruby is still growing and growing and growing and there is financial cost to the community that right now is not being borne by the community for that. André, what is the server bill for RubyGems.org at this point?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess to be clear, the server bill is currently covered by a combination of actual dollars from Ruby Together members, actual dollars from the Ruby central non-profit and donated services from Fastly. But if there were a single entity covering the entire server bill in one place, it would theoretically cost something like $40,000 a month.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Today?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, that&#8217;s today with clearly increasing usage and expected higher costs over time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do we think that this is like natural, organic interest in Ruby or is it something else? Like it&#8217;s individual kids and like, &#8220;I want to get into Ruby and I&#8217;m doing stuff,&#8221; or do we think this is more corporate usage. Any idea about that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it&#8217;s both. At this exact moment in our infrastructure life, it&#8217;s very hard to tell who exactly it is that&#8217;s asking us for gems because data centers don&#8217;t differentiate between people like we know that US east downloads a bajillion gems. But we don&#8217;t know who are the individual people that are renting computers for Amazon are. That’s something that we&#8217;re interested in trying to get better at figuring out but the overall story seems to be everyone is really excited about using a lot of Ruby. Even if people are talking about how Ruby is the newest, coolest stuff anymore at the moment, there are still a huge amount of Ruby developers, more than there ever have been before and they&#8217;re writing and deploying a huge amount of Ruby code more than there ever has been for.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My sense is that there are a lot of companies for a while there, Rails was pretty much synonymous with a certain type of Silicon Valley startup. If you were doing a startup, you were hiring as many Rails developers as you could find. But there&#8217;s a spectrum from individual enthusiast just learning to program all the way up to a giant corporate entity using Rails and 50 gems. Only towards the very big end of that spectrum does it make sense for an organization to stand up its own private gem&#8217;s server so I would imagine that a whole lot of that traffic is coming from that middle section of companies that are big enough to have a couple of Rails developers but not big enough to have bothered spending the time setting up a private gem server.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess, interestingly anecdotal evidence from employees at the very biggest end of companies is that mid-end companies as they grow are like, &#8220;We should stand up in an internal gem server,&#8221; and then as they grow again, they&#8217;re like, &#8220;It&#8217;s not worth the huge amount of operational costs to run own internal gem servers. Ruby gems actually does a really good job of running a worldwide infrastructure that allows all of our data centers fast access. Why don&#8217;t we just get it from them?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So never mind?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess I would say not never mind. that is absolutely true and then there&#8217;s an additional life cycle step beyond that where they outgrow their own ops team and the ops team says, &#8220;It&#8217;s no longer worth it to spend our time on this. We could just make the RubyGems.org ops team take care of it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And not pay for it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For instance, Stripe totally has their own Ruby Gems server and the reason for that is security because you want control over that code that is getting to play out to all of your production side. If you had Ruby Gems, with this infrastructure to make it possible to download gems throughout the world, and also you had an organization backing it that had resources to make certain states secure, that would be ideal.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That would be ideal and Stripe is basically the Ruby&#8217;s founding member of Ruby Together. They turned over money to the Bundler project when that actually meant writing André a personal check. I, then took the money from Stripe that they were giving me for no particular benefit to themselves. They didn&#8217;t put any strings on it. They just said like, &#8220;We use and like Bundler and if giving you money will help make it better, here’s some money.&#8221; I took that money and used it to pay for lawyers and pay for incorporation costs and get the IRS to give us non-profit status.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Stripes, still to this day is by dollar amount, the highest contributor to Ruby Together on every single one. I, very much feel like Stripe as a company that recognizes how good it is for them to be supporting that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good job, Stripe. Yay!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Now, that lead on Stripe for being the biggest contributor. Hey, every other company, wouldn&#8217;t you like to out-best them? Come on, you want to come and hire, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, this should be at the top of their list.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, like we&#8217;re competitive industry. Come on y&#8217;all, come compete.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JAY:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a question about gemstash. At my place at work, we use geminabox, which meets our needs. What are some differences? Geminabox has been around for a while?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Geminabox is a private gem server. You stand it up, you create private gems that you don&#8217;t want to push to public Ruby gems and then you put those in geminabox. Then you can add that geminabox server to your gem file as a source and say, &#8220;I want these gems to come from this source, geminabox over here.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That way, you can have your own gems that are internal but you get the versioning benefits, you get the speed of installation of a tarball versus a Git repo benefits and everyone can see the promises you&#8217;re making via version packages, rather than running alongside the bleeding edge Git repo.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Gemstash is a product that Ruby Together funded the development as a direct response to talking to companies that we&#8217;re giving Ruby Together money. It’s both a private gem server like geminaboxes but it&#8217;s also a caching Ruby Gems mirror. This is really the thing that makes gemstash interesting because you can run gemstash on your laptop. Once you&#8217;ve installed a gem from Ruby Gems, you will never download it again.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> You can run gemstash in your office and tell Bundler that when it sees Ruby.Gems.org, it should instead look at your in-office mirror and now the 50 dev boxes in your office, only have to talk to Ruby Gems once and after that Bundler was installed as a local operation on the local network.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Man, I need that for Elm.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In retrospect, it&#8217;s such a good idea. Then like the last and big one is that if you have a data center and it&#8217;s very common to have like 50 or 100 separate apps servers in a data center, you can run a single gemstash in that data center and you just like solved the, &#8220;It&#8217;s really expensive to fetch the same gem a hundred times from the internet problem,&#8221; without having to check a giant tar or gzip or blob into your Git repo, which has been the traditional solution for that. It’s miserable.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Gemstash, I guess is both an effort for us to support that private gem infrastructure in a way that looks just like Ruby Gems so like gemstash supports gem push and gem yank, where geminabox is like written its own client infrastructure so you use a separate geminabox command to push a private gem. The way gemstash is written. It uses the same public API as RubyGems.org so you say gem push to this server and now you have it in your gemstash. Then I was saying that secondary factor of like a pass through cache/mirror of RubyGems.org is a really powerful thing under certain circumstances.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That’s why we built gemstash to address that pain point that we heard from companies where, honestly kind of like big companies. We talked to them and every single one of them said, &#8220;Yeah, we&#8217;ve assigned a full time employee for months to solve this local internal gem server/Ruby Gems mirror problem,&#8221; and so we said, &#8220;Well, we can solve that better than you and we can solve it in less work than you because we&#8217;re already familiar with the problem.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think a really concrete example that we can look to in the past is Heartbleed and OpenSSL. Before Heartbleed happened, OpenSSL was getting something like about $2000 per year of total contributions to support a handful of developers to work on OpenSSL. Now, the entire industry depends on OpenSSL and nobody was thinking about it at all. Clearly, not financially but in general so much infrastructure that we just take for granted.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The moment we stopped taking it for granted was when Heartbleed happened and suddenly, every company had to scramble and the amount of lost time, the amount of I think in many cases was lost goodwill. You know, customers don&#8217;t always understand why something isn&#8217;t working. They may just look at your company and say, &#8220;Well, this product isn&#8217;t working. Your server is down. Clearly, your company is terrible. Why should I do business with you?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> There was all this cost of doing support, there was developer time. Altogether, the industry lost over a half a billion dollars on just cleaning up after Heartbleed. Now, you look at that kind of thing and you say, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know what the number would be if a similar situation happened within the Ruby community but you can&#8217;t send an individual company basis, what would be the cost of a major security breach again of something like RubyGems.org. What was the cost when it happened last time? You can look at those and come up with some real world numbers of what is the value to our company in making sure that these projects are stable, that they&#8217;re secure, that they&#8217;re understanding community wide problems and addressing them? It matters.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Compare that to the cost of a monthly membership in Ruby Together and Ruby Together looks like a really good idea along with SSL together and who knows what else. It also gets to the point that you like to think that software is [inaudible] once used it forever. But very few programs are like that. Software is an ongoing expense, just using software is an ongoing expense. It is not a capital expenditure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, definitely. One of the big outcomes of Heartbleed was that people suddenly cared enough about OpenSSL to donate money to the project. There are very succinct and clear write ups of what the outcomes and results from that are. Heartbleed led to enough donations to cover the cost of working on OpenSSL for exactly one year. That year is now over.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Open SSL no longer has funds to sustain ongoing development. If there is another Heartbleed hiding inside OpenSSL somewhere that no one has found yet, it won&#8217;t get fixed until it&#8217;s out in the wild because no one has the money to actively work on it right now. Seeing that happen basically served as a giant wake up call for me to say, &#8220;This needs to be not something where I go to a company and say, please give me a pile of money and I&#8217;ll go away.&#8221; This needs to be something where I go to a company and say, &#8220;This is a danger to you and your company and a huge potentially cost every single day that you&#8217;re in business and we need to keep preventing it from costing you money, basically as long as this matters to you.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, the question I get asked on a fairly regular basis is why are you doing things this way. It seems like it&#8217;s hard. Why don&#8217;t you just go to a couple of companies and get a big fat grant? The answer, first of all is that there aren&#8217;t that many companies that are offering big fat grants but a bigger problem is just sustainability. You&#8217;re going to need to go back next year and hope that again you can get fat grant from them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We need a base of ongoing contributions, not a one-time infusion. In the Django community, they had one of those one-time infusions, they used to pay a developer to work on Django, the money ran out after a couple of months and then what? You got someone who was working full time, who has taken time out of their life and career. When the money runs out, what is the project do? What is the individual do? We have to be able to make promises that developer can depend on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> As André said, we&#8217;re paying for about five hours per week to various developers. When you can make a promise that that&#8217;s going to happen every week, then they can also make an arrangement with their employers to say this is the promise I&#8217;m making to you too. I&#8217;m only available 35 hours a week for this job or whatever it is because I&#8217;ve made a commitment to five hours a week somewhere else. It’s about making things really logistically possible as well. When we make a commitment to developers, they&#8217;re able to make a commitment to their family and their employers so one-time versus sustainability matters for a lot of different reasons.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For subscription model totally works for software and when you have community infrastructure that&#8217;s helping everyone, then your subscription can be very small as part of a large group of subscriptions. But it&#8217;s still if you&#8217;re not paying for software maintenance, you’re not getting maintained software.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely and that&#8217;s really what we&#8217;re hoping for is that a large enough number of people will be able to chip in and a large enough number of companies will be able to chip in that we cannot just keep this from falling over but actively make it better for everyone who uses Ruby.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and we talked earlier about how one reason, it&#8217;s hard to get people to pay for development tools is that developers will develop them for free. But that&#8217;s not sustainable because either, they become abandonware as the developers or developing them are done with developing them &#8212; I want to say the word development several more times in the sentence &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Steve Ballmer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; Or that tool that I developed that I was so proud of becomes a burden to the individual until I choose to give it up so yeah, buy your Sublime license and ask your company to join Ruby Together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think this is an interesting example because some things are harder than others to make. When somebody looks at that license fee for Sublime and says, &#8220;I don&#8217;t want to pay for it.&#8221; Okay, well you have other options. You can use lots of free other options like say, Vim or Emacs. The person&#8217;s answer is usually is, &#8220;Oh, that&#8217;s hard. It would take me time to learn to use that. This is so much faster and easier.&#8221; Well, yes it takes time. What is your time worth? It’s probably definitely worth the cost of that licensing fee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Similarly, you could in theory make another Bundler. How much time and expertise do you think it would take to be a person who can create another Bundler and maintain it? These are hard niche problems and there&#8217;s only a few people in the Ruby community who have currently the expertise to be able to pull that off.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> It makes so much more sense to pay people to do stuff that they&#8217;re good at, rather than have so many people inside companies kind of chipping away at problems with this, that they don&#8217;t know as well how to solve. They’re spending a lot of time and stuff that isn&#8217;t the company&#8217;s core competence, their core product and they can&#8217;t do it nearly as cost effectively as people who are working on these projects already. It’s just silly the way that we&#8217;re approaching things right now as an industry. What is the value of your time invested in making a semi-good-ish result? It doesn&#8217;t make sense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Absolutely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s time for a listener shout out. Today&#8217;s shout out goes to Polly Schandorf. Polly is @N3rdyTeacher &#8212; that&#8217;s nerdy with a three &#8212; on Twitter and as you might guess from that, she&#8217;s a former school teacher who has made the switch to a programming career. I paired with Polly at Ruby Geek Camp a few months ago and I can personally attest that she is indeed a very cool person. Thanks very much for your support, Polly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We want this to be a 100% listener-supported show. If you feel inspired to help us out like Polly does, head over to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode. Any donation will get you into our supporters only Slack and we may have some other perks as well that you can see on our Patreon page but any amount is definitely appreciated. Thanks, listeners.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> We would like to end the show with a period of short reflection and that can be a call to action or something you&#8217;re going to take away from this or something that really surprised you and it&#8217;s going to stick with you on the way home or whatever. There’s been so much that we&#8217;ve talked about today that has my brain buzzing. It’s hard to pick one thing so I&#8217;ll go with the easy route, which is that during this call, I have officially become a friend of Ruby Together and I&#8217;m donating now. Thank you for reminding me to get off my butt and actually do that because the stuff is really important and thank you for your work.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome. Thank you, Sam.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sam, that&#8217;s awesome, except it&#8217;s not donating &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Damn it!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; You&#8217;ve joined Ruby Together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am a member friend or something.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Before this podcast, I didn&#8217;t know what Ruby Together was. Based on the name, I thought it was going to be another warm, fuzzy Ruby thing but it&#8217;s much more important than that. This is an advancement in the software industry as a whole to form a trade organization that is a business, related to supporting all businesses and people and making our software infrastructure sustainable. As in the Heartbleed and OpenSSL example, this is something that many, many more software communities desperately need. I hope that Ruby Together is the front wave of an innovation that gives us a sustainable software infrastructure even more widely than Ruby.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would love to see that happen. That&#8217;s definitely kind of the underlying idea is hopefully that this model can apply to other situations and I know that there are some echoes of this kind of situation happening in the Python community. Although, I&#8217;m much less familiar with it than I am with the Ruby community. While I am only prepared to make this this kind of situation happen for Ruby, I really hope that other developers and other communities will try to figure out if this is something that they can make sustainable as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My take away today is that OpenSSL is back to being insufficiently funded. I did not know that and that scares the pants off of me. Ruby Together is an important project for this community &#8212; for Ruby community &#8212; but there&#8217;s so many other projects need something supporting them too. There’s things like the Linux Foundation. There are so many different models out there for how to do that but there&#8217;s so many projects that have insufficient or no funding at all and we&#8217;re all relying on them. That scares me a lot. I think it’s part of the reason why I care so much about Ruby Together is because these kinds of things have to exist. We just can&#8217;t be gambling like this. That’s really frightening to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I will say that there is a great report on that bigger picture called &#8216;Roads and Bridges: The Unseen Labor Behind Our Digital Infrastructure&#8217;. It was written for the Ford Foundation by Nadia Eghbal who has been doing a great series of talks, drawing on the knowledge that she developed for this. It&#8217;s a real long read and it&#8217;s a really worthwhile read that gives a great insight into just how many problems we have with depending on open source infrastructure. Not because the dependency is bad but because it&#8217;s the unpaid open source infrastructure that we&#8217;re so reliant on and where that shifts the burden that companies are making on all of these projects. I really recommend reading or at least, skimming it and seeing some of Nadia&#8217;s talk where the most recent was a keynote at linux.conf.au just a week or so ago.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ANDRÉ:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m going to take the easy way out and say that my reflection is that I really hope that this is very convincing and I really hope that the devs and companies that listen to the show and care about Ruby will join as members and will help us keep doing this work to actually keep all of Ruby Gems and all of the code-sharing ecosystem that is such a big part of what makes Ruby great continuing to work into the future.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CARINA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Join Ruby Together. Tell your manager why your company should join Ruby Together and tell them why it should be at an aggressively high level that really reflects the value and importance and profitability of their dependence on Ruby and Ruby infrastructure projects so come in and come in at a level that really can help us to do important work that you think is worthwhile and know is necessary.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, please. Thank you, everybody. This has been a really informative and illuminating show, as always. It was wonderful to talk to you all and listeners, we will be back at you next time.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span> <a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jaybobo"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jay Bobo</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/cczona"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Carina C. Zona</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span><a href="http://www.callbackwomen.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@CallbackWomen</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/indirect"><span style="font-weight: 400;">André Arko</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">of the </span><a href="http://bundler.io/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Bundler</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://rubygems.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">RubyGems</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Team</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Welcome to “Cyberpunk Dystopia” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:45 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Origin Stories</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://qntm.org/gay"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://andre.arko.net/2013/03/24/falsehoods-programmers-believe/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">André Arko: Falsehoods programmers believe</span></a></p>
<p><b>11:38</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="https://rubytogether.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ruby Together</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">; Membership and Benefits</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/eotopick03.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">501(C)(6)</span></a></p>
<p><b>22:06</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Ensuring the Future of Ruby</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Thank you to our first corporate sponsor, </span><a href="https://www.atomist.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Atomist</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, for sponsoring this episode! Check them out:</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.atomist.com/"><img class="alignnone wp-image-359" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/atomist01.jpg" width="401" height="301" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/atomist01.jpg 800w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/atomist01-300x225.jpg 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/atomist01-768x576.jpg 768w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/atomist01-400x300.jpg 400w" sizes="(max-width: 401px) 100vw, 401px" /></a></p>
<p><b>27:39</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Fair Pay and Getting Developers/Companies to Pay for Stuff</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.defstartup.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">RethinkDB: why we failed</span></a></p>
<p><b>39:46</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="http://andre.arko.net/2015/04/28/how-does-bundler-work-anyway/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">How Does Bundler Work, Anyway?</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> [blog post]</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DqzaqeeMgY"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Andre Arko: How does Bundler work, anyway? @ RubyConf 2015</span></a></p>
<p><b>44:16</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Sharing and Reusing Code</span></p>
<p>]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |</span> <a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">|</span> <a href="https://twitter.com/jaybobo"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jay Bobo</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/cczona"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Carina C. Zona</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span><a href="http://www.callbackwomen.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@CallbackWomen</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/indirect"><span style="font-weight: 400;">André Arko</span></a> <span style="font-weight: 400;">of the </span><a href="http://bundler.io/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Bundler</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> and </span><a href="https://rubygems.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">RubyGems</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Team</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Welcome to “Cyberpunk Dystopia” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:45 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Origin Stories</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://qntm.org/gay"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://andre.arko.net/2013/03/24/falsehoods-programmers-believe/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">André Arko: Falsehoods programmers believe</span></a></p>
<p><b>11:38</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="https://rubytogether.org/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ruby Together</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">; Membership and Benefits</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/eotopick03.pdf"><span style="font-weight: 400;">501(C)(6)</span></a></p>
<p><b>22:06</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Ensuring the Future of Ruby</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Thank you to our first corporate sponsor, </span><a href="https://www.atomist.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Atomist</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, for sponsoring this episode! Check them out:</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.atomist.com/"><img class="alignnone wp-image-359" src="http://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/atomist01.jpg" width="401" height="301" srcset="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/atomist01.jpg 800w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/atomist01-300x225.jpg 300w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/atomist01-768x576.jpg 768w, https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/atomist01-400x300.jpg 400w" sizes="(max-width: 401px) 100vw, 401px" /></a></p>
<p><b>27:39</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Fair Pay and Getting Developers/Companies to Pay for Stuff</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.defstartup.org/2017/01/18/why-rethinkdb-failed.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">RethinkDB: why we failed</span></a></p>
<p><b>39:46</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="http://andre.arko.net/2015/04/28/how-does-bundler-work-anyway/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">How Does Bundler Work, Anyway?</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> [blog post]</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DqzaqeeMgY"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Andre Arko: How does Bundler work, anyway? @ RubyConf 2015</span></a></p>
<p><b>44:16</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Sharing and Reusing Code</span></p>
<p>]]></googleplay:description>
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					<itunes:explicit>yes</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>Yes</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>01:10:05</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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							<item>
					<title>Episode 016: Blogging is Shipping with Julia Evans</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-016-julia-evans/</link>
					<pubDate>Mon, 23 Jan 2017 21:51:44 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=344</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[In this episode, we talk to Julia Evans about writing blog posts, asking good questions, and DevOps.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[In this episode, we talk to Julia Evans about writing blog posts, asking good questions, and DevOps.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/b0rk"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Julia Evans</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Intro music by </span><a href="https://twitter.com/springrod"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rod Johnson</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">: Prelude in C# minor, commonly known as </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Bells of Moscow</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p>
<p><b>01:07</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Welcome to “Anarcho-Suyndicalist Tech!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>02:03</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Writing Blog Posts: “Blogging is shipping.”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.recurse.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Recurse Center<br />
</span></a><a href="http://blog.adamperry.me/rust/2016/06/11/baby-steps-porting-musl-to-rust/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Adam Perry: Baby Steps: Slowly Porting musl to Rust</span></a></p>
<p><b>07:17</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="http://jvns.ca/blog/good-questions/">How to Ask Good Questions</a></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Eric Steven Raymond: How To Ask Questions The Smart Way<br />
</span></a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_effect"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Google Effect</span></a></p>
<p><b>20:26</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="http://jvns.ca/blog/2016/10/15/operations-for-software-developers-for-beginners/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Operations</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (Ops); Testing in Ops</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">&#8220;There&#8217;s this exciting thing that happens when you run software, which is that stuff goes wrong in unexpected ways!&#8221; <a href="https://twitter.com/b0rk">@b0rk</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/821777423473618945">January 18, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFE7PsdZN-c"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ryan Kennedy: Fear Driven Development @ OSB 2015<br />
</span></a><a href="http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920039846.do"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale by Jennifer Davis and Katherine Daniels<br />
</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">(</span><a href="https://twitter.com/beerops"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@beerops</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><a href="https://twitter.com/sigje"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@sigje</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)<br />
</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Continuous Integration</span></a></p>
<p><b>38:42</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="http://jvns.ca/blog/2016/11/14/why-cute-drawings/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Zines &amp; Drawings</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Takeaways:</b></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Having concrete strategies for asking question more effectively.</span></p>
<p><b>Julia: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">If something is painful, then do it more often.</span></p>
<p><b>Jessica: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">If asking questions is scary, put some work into the question and then you can ask it with confidence and know you’re not wasting someone’s time.</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>We are (currently) listener supported! Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Good morning. Thank you to Rod Johnson at the Atomist HQ for the intro music and I am super happy to be here. I&#8217;m Jessica Kerr and this &#8216;Anarcho-Syndicalist Tech!&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yay! Jessica, I love how enthusiastic you are and I love you but I think that we&#8217;re looking for something that appeals to maybe a few more people and maybe just&#8230; I don&#8217;t know, has something a little bit more. What else have we got?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Everybody like [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is true but I was talking about the show name.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, okay. Let&#8217;s see. Greater Than Code!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yay! I&#8217;m Sam Livingston-Gray and I am here to welcome the amazingly talented and scary-smart Julia Evans. Julia is a developer who works on infrastructure at Stripe and she likes making programs go fast and learning how to debug weird problems. She thinks you too can be a wizard programmer. Julia welcome to the show.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hello. I&#8217;m delighted to be here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Julia, you&#8217;re a fabulous infrastructure developer at Stripe. I know this from experience but you also write some really good blog posts.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I write, I think an abnormal amount of blog posts.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Why would you do such a thing?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I started to write maybe a weird reason. I don&#8217;t tell people this but I guess I&#8217;ll tell you now. I was at the Recurse Center, which is like [inaudible] program and I was like, &#8220;I want to get a job at the end. Well, how do I get an awesome job?&#8221; So I decided I was going to have a media strategy and my media strategy was I wrote a blog post of what I learned every day.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s fantastic.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Every day, wow.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s for 12 weeks. Then after I did that, I was like, &#8220;Oh, blogging is really awesome. People seem to like these weird blog posts I write every day. Maybe I&#8217;ll keep writing,&#8221; so I did and now it&#8217;s three years later.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess, writing blog posts every day for 12 weeks takes the fear out of writing a blog post.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think so, a little bit. I was like, &#8220;No one is going to read this, except maybe my friend, Tavish and Tavish would read them and it would be like, &#8220;Great blog post, Julia,&#8221; and he was trying to maintain that attitude and I was like, &#8220;Oh, no one&#8217;s going to read this except maybe Tavish,&#8221; even if it&#8217;s not true.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s awesome. Yeah, write for your friends and if anybody else happens to get benefit out of it, it&#8217;s a bonus.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess that&#8217;s part of your origin story. We always ask people for their origin story. It’s now a tradition. How did you come to be at the Recurse Center?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My partner convinced me to go. Basically, I had a job and then I was like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t think I want to have this job anymore,&#8221; and my partner was like, &#8220;Why don&#8217;t you quit your job and go to the Recurse Center for three months and do fun programming things.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Was the job not in tech?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was in tech. I did work as a programmer. I worked as a programmer for two years before going to RC and before that, I did two computer science degrees.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;re not starting from nothing here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was not starting from nothing. No, but I did still feel there are so many awesome things that I could learn and still are true today so I was like, &#8220;I&#8217;m just going to spend 12 weeks learning awesome stuff about computers and I did.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That sounds so amazing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s like you have a second developer life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. Yeah, I think so. I think that was the start of my second life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Does this mean that you have an alter ego, like a superhero?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We won&#8217;t tell anyone, I promise.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and it&#8217;s like you develop that alter ego by learning awesome things about computers for 12 weeks and blogging about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. I think with my blogging, I was like, &#8220;I can be the person who writes awesome things on the internet,&#8221; because I would read all kinds of awesome things on the internet for my whole life before that like I&#8217;ve been programming for ten years and I have read so many awesome things on the internet but I was like, &#8220;I could write them too.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, that&#8217;s an interesting transformation. Not everybody can quit their job and go spend three weeks at the Recurse Center but everybody can learn an awesome thing and blog about it, maybe at a lower frequency.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Probably at a lower frequency. It&#8217;s true and I read so many awesome things written by people. I read this guy&#8217;s name is Adam Perry who wrote a blog post about how he was rewriting the libc in Rust. I think that was it. His project was called ‘musl’ and he was like, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to rewrite these functions from C to Rust, one at a time and then test whether or not they work. This project is 20% done,&#8221; and it was really cool. I was like, &#8220;This is an amazing blog post.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, he was like totally irrational, &#8220;What would you ever use this for activities?&#8221; What you do is you learn something and then you blog about it. This is something that we&#8217;re pushing it out of us, blogging is shipping because it&#8217;s something works but nobody knows about it. It&#8217;s not useful but helping people know about it is that&#8217;s actually &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s right. I think [inaudible] did it myself as a developer add to kit like on the side but not for things that I make or for my company makes. I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to sell you on [inaudible]. Here&#8217;s &#8216;/proc&#8217;.&#8221; You should deal about it, right? [inaudible] try to sell you stuff that you probably already have on your computer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was fabulous.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Then I have no [inaudible], except that I think it&#8217;s wonderful. Like I talk about strace and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;It&#8217;s kind of like I wrote strace,&#8221; even though I didn&#8217;t because there were always people who would know that strace would work for me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You made the stickers. You can have the stickers. You are totally a developer advocate for strace.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I am. All of those who think I created strace for those people, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly. They didn&#8217;t have it before and now it&#8217;s useful for them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and I didn&#8217;t write any code at all.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But you wrote English, which is harder than code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>English is hard. It&#8217;s definitely less [inaudible] on strace though.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Using code is hard. It turns out and when you teach people to use code, then you have value to it. That&#8217;s sweet.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Like knowing that you can do a thing, that&#8217;s huge.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Just of speaking of blog post, you wrote one about asking questions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, asking questions is one of my favorite things. I realized that I knew something about it that I should maybe tell people. I heard this blog post that was just like, &#8220;How do you ask a good question?&#8221; and I was kind of inspired by this blog post that I hate by ESR called &#8216;In public, how not ask stupid questions&#8217;. I think it&#8217;s called &#8216;How To Ask Questions The Smart Way&#8217; and he spends most of the time insulting you. Then somehow, there&#8217;s a good advice and I was like, &#8220;I want to write it closer to how to ask good questions that has good advice but that does not mostly insult you.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. Everybody appreciates that, I&#8217;m sure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I was thinking about how do you ask a good question? What are the parts of that? Should I tell you what the parts of it and figure that are?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay. Part one that I love to do is to say what you already know. Maybe you&#8217;re asking a question about, &#8220;How the Linux kernel works?&#8221; You could be like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know a lot but I know that there is code running on my computer and some of it is reading in C and some that is written in assembly,&#8221; and the first could be like, &#8220;Great. Good start,&#8221; or you can actually frame your question in the context of what you know.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">Actually, sitting on what you know is pretty hard and I just want to know several things about Linux here so I&#8217;m asking you about Linux and I need to figure out like, &#8220;What are the relevant facts that I know right now?&#8221; It helps me to reflect to what I know. Then the other person knows what kind of question I&#8217;m asking.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This also a great way to find out if you have any incorrect assumptions early on in the process, which is really important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because frequently the things that I say I know are actually wrong. I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I know these five things,&#8221; and they were like, &#8220;Four of those are true.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And you&#8217;re like, &#8220;Yay! I&#8217;m learning something before I even ask the question I want to ask.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah. One, it helps you organize where you are now and forces you to put that into words but it helps. It’s amazing how much English can clarify our understanding of code. Two, you might find an assumption that [inaudible] and three, it lets the person answering the question as a teacher, it lets them put themselves in your contacts.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know that before asking a question, you should state briefly what you know. What else can I do by asking a good question?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The way I&#8217;m asking questions is like there&#8217;s a person who has information that I want and they might not have that talk prepared about the information. They have the information in their head somewhere but it&#8217;s may not be organized in a way, where they can just tell me it. I might be like, &#8220;How do SQL queries work?&#8221; and they&#8217;ll be like, &#8220;Well, I know a lot about that but how do SQL query work is a pretty broad question,&#8221; and if they haven&#8217;t already create an answer to that, they might not be able to actually answer it.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">What I like to do is try to ask something that is really specific and in particular maybe a fact-based. One example I come up with in this post was if we&#8217;re talking about like joins, I&#8217;d be like, &#8220;I know that we&#8217;d be using the thing called the hash joint,&#8221; which is where you have a hash table of all the primary keys and you just look them up. You can&#8217;t keep a hash table in memory and then you go through your other cable and you just look it all up. It&#8217;s a joining strategy that postgres uses, if I know the person knows a lot of postgres and they could be like yes or no.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or sometimes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or sometimes. The question is a lot closer to a fact than, &#8220;How do joins work in postgres.&#8221; Then maybe that&#8217;ll bring out something related. That reminds me of something else a lot more useful to get really specific.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that makes sense, because you need to give people a direction to go or in that case, you&#8217;re giving them a starting point. It’s almost a yes or no but it&#8217;s never going to be like, &#8220;Yes! No!&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. If it’s a yes or no question, then the answer will probably be sort of complicated.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right because you&#8217;re asking for the subtleties and the alternatives and things like that so you give them a starting point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is like when somebody comes up and asks you, &#8220;What&#8217;s the best way to fit this thing into that thing,&#8221; and you sort of like it can go well, &#8220;I guess you could do this.&#8221; Then you find out that the reason they&#8217;re trying to fit this thing into that thing is because they want to like water their yard and maybe the best answer is not to try to fit this thing into that thing. It&#8217;s to have your kid do it or something, which is a horrible non-tech analogy but that&#8217;s what I had on the top of my head.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, that&#8217;s really good. It&#8217;s like the person like some contact to what you&#8217;re trying to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, like a direction to go.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As somebody who maybe is being asked that question, I can be like, &#8220;If you needed to do this, here&#8217;s some strategies that might work. But since I know what you&#8217;re actually trying to accomplish, let&#8217;s go and look at this whole other new thing that I get to teach you about.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s true because you need some combination of specific and open-ended.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. I think I often use this at weird specific questions like sometimes I&#8217;m trying to extract information from someone but I don&#8217;t know exactly what information that is yet. Does that makes sense? Like I haven&#8217;t figured it out.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If we did, we just Google it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. They&#8217;re like these weird probes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>They&#8217;re kind of like nerd-sniping, just to get the person&#8217;s attention?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think so, yeah. This is kind of a weird setting, where sometimes I asked people questions just to increase my knowledge about something, like when I&#8217;m working on somebody that knows a lot Scala and I need to know more about this but I don&#8217;t. Sometimes, I don&#8217;t have a specific test but I just want to have one information. It&#8217;s like, &#8220;Please tell me more information about Scala.&#8221; It&#8217;s probably will not result to a useful answer so that was asking for some weird specific question that I think might have an interesting answer and see if it works or not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>If nothing else, it&#8217;s fun to get people talking about something they like.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Also, it builds relationships.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Someone pointed that I left that originally because I forgot about it but someone was like, &#8220;Julia, you have to be willing to say when you don&#8217;t understand something,&#8221; and I was like, &#8220;Oh, it&#8217;s true.&#8221; You have to be willing to say what you don&#8217;t understand.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Just like you have to be willing to ask a question in the first place and maybe appear like you don&#8217;t know everything and that it is okay.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It is okay and that&#8217;s something that I practice that I&#8217;ve become really good at it, like to keep alive&#8230; I don&#8217;t know, what does that mean? And I&#8217;ve started to think of being willing to say that you don&#8217;t understand is like something that senior developers do. I&#8217;m like, &#8220;This is a property of someone who&#8217;s comfortable on what they&#8217;re doing. Because I&#8217;ve noticed that when I talk to people who really know what they&#8217;re doing, they&#8217;re often like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t understand this one thing,&#8221; and it&#8217;s not a big deal for them to say that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right because when you do understand how join queries work in [inaudible], it&#8217;s not so painful to see that you don&#8217;t know how they work in postgres and this is ahead of confidence. Also, as a senior person, I might hear somebody say a sentence about joins in postgres and I might hear one or two terms that I don&#8217;t know and those I can ask about. It’s different when I hear eight terms that I don&#8217;t know.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly and I think that is something that happens really often to junior people. It&#8217;ll be like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know any of those 30 words mean, like it feels too much to ask about all of them.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For seniors who are not even in an explicit leadership role but if you&#8217;re in a role where you&#8217;re around more junior developers and you&#8217;re trying to model behavior, this is a really useful strategy as well. I will often deliberately ask a question that I know the answer to just so that I make it okay to ask a question.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s really important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sometimes, I&#8217;ll do that just to make it okay for a woman to ask the question because it&#8217;s been all men up to that point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. Do you want to say like, I&#8217;ve definitely been in situations where there are 30 terms I didn&#8217;t understands and I did ask about all 30 of them but I was just like, &#8220;Can we [inaudible] for 2 hours?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. When you have &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have to ask like these 40 words mean.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s like following all the links in a Wikipedia article, except more interesting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, until it&#8217;s okay to do that but it&#8217;s different to ask because you&#8217;re just not [inaudible]. I have a very large number of questions.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But when you explore it like that, you really get the information and then the other thing is, I am totally willing to spend two hours explaining something to Julia because she&#8217;s going to go and write a blog post about it and then anybody else who ask, I could just point them to that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s right. If you&#8217;re asking a lot of questions, I&#8217;m like writing down what you learn that towards can be a good way to give back.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Then to solidify the information in your own brain too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think this episode is going to motivate a lot of people to blog.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I hope so.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, so if you hear this episode and you write a blog post, please ping us on Twitter @GreaterThanCode and we will be tweeted.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, please. Oh that reminds me, there was another thing that I&#8217;ve heard a lot of people talk about who write blogs is that they will blog something, even if it&#8217;s just like some stupid technical thing like I couldn&#8217;t figure out how to get library X to do Y. Then they find like a year and a half later that they&#8217;re trying to do that again and they Google and they find their own blog post so it benefits you too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, I&#8217;ve done that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This [inaudible] all the time. The other day, I was having a conversation by a friend Amy and she was saying this really interesting thing and I was like, &#8220;Can I just write this in a blog post so I remember.&#8221; It really works. I think if I don&#8217;t write things on my public blog, I don&#8217;t remember them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah. It&#8217;s an extension of our brains, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a cognitive bias for that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a cognitive bias for that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, there&#8217;s a cognitive bias called the Google Effect, which is where we actually find it easier to forget information if we know we can find it again later. I&#8217;m just quoting that from memory but let me go look that up, actually.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I didn&#8217;t even mean it that way. That&#8217;s so great. Google Effect in Wikipedia, &#8220;The Google Effect also called digital amnesia is the tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by using search engines, such as Google.&#8221; Boom!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I know, there&#8217;s not so much I can hold in my brain.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have one more question asking tip, which I kind of came up while I&#8217;m writing this post and I love it. I think there&#8217;s a tendency to be like who should I ask a question about this thing, and you are like, &#8220;I&#8217;ll find the person who knows the most about it and I&#8217;ll ask them because they&#8217;ll know.&#8221; That&#8217;s pretty effective if you ask the person who knows the best about a thing, they probably know the answer.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">But it&#8217;s also kind of a problem because that person is kind of overloaded so I try to be better at being like, &#8220;Can I find the person who knows with the least knowledge, who probably knows the answer to my question?&#8221; Then ask them. I think this is kind of cool because it distributes question-answering power over more people and it&#8217;s cool for the person because they&#8217;re like, &#8220;Oh, I am important.&#8221; Is that everyone always asks the person who knows the most, then everyone was like, &#8220;No one asked me. I guess I don&#8217;t matter.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah that&#8217;s a great thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s an opportunity to realized, as the person being asked that you do know something too so it&#8217;s a great confidence builder.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But if they don&#8217;t, then you go together to the person who knows the next most and then you both learn the thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, right. That&#8217;s like the cache miss.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s the cache miss that&#8217;s benefits everybody.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like how it strikes you have a person on the team on run, who&#8217;s in charge of answering questions and they&#8217;re not in charge of knowing everything. They&#8217;re just in charge of receiving the question, providing a prompt response of, &#8220;Oh, hey I care about you,&#8221; and then they go find out the answer and then they know the answer so knowledge really gets spread around the team that way.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s really good but I think it&#8217;s hard to remember to do. I think it&#8217;s hard to not just go to that person with all the answers but I think it really pays off.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because there&#8217;s another reason too and that&#8217;s because the person you know is a little bit more than you is going to have a much easier time explaining it to you in terms of you already know. If you don&#8217;t want to take two hours to track down the eight words in that sentence that the expert just used that you don&#8217;t understand, you&#8217;re going to get a useful answer faster than the person who just learned it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think we know everything about asking question now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or at least we know enough to get started.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or at least we know enough to get started.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And how to ask about how to get better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay. I noticed one of the next things you wanted to talk about was ops, which is great because I can&#8217;t even ops.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think I&#8217;m trying to be the person who just learns about ops &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; So that I should explain it. I read a lot of [inaudible] blog. I think of her as being like the person who knows all the things and I&#8217;m trying to be like, &#8220;I know three things that I just learned it.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, yeah that&#8217;s a good point. The best time to write a blog post about something is when you just learn about it because then it&#8217;s fresh and it&#8217;s not too involved. It’s bit-size because [inaudible] a thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Julia, what do you know about ops that you can help us learn?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What is ops?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You write software and then at some point, you need to run your software on a computer or 200 computers or whatever and there&#8217;s this exciting thing that happens when you run software, which is a lot of stuff will go wrong in unexpected ways.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Stuff that is not even in your software.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Which is stuff that is not even in your software goes wrong in unexpected ways and I was trying to articulate the cases I went through and learning about operations. I started out as my software will work, what are you talking about, which was like I would work on these relatively small webapps, which would mostly work and their databases would work and everything was fine. Not that many people tried to use them and they&#8217;re generally just kind of up. I was like, &#8220;What&#8217;s operations? Everything is fine but I can set up Apache, what&#8217;s the problem?&#8221; This is kind of, I think appropriate at that point. It was like a workable strategy. </span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">Then at some point, I could do work at Stripe, which has many more computers and also with higher reliability requirements and many more components and I was like, &#8220;Oh, my God. There are so many possible things that can break. How does anyone run software? This is impossible,&#8221; so I kind of like, &#8220;This is not even a problem. How can you do this? It doesn&#8217;t make sense.&#8221; Maybe you just hide under the bed because there&#8217;s a lot of things that can happen, like you can expect some traffic which maybe you didn&#8217;t expect or maybe some piece of the software or a service just like somebody stops working for a minute or for ten minutes or for an hour &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Which triggers an error case in one piece of your software, which triggers some error code down later that was never tested because it&#8217;s error cases that are hard to test and then all kinds of things happened.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, yeah. It&#8217;s like all these unexpected things happen and I was like, &#8220;How am I supposed to write software that works under these conditions?&#8221; Then I kind of learn to be scared. I think it&#8217;s like learning to be kind of a little scared of software learning introduction. It&#8217;s like in knowledge you&#8217;re scared but just being like something could go wrong or this might break and moving away from this that I&#8217;m [inaudible] confident that everything will be fine.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Shutting your done-in-career syndrome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly. That has sort of helpful but it&#8217;s not like not a good place to stop because I was never [inaudible] with my code because I&#8217;m scared of what will go wrong. that&#8217;s like an extremely bad place to be, probably worse than everything is fine on what could go wrong that you just never make any changes because you&#8217;re too scared to make them happen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Which is absolutely not a metaphor for anything else in life.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. As a perfectionist, you either delude yourself that everything&#8217;s going to be fine or you run away so you have to kind of get past that and you can. What&#8217;s the third phase?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The third phase I think is a [inaudible] blog phase and it&#8217;s like maybe an entire career.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Did you call it &#8216;a happily ever after?&#8217;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, I think it might be called operations engineering.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is what I have to look forward to.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It doesn&#8217;t actually stop but it&#8217;s not like, &#8220;Oh, you learn how to do operations and then there are no more problems. You solved the problems and sets you forever.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think you just said that development culminates in operations engineering and eventually we get there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess what I was trying to solidify in my head is I think I had this idea that you can just write software and if you&#8217;re really good at writing software, you can write software that was correct and might would work. It turns out that this is not true like what you do is you write software and then you try to write software that can eventually evolve into something that works.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">You put your software in production and you design it in a reasonable way. Then it gets hit by all these external service that doesn&#8217;t work and you kind of learn over time what goes wrong with your service and then you learn how to make it resilience to those things. It’s more of a process of designing something in a hopeful and reasonable way. Then teaching it about all of things that get wrong as they happen. I think the idea is if enough bad things happen and you deal with them, then you&#8217;ll end up with something that mostly works.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That’s really interesting. Can I try and recast this in a slightly different way?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What I found in my own journey as a software developer is that my sort of overarching career goal has been to get better and better at writing software. I started out writing software that I thought was decent and then I found out that it was crap. Then I figured out how to, maybe possibly someday make it less crap.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">At this point in my career, I&#8217;ve gotten to the point where I will start something and I&#8217;ll put it out there and then I&#8217;ll see what else happens and I will trust in my ability to not necessarily start with the best design from the beginning but to evolve, to refactor to get there. Are you describing a similar process for learning how ops works where you eventually you don&#8217;t know all the answers but you trust in your ability to fix things as they come up?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that&#8217;s right. I think you have to accept that it&#8217;s impossible to know all the answer about how to operate your software when you write it. But then as you operate it, you could learn what&#8217;s necessary to operate that piece of software.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah because there are infinitely many problems that can go wrong so you just have to make it so you can notice what does and then handle the ones that actually happen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And be able to ask questions to find out what went wrong when you don&#8217;t know.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes so you need that visibility into your software. I think that&#8217;s one piece of the software that can be evolved into something that works.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right and this is where you get all of these awesome things like monitoring where you&#8217;d be like, &#8220;Oh, I can see what myself [inaudible] because I&#8217;m really a good monitor [inaudible].&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Then you have to be able to change it. I think a lot of what we just said is that software has changed. The development process is continually changing our software, evolving it into what we need and therefore, change has to be easy. Once you have the need visibility to find out what is needed and then you need the ability to make those changes without fear. I guess I found my favorite phrase today &#8212; software that can be evolved into something that works.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s a really good [inaudible] talk by Ryan Kennedy called Fear Driven Development, which is about fear in deploying code and how you can end up in the state where you are too scared to deploy your code but not for any real reason. You can be like, &#8220;I&#8217;m scared.&#8221; But why are you scared and you&#8217;ll be like, &#8220;I don&#8217;t know. I&#8217;m just scared. That&#8217;s a really bad place to be.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because of Pavlovian, the association, right? I&#8217;ve learned that when I deploy a code, I get an electric shock.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, but of course it&#8217;s good to be scared but those things has to be associated with reasons. You can be like, &#8220;I&#8217;m scared because I know that this code path is untested so I&#8217;m worried that when I put it to production it will work but it will break,&#8221; which is the very reasonable but that&#8217;s something you can do something about that like maybe untest.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">Then you need to have this like, &#8220;Why am I scared?&#8221; Then associate it with better reason and then deal about reason. Then be like, &#8220;I&#8217;m not allowed to be scared anymore,&#8221; because like what you dealt with all the reasons you used to go to play it and not just like, &#8220;I&#8217;d still [inaudible].&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and if you make an automated test, then you never have to be scared again, at that particular thing. That is a lot of work, though.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What I know now is that I am pretty good at testing and I feel like the things that are reasonable to test, I can test pretty well. The things that are unreasonable to test, I can usually still figure out. But I feel like at this point in my devops career, which hasn&#8217;t even really started yet, I feel like I don&#8217;t have even any idea what&#8217;s going on so I can address all of those fears that have to do with untested code paths, like I got that. But I don&#8217;t know how to deal with fears about unknown things that could go wrong with ops or if there is something that I know could go wrong with ops, I don&#8217;t know how to test it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, Like how do you test file systems as full?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, are there strategies we can use their ops-specific to help mitigate those fears?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Great question. The [inaudible] is something [inaudible] when it&#8217;s interesting. Maybe this is wrong but I guess I try to separate the fears and the things that I think will definitely happen and things that I don&#8217;t know that will happen or not. To some extent, with things where you&#8217;re not sure if they&#8217;re going to happen or not, like maybe there&#8217;s something that was never happened before and you&#8217;ll like, &#8220;What if that happens?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">I feel like what you often do is you just let go of it and you&#8217;re like, &#8220;When it happens, we&#8217;ll deal with it,&#8221; with the things which don&#8217;t really happen. If you spend too much time worrying about them, it&#8217;ll slow you down. Like your service isn&#8217;t going to be up 100% of the time. This is like one thing, I think we&#8217;ve learned that we’ve seen a lot, it&#8217;s this idea like an error budget and you&#8217;re like, &#8220;Things are going to go wrong.&#8221; As long as you think it won&#8217;t be a catastrophe, if there&#8217;s an unlucky thing happens, then maybe you just let it happen.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Also, I like to think about it as in the terms of what&#8217;s the worst that can happen? Then if you deal with making it just not the end of the world, the worst that can happen is we have to restart from backup but we&#8217;re going to find out that that happened in this way and then we&#8217;re going to take this action. Then you&#8217;ve covered &#8216;file system not found&#8217;, you covered the servers exploded. If you can make one &#8216;not the end of the world&#8217; scenario around a bunch of errors, then you can be nervous and might get paged but not scared.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and then through things that you know will happen and that are happening regularly, like you have some experience of them, like you&#8217;ve seen them happen before probably. Then maybe simulate the error cases around those.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right and then you can do frustration-driven development like, &#8220;I&#8217;m tired of getting paged at three in the morning. I&#8217;m going to make this problem be taken care of itself.&#8221; I think you can justify that because you can say, &#8220;Look, it happens. We measured it twice and now I&#8217;m going to fix this and now I expect those to be zero,&#8221; which gets back into the monitoring. It&#8217;s so hard to make software that&#8217;s [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It is worth it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We were talking about operation and how scary it is but how you can evolve into dealing with things as they come up?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I came up with a concrete thing, actually. We&#8217;re going to talk about knowing how your services and one thing I did when I was kind of getting started with [inaudible] 100% operations is I made a dashboard for a service I have, that showed the current status. That was useful to me when there was a problem. I could look at the dashboard and be like, &#8220;That&#8217;s on fire,&#8221; or I could look at it and be like, &#8220;Oh, that&#8217;s fine.&#8221; I feel like it was a really useful task for me to do and it was also helpful to other people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And it looks pretty.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And it looks pretty.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Making dashboard is shipping.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I learned recently with devops [inaudible] by reading Effective DevOps, which is by the amazing @beerops and @sigje. What I learned was I thought devops was like you use Chef and you run servers and stuff. But it turns out that devops is actually about collaboration and that the point is not like you run servers and stuff. It&#8217;s like when you have people who are running services and people who are operating those services, those people need to work well together. I think this especially comes up in larger organizations because in very small organizations, you&#8217;re just like, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to write the service and I&#8217;m going to do all the operations for it and I&#8217;m going to do everything. This is great.&#8221; That&#8217;s actually fine and people do that and it works when you&#8217;re in a small company.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I thought about it as devops. Devops means you write it, you run it. Then, now I feel all these pressure to understand all the things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, but then in a larger organization, this is not I think what happens because what happens is that you have people who specialize and there are some people who are very good at operations engineering and they learn a lot of services. They know a lot about how to make services runs and there are people who know, maybe a lot about frontend development and our amazing frontend developers. You probably don&#8217;t need your frontend developers to be your database engineers. It’s reasonable for these for two different people.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right but in a lot of organizations, there are really strong forces that push people into their own silos.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think devops is not about making those literally the same person but it&#8217;s more of having people work well together. Maybe an example of this is I work on infrastructure and as a security team, and I&#8217;m not on the security team and I don&#8217;t necessarily know as much about security as I would like. But I just try to maintain a good relationship with the security team and also to tell them about concerns I have really early and involve them in discussions.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">I can be like, &#8220;I&#8217;m doing this thing. Should we do it like X or Y,&#8221; and they&#8217;ll be definitely X and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Good. It&#8217;s great that we talked about that really early because now I know what to do.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For me, devops has a lot in common with, I guess it&#8217;s an old idea now. The old idea from extreme programming of having a whole team, which is XP Dragon 4. Have everybody who works on a project actually work on a project together as part of the same team, rather than forcing people to go to a different floor of the building and schedule meetings and make it easy to have low-latency, high-bandwidth communication across all of the disciplines that you need to effectively ship your product.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And shared objectives.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Like if the security team&#8217;s only objective is to prevent a security breach, then their job has nothing to do with getting software out and is in direct conflict with yours.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right so there&#8217;s no code like no codes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right, like you want to be like our goal is to ship secure software.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes so the security person shares your objective of shipping this thing along with and not making it terribly insecure, then you can collaborate. If devops is collaboration, what is Chef?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t know. Provision and automation?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I guess it&#8217;s an automation part of operations engineering at that point.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and it&#8217;s an important part of operation engineering.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s a tool and it&#8217;s an important tool but it&#8217;s what Skype is to devops for a distributed team. It&#8217;s something that you need to do your job but the point is not really the tool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and another thing that I learned is considered to be a part of the devops movement is continuous integration because I&#8217;ve always done the idea that you deploy your site 10 times a day or 20 times a day.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Like continuous deployment?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Continuous deployment, maybe both. Continues integration is having small features and you embed it to master frequently, I think like you don&#8217;t develop on a branch for three months.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Then, if as soon as those tests passed, the software gets deployed without you pushing a button, then you have continuous deployment.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I think for continuous deployment will also just mean that you deploy your site very frequently and it&#8217;s not the weekly deploy so it doesn&#8217;t necessarily have to instantly when you merge your code. It just happens a lot. But I think what I didn&#8217;t realize is deploying your site 20 times a day is a radical idea or was a radical idea.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Still is in a lot of places.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And it still is in a lot of places and I was like, &#8220;Of course, it makes sense that it&#8217;d be a radical idea. That’s something that you were doing before.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I remember working in the enterprise and they had four deployments a year: April, July and September, and occasionally an emergency in October, which let them say four.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. I think that too has its roots in the XP in [inaudible] communities where there&#8217;s this recurring idea that if there is some part of the development process that is causing you pain, you should do it much more frequently so that you&#8217;re forced to confront that pain on a daily basis and develop ways of making that thing a lot easier to do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Great, and then you get the automation and you want to make it not scary to do, which in the end, being software developers, we solve with automation and I guess this is where some of the confusion comes in. As devops, you might think of it as bringing development to operations as in automating your operations like with Chef. But it also about bringing awareness of operations into development with that collaboration.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and I think this is like a lot of, especially they have an idea that people in operations are trying to push because they&#8217;re like, &#8220;We automated operations but you developers still need to know how to operate your services. You can&#8217;t just say we wrote puppet and never done.&#8221; I think there&#8217;s maybe more awareness that operations people need to do some programming, than there is that developers need to know about operations.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And so you write blog post about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And so you write blog post about it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I mean, you specifically, and zines, we didn&#8217;t talk about zines at all.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, Let&#8217;s talk about zines.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because you&#8217;re known for conveying information about things like a strace, not just through your enthusiasm in English words but also with cute drawings.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. This has been kind of a weird thing. The only reason I started writing drawings is that in the middle of 2015, my wrist hurt a lot and I didn&#8217;t want to type on my computer. I still have a lot of ideas that I want to post on the internet so I would sometimes draw them on a piece of paper and take a picture and post them on Twitter. This was surprisingly successful despite my complete lack of drawing skills so I started doing it more. Now, apparently this is something that people know that I do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Typing hurt so you did something else more and it turned out that was like a surprise win.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it&#8217;s like surprisingly amazing. As I keep on doing it because it works unreasonably well, like why does it work so well? I don&#8217;t know if I know why it works so well &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Does that even matter?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think it really doesn&#8217;t matter. For example, I wanted to write about stuff and someone was like, &#8220;Julia, write about &#8216;/proc&#8217;,&#8221; and I was like, &#8220;Okay.&#8221; Everyone knows about &#8216;/proc&#8217; but I&#8217;ll write about it anyway. I should have known this by now but every time I think&#8230; Oh, no everyone knows about this already. No one knows about /proc &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t even know what it is right now as we speak.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Exactly, so /proc is a file system in Linux, it&#8217;s a directory in Linux that has all kinds of cool information about your computer. It’ll show you all of the files that every process has opened. In particular, if you accidentally delete a file but it&#8217;s still open, like if a process is still open, you can recover it using /proc, which is really cool. It’s kind of like a wizard thing that exists on Linux, that is really useful. It also has all the environment variables for every process so if you want to know what environment variables you process, you can just read it out of /proc.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because Linux uses the file descriptor abstraction for like everything.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. It&#8217;s like everything is a file. Then the list of environment variables for your process is a file? I don&#8217;t know&#8230; but it is and you can &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There&#8217;s got to somewhere.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s somewhere.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>In Linux, everything is going to be a file descriptor.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. I wrote like a little comic about this and I posted on Twitter and everyone was like, &#8220;What is this? This is amazing,&#8221; and I was like, &#8220;Oh, yeah. It is amazing.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Awesome. We&#8217;ll have a link to some of your drawings in the show notes. Is it time for reflections?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have one more thought about drawings &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One more thought about drawings. Go on.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; Which I gave a bunch of talks and I realized that I got really mad that I couldn&#8217;t force people to remember the stuff I said in the talk so I wanted to be able to give them something physical, which is kind of why I started writing zines. For example, I know people can&#8217;t see this in real life but I&#8217;m currently holding up a small zine called Production Machine Learning, which I wrote last night &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s so cute.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>&#8212; And it has a bunch of comics, about things I learned about doing machine learning and production because I&#8217;m giving a talk about it. I&#8217;ll just print out 30 of these little tiny booklets with comics in them and give them to people at the talk and then maybe they&#8217;ll remember what I said.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s like a little eight-page thing with tube sheets of paper stapled together in the middle and folded.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, exactly. It&#8217;s literally two-pieces of paper, stapled together and folded.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Nice.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Which sounds totally simple. All you have to do is take eight drawings and put them together. But I&#8217;ve seen Julia work on these and she does layouts and she does plans, then she gets feedback on each page so print out her zines and appreciate them. Absolutely, try to make your own but don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s going to be as easy as she makes it look.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is what I wrote last night. It took me two hours.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah but how many did you write before that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Only three but the other three, I spent a lot more time on. But I&#8217;m kind of experimenting with the idea of writing this in two hours and then print [inaudible] here. This is a cool tidy thing, instead of edit it for a hundred hours, which is way &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Making a zine is shipping.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah because shipping things is fun also.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, it&#8217;s like someone could try that for their next project meeting and that would be memorable.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah and then people can read it on the bus. This is my vision of zines.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, maybe totally start a conversation on the bus with somebody next to you who is like, &#8220;What are you learning about? That looks amazing. What is this /proc? I need this in my life.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Listeners, if this happens to you, please tell us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Okay, awesome. The one thing we do at the end of the show is be to ask each of us what something that you will take away from this that you learned and maybe continue thinking about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Well, I can start. One thing that I am going to take away from this is this idea that even at this point in my career, I still ask a lot of questions and I&#8217;ve just sort of gotten in the habit of saying whatever comes into my head. But it’s really useful to have a bunch of little concrete strategies for asking questions more effectively. I think I might actually have to try a couple of these explicitly and deliberately and see what happens. Thank you very much for that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The thing I&#8217;m going to think of that is you said about if something is painful and do it more often, like it&#8217;s something that I&#8217;ve heard before but I feel it&#8217;s very hard to do because it&#8217;s such a human instinct is something that is painful to do it less often and be like, &#8220;Let&#8217;s just not do that, okay?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But didn&#8217;t you do that when you wrote a blog post every day?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That wasn&#8217;t actually painful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh. Yay!</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But it was very effective to do it more often and actually, yeah. It’s a good point. I think it is the same thing like no matter how well I know that thing, it&#8217;s still important for me to think about it because there are always new things that are painful. But I need to do more often.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Typing is not one of them, though. If it hurts to type, do something else.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Definitely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think that&#8217;s right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Or get a brace or work on your ergonomics or something.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;re talking about existential pain here, not physical pain.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, we&#8217;re talking about fear and that has been a theme today of how do you deal with fear, how do you confront your fear. In the case of writing a blog post, if that&#8217;s scary to you, just do it anyway because you&#8217;re going to find that those fears are unfounded. If asking questions is scary, put some work into the question and then you can ask it with confidence and you&#8217;re not wasting someone&#8217;s time because you put thought into this. Confront your fear of development and of operations in a couple of ways.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">First of all, if you&#8217;re not scared, you&#8217;re doing it wrong. you don&#8217;t know enough and once you are scared, you can consciously think about, &#8220;Is this a fear that I can solve with automation, such as testing,&#8221; or the other one is when you have a whole bunch of fears, &#8220;I have put into production anyway and see which ones happen and then deal with those.&#8221; But make sure you can see which ones are happening by adding visibility because we fear the unknown and if we can make what&#8217;s happening a little more known, then we can be nervous but not too afraid and then we can ship.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">Those were awesome. Julia, thank you so much for joining us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JULIA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you so much for having me. This was extremely fun.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, it was. Thank you. Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes and also, Greater Than Code is a community supported podcast. Mandy, who is our podcast manager and editor does a fantastic job and this is made possible by our Patreons so if you want to support this podcast, go to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode and then you can get access to our little community Slack, in which we have nice, supportive, happy conversations and sometimes abusing rants.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, and stickers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I will both send you stickers. Mandy will send you stickers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>All right, listeners. Thank you and we&#8217;ll see you next time.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/b0rk"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Julia Evans</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Intro music by </span><a href="https://twitter.com/springrod"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rod Johnson</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">: Prelude in C# minor, commonly known as </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Bells of Moscow</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p>
<p><b>01:07</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Welcome to “Anarcho-Suyndicalist Tech!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>02:03</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Writing Blog Posts: “Blogging is shipping.”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.recurse.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Recurse Center<br />
</span></a><a href="http://blog.adamperry.me/rust/2016/06/11/baby-steps-porting-musl-to-rust/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Adam Perry: Baby Steps: Slowly Porting musl to Rust</span></a></p>
<p><b>07:17</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="http://jvns.ca/blog/good-questions/">How to Ask Good Questions</a></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Eric Steven Raymond: How To Ask Questions The Smart Way<br />
</span></a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_effect"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Google Effect</span></a></p>
<p><b>20:26</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="http://jvns.ca/blog/2016/10/15/operations-for-software-developers-for-beginners/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Operations</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (Ops); Testing in Ops</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">&#8220;There&#8217;s this exciting thing that happens when you run software, which is that stuff goes wrong in unexpected ways!&#8221; <a href="https://twitter.com/b0rk">@b0rk</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/821777423473618945">January 18, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFE7PsdZN-c"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ryan Kennedy: Fear Driven Development @ OSB 2015<br />
</span></a><a href="http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920039846.do"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale by Jennifer Davis and Katherine Daniels<br />
</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">(</span><a href="https://twitter.com/beerops"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@beerops</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><a href="https://twitter.com/sigje"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@sigje</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)<br />
</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Continuous Integration</span></a></p>
<p><b>38:42</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="http://jvns.ca/blog/2016/11/14/why-cute-drawings/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Zines &amp; Drawings</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Takeaways:</b></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Having concrete strategies for asking question more effectively.</span></p>
<p><b>Julia: </b><span ]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/b0rk"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Julia Evans</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Intro music by </span><a href="https://twitter.com/springrod"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Rod Johnson</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">: Prelude in C# minor, commonly known as </span><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Bells of Moscow</span></i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></p>
<p><b>01:07</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Welcome to “Anarcho-Suyndicalist Tech!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>02:03</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Writing Blog Posts: “Blogging is shipping.”</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.recurse.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Recurse Center<br />
</span></a><a href="http://blog.adamperry.me/rust/2016/06/11/baby-steps-porting-musl-to-rust/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Adam Perry: Baby Steps: Slowly Porting musl to Rust</span></a></p>
<p><b>07:17</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="http://jvns.ca/blog/good-questions/">How to Ask Good Questions</a></span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Eric Steven Raymond: How To Ask Questions The Smart Way<br />
</span></a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_effect"><span style="font-weight: 400;">The Google Effect</span></a></p>
<p><b>20:26</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="http://jvns.ca/blog/2016/10/15/operations-for-software-developers-for-beginners/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Operations</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> (Ops); Testing in Ops</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="en">&#8220;There&#8217;s this exciting thing that happens when you run software, which is that stuff goes wrong in unexpected ways!&#8221; <a href="https://twitter.com/b0rk">@b0rk</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode">@greaterthancode</a></p>
<p>— Jessica Kerr (@jessitron) <a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron/status/821777423473618945">January 18, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFE7PsdZN-c"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Ryan Kennedy: Fear Driven Development @ OSB 2015<br />
</span></a><a href="http://shop.oreilly.com/product/0636920039846.do"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale by Jennifer Davis and Katherine Daniels<br />
</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">(</span><a href="https://twitter.com/beerops"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@beerops</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">, </span><a href="https://twitter.com/sigje"><span style="font-weight: 400;">@sigje</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;">)<br />
</span><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_integration"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Continuous Integration</span></a></p>
<p><b>38:42</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – </span><a href="http://jvns.ca/blog/2016/11/14/why-cute-drawings/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Zines &amp; Drawings</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Takeaways:</b></p>
<p><b>Sam:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Having concrete strategies for asking question more effectively.</span></p>
<p><b>Julia: </b><span ]]></googleplay:description>
											<itunes:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/julia.jpeg"></itunes:image>
						<googleplay:image href="https://www.greaterthancode.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/julia.jpeg"></googleplay:image>
										<enclosure url="https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast-download/344/episode-016-julia-evans.mp3" length="45904206" type="audio/mpeg"></enclosure>
					<itunes:explicit>clean</itunes:explicit>
					<googleplay:explicit>No</googleplay:explicit>
					<itunes:block>no</itunes:block>
					<googleplay:block>no</googleplay:block>
					<itunes:duration>46:59</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
				</item>
							<item>
					<title>Episode 015: Zuri Hunter as Queen of Hackathons</title>
					<link>https://www.greaterthancode.com/podcast/episode-015-zuri-hunter/</link>
					<pubDate>Wed, 11 Jan 2017 23:24:25 +0000</pubDate>
					<dc:creator>Mandy Moore</dc:creator>
					<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.greaterthancode.com/?post_type=podcast&#038;p=332</guid>
					<description><![CDATA[In this episode, Zuri Hunter talks about Hackathons, navigating the channels of your career, and hiring practices.]]></description>
					<itunes:subtitle><![CDATA[In this episode, Zuri Hunter talks about Hackathons, navigating the channels of your career, and hiring practices.]]></itunes:subtitle>
																									<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |<br />
</span><a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ZuriHunter"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Zuri Hunter</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Welcome to “Snowpocalypse!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:50</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Zuri’s Background and Origin Story</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.zurihunter.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Blog<br />
</span></a><a href="https://www.digitalglobe.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Digital Globe<br />
</span></a><a href="https://www.womenwhocode.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Women Who Code</span></a></p>
<p><b>04:19</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Hackathons</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://blog.codewithveni.com/meet-zuri-queen-hackathons/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Meet Zuri. The Queen of Hackathons.<br />
</span></a><a href="http://colorcoded.voxmedia.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Color Coded</span></a></p>
<p><b>16:37</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Overcoming Shyness</span></p>
<p><b>20:47 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Navigating the Channels of Your Career</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interface"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Graphical User Interface (GUI)</span></a></p>
<p><b>27:07</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Developing Skills and Keeping up with New Technologies</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-solutions-architect-associate/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">AWS Certified Solutions Architect</span></a></p>
<p><b>33:31</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Hiring Practices; Culture Fit</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://hbr.org/2016/12/research-how-subtle-class-cues-can-backfire-on-your-resume"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume (&#8220;No Silver Bullet&#8221; for D&amp;I)<br />
</span></a><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-09/facebook-s-hiring-process-hinders-its-effort-to-create-a-diverse-workforce"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Facebook’s Hiring Process Hinders Its Effort to Create a Diverse Workforce<br />
</span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/22/technology/an-imbalance-casting-a-wider-net-to-attract-computing-women.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">An Imbalance; Casting a Wider Net to Attract Computing Women (&#8220;Dave-to-Girl Ratio&#8221;)</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>We are (currently) listener supported!<br />
Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Thank you, Colin Bruce, for your support!</b></p>
<p><b>50:23</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Leading While Learning</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Takeaways:</b></p>
<p><b>Jessica:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Helping others in small ways. #Micromentoring!</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="und"><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/micromentoring?src=hash">#micromentoring</a> <a href="https://t.co/D51s0HoA8m">https://t.co/D51s0HoA8m</a></p>
<p>— Greater Than Code (@greaterthancode) <a href="https://twitter.com/greaterthancode/status/819250473765109765">January 11, 2017</a></p></blockquote>
<p><script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script></p>
<p><b>Coraline: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Senior developers need to create opportunities for micromentorship.</span></p>
<p><b>Zuri: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Periodically check in with new developers.</span></p>
<p><b>Astrid: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Use hackathons as a way to try new things and to meet others who are already good at them.</span></p>
<p><b>Sam: </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">Hang out at hackathons and the power of post-its!</span></p>
<div id="Transcript" style="display: none;">
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>OMG. There is so much snow. There is more snow than I have ever seen on the ground in Portland. With that, I would like to say welcome to Episode 15 of Snowpocalypse.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;re forgetting, Sam. There&#8217;s no snow here in Chicago.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I should speak more quietly is what you&#8217;re saying?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think you&#8217;re using exclusionary language. I don&#8217;t have snow at all right now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, damn it! Sorry. What would you prefer I say, instead?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Your weather may vary.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Greater Than Snow?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. I am Coraline Ada Ehmke and I&#8217;m joined today by the wonderful Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Coraline. We are also here with Astrid Countee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Jessica and today our guest is Zuri Hunter. Zuri is a software engineer at DigitalGlobe, one of the world leaders in providing high-earth imagery, data and analysis. While studying Computer Information Systems at the illustrious Howard University, Zuri spent about two years teaching herself Ruby on Rails and participating in hackathons to expand her knowledge and experience.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">In her spare time, she loves watching American football and playing video games. Hi, Zuri. Welcome to the podcast.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi. Thank you for having me. I think I&#8217;m super excited.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>High-earth imagery, is that like Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Amsterdam?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m not sure about that but I&#8217;m going to say this. We recently got acquired so formally, our company is The Human Geo and we did a lot like geo-spatial visualization data and then DigitalGlobe which does a lot with satellite imagery and stuff. That was a great fit they do more of that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That sounds really cool. Before we get too far into that, we like to start the show by asking people about their superhero origin stories. So Zuri, How did you get into tech?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When I first came to Howard, it was a marketing major. I took my Imaginary Information Systems class. It&#8217;s like one of the requirements from [inaudible] and I just love the idea like tech and how it&#8217;s being use in businesses and stuff so I decided to switch to Computer Information Systems and with that, they had intro to Java programming and that&#8217;s when I love the idea like, &#8220;Oh, I could be creative and build stuff with my knowledge and stuff.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I decided, from that point on that I want to do web development, software development but I knew that with my Computer Information Systems, it wasn&#8217;t geared towards that so I decide that I was going [inaudible] my skills.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We said in the intro that you spend a couple of years on Ruby on Rails. What attracted you to that platform?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Ruby is really easy to read. When I started at Java programming, I wasn&#8217;t like a fan of Java syntax and it&#8217;s super, super hard but doing that was like web [inaudible] tools and then I attended Women Who Code Meetups in DC. They had opened up one in Ruby on Rails. The founder at the time, Kaylin, she was like, &#8220;Would you like run this and Meetup for us,&#8221; even I was a complete newbie to it. I was like, &#8220;Yeah, let&#8217;s go for it.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> From there, it&#8217;s not easy to pick up for me around that time and a lot easier to create prototypes for hackathons. I must emphasize that. It&#8217;s so bad because in ethical hackathon, I was doing an app in Ionic and that took forever, trying to build up the base in the base behind unlike Rails, you just click.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you remember what&#8217;s your first Rails app was?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, I do. It was a Pinterest demo. When we first launch Ruby on Rails for a DC at Women Who Code, I hope I didn&#8217;t butcher his name, [inaudible] one month, he gave us a discount for the ladies to go through his course of one month Rails. That was basically making a Pinterest app, going from design, using Bootstrap, all the way to deployment using [inaudible]. That was like my first Ruby on Rails app right there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have done that so I know exactly what you&#8217;re talking about. That&#8217;s so awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, documentation is so good. It&#8217;s like I could see you down the road and I looked back at it and I appreciate this so much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Zuri, when did you first start participating in hackathons because I know that you had talked about the fact that you changed your major but when was your first hackathon after you decided that you were going to be interested in learning how to program?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My first hackathon, back then I didn&#8217;t really participating as soon as I came as spectator. But my professor in the summer of 2013, Professor Henry, he was pushing me to go to these events. Because I&#8217;m really a shy person so he said, &#8220;You don&#8217;t have to do anything, just come. Just see what people are working on. You don&#8217;t have to join the scene. Just show up.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That summer, I attended my first hackathon. It was IndiaHack. I don&#8217;t think I have been at the time but I just came, went to 1776 Washington DC and just saw greatness in the room with people working on their projects. I think at the time, Google Glasses were hot so I was able to touch and play around Google Glasses for the first time. It&#8217;s no pressure, honestly. Everyone is relax and do things that they love. That was like [inaudible]. After spectating on site, I was enjoying development tutorials and then [inaudible] my professor helps when I was going to cross errors. But I didn&#8217;t participate until my second hackathon.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You sound really enamored of hackathons.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. If you have an idea, you can work on it and this is a perfect opportunity to work on a new technology, that you ever want to work on. The last hackathon that I went to recently was in November and that&#8217;s for this new group called Color Coded. I had this idea since August. But it&#8217;s been back from my college years and I want to use React Native because with my current job, we use React for finance. I was like, &#8220;Let&#8217;s try React Native.&#8221; Of course, it&#8217;s really hard just trying to break in into that but it&#8217;s perfect opportunity for me so I use a new tool at the hackathon.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I actually ran a hackathon back in January. The way we set it up was not like a typical hackathon and that was not competitive. We had five or six different nonprofit organizations and we built teams, grabbing people for the teams and we try to have a mix of different experience levels and different technologies and like front end people and back end people and whatever the difference there and that hackathon as it was noncompetitive. We wanted to be noncompetitive so it wouldn&#8217;t be so intimidating for new people. Do you find the competitive aspects of hackathons appealing? Or do you think it takes something away?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>From a newcomer perspective, it takes away because now [inaudible] is feeling pressured, like for me whenever I get so competitive, I&#8217;m feeling pressured that I can make sure I know everything, that come across the error, I have to fix on the spot. That kind of takes away from the experience.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But as soon as I come to get more experience or get more comfortable with their skills, like I am right now, I guess you don&#8217;t really paid too much attention to the competitive in that aspect. It&#8217;s more of, &#8220;I just want to have fun using this new technology. I just want to have fun and even keep the same interest as me. For newbies, especially when I first got the idea, the competitiveness did take away from wanting to be a part of these hackathons.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That would take away from me as an experience developer as well. I was just saying in the chat that I&#8217;ve never found hackathons appealing for a variety of reasons, like I don&#8217;t do well when I don&#8217;t sleep so the idea of spending a weekend is kind of unappealing. Then even if I wanted to, I have a kid so I can&#8217;t really schedule an entire weekend in town but not at home.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">Then just the idea of having a competitive events and working on something where your whole goal is to slap it together as fast as you can is like really at odds with my preferred mode of taking your time and doing TDD and trying to get things right as you go. For all of those reasons, I&#8217;ve never been really interested in hackathons so it&#8217;s really interesting to hear you talk about how great they are. There’s some aspect of this that I hadn&#8217;t considered. That’s really cool. Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There were going to be like excellent run hackathons and they&#8217;re going to be really, really hard hackathons but it&#8217;s more of like the audience that comes to those things and it&#8217;s what makes it. But I am 100% with you. I can&#8217;t work straight through like I can&#8217;t do a full 24 hours of coding. I need a break. I need sleep.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think we all do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. Some people they&#8217;re built like that and some people, like me are not. The hackathons that really put me on the spot and actually help me get my gig until today, the IndiaHack, Capital One Hackathon, I did take a break during that. My team knows me very well. But I took a break and I said, &#8220;Look guys, in early in the morning, I need to take this break,&#8221; but I think we need to understand that it&#8217;s okay to [inaudible] or take some time to yourself while we are in these events because coding is a lot of mental power right there and you need to rest.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess fear of missing out could keep you awake for a while, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. For some people, making that last, extra effort so they can win something like price money or some sort. It turns on people and that what drives them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You just said something interesting about the hackathon that got you your gig and that&#8217;s another thing that I wanted to ask you about was this idea of using a hackathon to sort of break into the field and launch your career. You want to get into that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, sure. I&#8217;ll get into that. It was funny thing that it was like, &#8220;I never saw this coming.&#8221; With me doing the hackathon, I didn&#8217;t see this coming at all, like actually being offered to what interview at my current company and actually getting offered. I was just simply going to this events, trying to meet people, network as well as extend my skills and understand how it to work in a tech environment because that was going to be the very closest thing I can get to in working in a tech environment was that these hackathons. It was a really huge shocker and a blessing at the same time that I have someone [inaudible] my team [inaudible] and it&#8217;s like for anyone looking to get a job.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I do sometimes try to recommend newbies when they&#8217;re asking, &#8220;How to get to [inaudible]?&#8221; And I was like, &#8220;Go to meet ups and to feel that you&#8217;re interested in, talk to people and you will learn an awful lot and you&#8217;re going to see a name of the face and see that you know what you&#8217;re doing and that you have a high interest in it because honestly, I feel like companies are looking for people who are really energetic and have a high interest in the tools that they use. It’s really, really helpful and hackathons are a perfect way to show that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I feel that also to attend hackathons, regardless if you don&#8217;t really get ready or not because I tell you, I was trying to get out of it with my professor, when he was trying to tell to come out to these hackathons and say, &#8220;Just show up. You don&#8217;t have to do anything.&#8221; I say okay because I was not 100% confident in my skill, especially in Java. In fact, in participating a team but when you show up and you&#8217;re comfortable and you are, &#8220;This is not as bad. This is not as intimidating.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You mentioned that your team knows you. Did you show up to that particular hackathon as a full team?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, actually. It was my professor or it&#8217;s my classmate who sent the email out about hackathon and I bought my ticket. We&#8217;re always like, &#8220;If we don&#8217;t find anything or themes that you are interested in, we can all form together,&#8221; and that end up happening up to the pitching session and we just stick together on this one.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What&#8217;s a pitching session?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What they do, again in hackathons is people who have ideas, they will pitch it to the audience and say, &#8220;This is my idea. These are the text that I&#8217;m interested in working with.&#8221; Or these are that types of people I&#8217;m looking for and this is what I do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For Color Coded hackathon, the idea was basically an app that allows you to record sessions with your friends or you freestyle over a popular hip hop beat. We usually do this in college all the time. We have album listening party and after is somebody pop in some instrumentals and someone would [inaudible] and we all go in a circle, amazing freestyles.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I went to [inaudible] that makes me [inaudible] to have that process as well as record it and share it with your friends. When I was pitching that idea, I also explained to them like, &#8220;I&#8217;m a full-stack developer. But these are the tools that I&#8217;m interested in working with like React so if you float with React, that&#8217;s great. If you have some experience with audio engineering, that&#8217;s also a plus and I also would like to have a designer.&#8221; That’s what essentially is being covered within the pitching sessions in hackathons.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;ve talked on the show in previous episodes about signaling behaviors and I&#8217;m wondering, as somebody who is new to the field or maybe like me as just new to the idea of hackathons, what are some signals that I should be looking for to decide whether a hackathon is going to be friendly or uber competitive or what?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like to judge hackathons whether it&#8217;s going to be friendly or not based on the types of people who show up. When I tried to do this and talk to other people that are there, I say, &#8220;What do you do? What brings you here?&#8221; You&#8217;ll get the idea that this might be friendly environment. Who knows that? But you might be my future teammate or stuff like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also, take into account the environment that they bring. When I say environment, the setting is it comfortable for you to sit down and start coding. Is there access to the bathroom, is there a whole bunch of water, a whole bunch of food? Those stuff really make or break hackathons and actually contribute to the vibe of hackathons. I do look out for those things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But the key thing is to talk to the people that are there and let&#8217;s say, this person is very stand off-ish or this source are really open and welcoming. I&#8217;m very excited for this. I think that would be a good indicator of whether they want to participate in this hackathon or not. Also, do talk to the coordinators who puts together the hackathons because that can also lead to whether this is going to be a good experience or not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was interesting. I was maybe wondering if there were signals I could look for before I went to decide if I wanted to go but it hadn&#8217;t occurred to me that you could show up and if you&#8217;re not having a good time, you can leave?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Of course. I mean, if you pay for a spot for hackathons, sure you want to get your money&#8217;s worth. But there were events where you don&#8217;t really have to pay and you can just show up and you can like, &#8220;All right. I am not feeling this.&#8221; See, you&#8217;re not being held there against your will. You go to the show and end up like don&#8217;t have to stay to the entire thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The idea of paying in participating in hackathons seems really strange to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m assuming that there are some people think, like I paid for numerous hackathons. I wouldn&#8217;t say the most expensive because the only reason it was expensive for me was I had to fly out to get there. But I felt that the cost for this probably goes to food and getting the area and everything. But I think the ones that you do pay for it, you do get better quality and really good Wi-Fi.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Actually it makes me feel a little better if I pay for it because if I&#8217;m not paying for it, who&#8217;s getting the benefit you know who am I there for?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, right. Exactly. That is also something to think about as well. Most cases, if I am not mistaken, the hackathons that I&#8217;ve seen that were free are geared towards helping out nonprofits or up and coming ideas. For example, Call for DC Hackathon, which was if I&#8217;m not mistaken, it was March or April last year. That was a free hackathon but that was geared towards building tools and technologies to help the communities within DC. You do have to take that into account &#8212; if there&#8217;s a free one, who am I servicing and whatnot and if it&#8217;s not free, hope there&#8217;s a great quality too, greater quality in area and settings.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Zuri, you have mentioned before that you&#8217;re kind of a shy person. But you&#8217;ve also talked about pitching at hackathons and walking around and talking to people. What is your advice to other people who would say that they&#8217;re shy and are too freaked out to go to these hackathons and maybe start chatting up people to see if they want to be there?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For me, what’s really contributed me to not opening up is not willing to pitch. I&#8217;m a very critical person on myself like everything has to be 100% perfect before I do the same thing or do anything. At the time, when I was first starting out, I didn&#8217;t think my skills was good enough. I didn&#8217;t think my ideas were actually appealing and that people will like it. That’s occurred to me from going around, talking to people, and actually doing the pitches and stuff like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> With me seeing that in myself, I was like, &#8220;This is a problem. I need to boost up my confidence.&#8221; That might be a problem for other people why they&#8217;re shy or kind of scared to go in and really put their self out there at these events. It’s probably because they don&#8217;t have strong confidence. My advice to this is if you have that feeling, do what you need to do to get the confident. For me, I felt like I was struggling with Ruby on Rails so I get a whole bunch of Ruby on Rails tutorials, went to a whole bunch of Ruby on Rails Meetups and try to get well-versed in the subject as I can.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then when I went to these events, I was like, &#8220;I know what I&#8217;m talking about. I understand what I&#8217;m talking about and I feel like I can contribute more beyond what I&#8217;m talking about.&#8221; That would be one of my advice I would give to people who are kind of shy like me because if they lack in confidence. It&#8217;s just anything with growing, it&#8217;s going to be uncomfortable, it&#8217;s going to be outside your shell but you have to be willing to grow. That’s what putting yourself out there on these hackathons is going to require you to do to grow and to be confident and network and learn new things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I know that I wanted to grow in my skill so I had to really, really push myself, even though, I&#8217;m definitely shy and don&#8217;t really like talking to people but [inaudible], they&#8217;re amazing people that I come across so far.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would also like to suggest to our listeners if they haven&#8217;t tried this, that maybe they work up to the hackathon by going to a few local user group in Meetups. First off, it gets you used to being around the kind of people who show up for voluntary tech events. It&#8217;s a lower investment things because you&#8217;re going for maybe a couple of hours until the evening. Even if you don&#8217;t wind up going to hackathons, after that you get some good exposure to user groups which are one of the most valuable resources we have to keep growing and learning in our field.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a really good advice. That&#8217;s exactly how I started up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Zuri, you said you started by going to Women Who Code DC, was this helpful to find a group that was targeted for women?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. Actually, if it wasn&#8217;t for them, [inaudible] confidence, I wouldn&#8217;t be in this industry. I would probably get out a long time ago. Something about it just make you feel comfortable, you can ask a whole bunch of question and some unique experiences that women go through is sometimes something that men can cope all the time and you do talk about that and relate that with women.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Women Who Code Meetup in DC it&#8217;s like we&#8217;ve grown to part ways. They are organized and they have so much content, so much talks plus it&#8217;s very, very, very helpful. As well as perfect time, perfect group to come across, like mentors or people that you can ask questions with about whatever technology or whatever, say like entrepreneurship too because when my team went to Capital One Hackathon, I had [inaudible] who was a part of Women Who Code DC Meetup that I went to and I see them, &#8220;Where are the next session do in this route and trying to build this business up with my team,&#8221; and she gave some very good, insightful experience. Women Who Code and groups like that, really do help a lot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Zuri, you mentioned winning that hackathon, opened a door to a job opportunity for you. Do you want to talk about that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was in August, that hackathon, after my team had won, it was like really, really exciting. [inaudible] to my team, imagine like there&#8217;s a team of three, there was three of us. [inaudible] team and hit us like, &#8220;Is someone looking for a job?&#8221; At first, he really, really love the front end as to cover a project, like he was really like [inaudible] for that more than anything else. Then, as [inaudible] was looking, at that time I was temping at this temp agency so I was doing this property management work and it was like [inaudible] that want to do and I was like, &#8220;You know what? Yeah, sure. I had enough of those days. I&#8217;m trying to get in to this industry,&#8221; so I took down his email it took a month before I applied.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think the reason why was because I wouldn&#8217;t have my personal website up before I applied so whoever who was looking at my resume started to look up and like, &#8220;This is her website. It’s pretty nice. She knows her stuff. She built it herself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A month later, I applied and [inaudible] next we called in person interview. I think it was two days later, I was offered a position here as the technologist at The Human Geo. That was very, very exciting because I kid you not, prior to that, I&#8217;ve been applying to a lot of companies and every single one of them: you don&#8217;t have enough experience or we&#8217;re looking for senior developers and mid-level developers, you don&#8217;t have a computer science degree, you don&#8217;t [inaudible] information systems, your projects are not enough for us to gauge whether we like to bring you for interview. I had a lot of &#8216;nos&#8217; and it has been very discouraging. But for every billion nos or some sort, someone is going to say yes and The Human Geo said yes to me so I was really, really, really excited and happy and more of a blessing than anything else.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You only need one yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Zuri, what did they do when you got hired to bring you up to speed because you were very junior and you had very limited experience? What did they do to help you develop your skills and really get productive as quickly as possible?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>They bought me [inaudible] and I just [inaudible] to everyone, as well as my team and my team manager. My team lead, basically said, &#8220;We&#8217;re going to having you work on the [inaudible] aspect of your application and we&#8217;re going to have you paired up with a senior dev. From there, I was learning and working with a senior developer who is really, really good in front end stuff, especially Angular. I learned a lot from him. It was more of working, I wasn&#8217;t alone, I wasn&#8217;t thrown out and sit on the water and set float. But they paired me up with the same dev and having learned from there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also the first two weeks they gave me in time so I do self-reading on Angular, JS documentation because I thought we were working on those. First we do that is network with the senior developer and learn from him.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s great. I wish more companies were willing to take what they perceive to be a risk and hire and mentor more juniors because that&#8217;s the only way that anybody is ever going to get mids and seniors.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. Exactly. You&#8217;re so right about that. Also, it&#8217;s [inaudible] because at the time when I joined, I think I was employee number 63 or 64 so we&#8217;re a small company. Most small company, everyone is doing everything, and everyone has started from mentoring but helping junior devs along the way. It&#8217;s really, really good that I have that opportunity to have a senior developer worked with me as well as guide me on what I need to do [inaudible] aspect for our project.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How long have you been there now?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just reached two years in October.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Congratulations.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. I must say, I grown a lot in my skills. When I first joined, I was scared to work with the command line and everything. But then right now, I&#8217;m going to make this change on vim and I got no problem with it. I&#8217;m doing completely comfortable. It was amazing from zero to a hundred.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Vim does have that property of making you feel really smart when you know how to use it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Definitely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I definitely never unlocks that level of vim. Vim just makes me feel really stupid all the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it does that too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t know how I ever used vi without Git because with Git, at least I could get back to a history point and it&#8217;s totally possible to just accidentally wipe things out with vi. Although, really the hardest part is just exiting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, that&#8217;s like the story of my first few weeks on my first job as a developer where I learned vi and I was like, &#8220;How do I get out of this? How do I get out of this? Oh, my God. Oh, my God.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Just close the terminal window and we&#8217;re fine.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, my God. You&#8217;re right because I definitely did that in the early days. I was like, &#8220;Screw this.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The way that I work in my day to day work flow is that I use tmux and I have a vim window open and it just stays in vim for hours or days at a time and then I switch over to another terminal. When I pair with other people who work in a single terminal and they&#8217;re like jump in and out of vim, I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Wait. What are you doing?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There is this wonderful invention. I think it came about in the late 70s, early 80s. Some people call it GUI &#8211; graphical user interface and I find that I really enjoy applications that take advantage of this technology, especially for code editing. It’s something for listeners to check out. If you want to get away from vim, check out something with a GUI. I hope I&#8217;m saying that right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, everything was perfect in 1975 and that is the way it will be forever.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Zuri, it sounds like there were a lot of growth opportunities for you early on in your job. Do you still find that you have a lot of opportunities for learning and growing? If so, what are some of the things you&#8217;re interested in developing some skill in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it does a lot of growing and learning in the job right now and still have a lot more to go. As far as skills, I&#8217;m now on back end devops type stuff. One of the things that my company is pushing for is for us to get our Amazon Web Services certificate, specifically, the certified solutions architect certificate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They bought us accounts for Linux Academy and I&#8217;ve been using that as a way to study for the certificate. Hopefully, check back with me in March. Hopefully, by then I&#8217;ll get my AWS cert from there but that was one of the things that I am focusing on for this New Year. It&#8217;s getting my certification in that. Actually, it has gone really, really popular thing going on right now. But we use it a lot. In our own projects, we use it a lot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, AWS is super useful. I think it&#8217;s cool that you&#8217;re getting into devops and that operational side so early.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I&#8217;m going to start Year 2. I&#8217;m actually kind of shocked because when I thought I was doing the back end work, I was like, &#8220;Oh, my God. They trust me with that.&#8221; I don&#8217;t trust myself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For the Rail, I was [inaudible] and you know some funny thing, I thought I was going to be able to keep up. I felt like maybe I&#8217;m not ready for this. I do them for this but no. I didn&#8217;t feel that way the minute I spent in a project. My team lead, he&#8217;s pushing for everyone, regardless that you don&#8217;t know the technology. They agree to help you along the way with it. First step, it was like working with Jenkins, which is [inaudible] tool and integration.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I did worked with creating [inaudible] and then we move on to getting services in Docker Containers, then a little bit on the way that does kind of interact with AWS because we&#8217;re creating this microservices that gets to AWS. It’s helpful for us to get understanding of what&#8217;s going on over there on the [inaudible] side. They’re really trying to mold everyone into full stack developer. Everyone that has a skill set in everything, like not one person knows one thing, like everybody knows everything. That’s how they want to grow people here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s really fantastic. That&#8217;s a lot of stuff for one year. I never had a certificate in anything. Has anyone else here have gotten one?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I did about 20 years ago. I got a Netware 3 Certification. I was a certified netware engineer and I stopped to using those skills long before I was done paying off the classes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Ouch.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Were the classes expensive?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I went to a six-month thing at [inaudible] College. I think I spent about $4000 dollars on that stuff. Plus there were the testing fees as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, that&#8217;s wild.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was not a good choice for me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is why I was surprised to hear that they&#8217;re encouraging certificates. Maybe this one is a totally useful guide at learning sort of path. But the history of certificates has been pay our company a lot of monies that we will give you a stamp and you will feel important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and the funny thing is I was wondering because I remember talking to somebody and actually I was at abstractions that IO conference. I was talking to the fellow agent and he&#8217;s like, &#8220;Yeah, I remember that.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> &#8220;The Microsoft one.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> &#8220;Can&#8217;t remember specifically, which one?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> He was like, &#8220;You see when that one with.&#8221; I see where that one came and how that helped me. It makes me wonder, will this get obsolete? Will be no longer use this technology but as I looking at the history of how cloud services have evolved and how it turns into like a major main thing, I have a feeling that may not go away.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For any given technology, will this become obsolete? Yes. But will that next thing &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Will my skills transfer?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, and that probably so.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe this is a little bit different because I know what you&#8217;re talking about, Zuri, the Linux Academy because I use that as well when I was working on devops team. But it&#8217;s not Amazon who&#8217;s actually teaching you. It&#8217;s another provider and it is really cool because they give you a server. You get an opportunity to learn how you can SSH into a server and to a remote server and actually teach yourself in the way that you&#8217;ve really been working so it&#8217;s not like you&#8217;re just doing videos, then it&#8217;s not real to you. I don&#8217;t know compared to the way that normal certificates work but it seems like it&#8217;s a good investment of time to learn a skill that&#8217;s really transferable because it&#8217;s not like you won&#8217;t ever do that again.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It will always forever be SSH into servers and making manipulations. Always. I bought a course a long time ago on Udemy, which is really, really good. That&#8217;s how I started off with the free stuff and trying to learn Ruby on Rails but Cloud Guru had a course on AWS certified on software architect so I am going to also use that as well as learning at good Linux Academy for certification.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It sounds like you&#8217;re really excited about all this continuous learning. You’re tested for great career in tech.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. I hope so. I like when [inaudible]. I don&#8217;t want to do something repetitive over and over again. I think with me having my temp job and do something over and over again and it was like really bugging me a lot and I was like, &#8220;I need to be in something where there&#8217;s always something changing, there&#8217;s always some new technologies out there.&#8221; Like it keeps my mind fresh and ready.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, and we can always take what we&#8217;re doing and do it faster or better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But not both.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Probably not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Not at first, anyway. It takes a while to make it faster and better but then we can.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Zuri, before when you were talking about getting your first job, you mentioned that there was a lot of nos that you received. I just wanted to find out what was it that allowed you to keep going and keep looking for new opportunities and keep participating because a lot of people have talked about how getting all those nos or having a really hard beginning in tech made them discouraged. Some people didn&#8217;t come back for a long time. What was different for you that kept you in it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like to say it was current temp job. I knew I didn&#8217;t want to do that and that I really, really truly want to be a developer. I just keep going and just keep at it and then what the support of Women Who Code community and having the members tell me like, &#8220;Listen, you know your stuff. Somebody is going to say yes. Just keep on applying.&#8221; That&#8217;s what really kept me going, kept me up applying.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You just scared straight program for new developers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s usually called working at a job you hate but I&#8217;ll do it for you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That did it for me. That&#8217;s a lot of what kept me going as I went back from a bachelor&#8217;s in computer science was like I know what happens if I don&#8217;t do this.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, exactly and you don&#8217;t want to love that at all. That really kept me going.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That actually brings up another question I had because I know that in the bio we said that you have a degree in computer information systems but you also said that people mentioned that you don&#8217;t have a degree in computer science. What is the difference between the two? Because I know a lot of people have that question, and why would somebody assume that you can&#8217;t do the developer job because you don&#8217;t have the computer science degree?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When I did interviews and when I talk to anybody, I always give the quick story of the difference between information systems and the difference between computer science. Information systems, all business aspect, you&#8217;re basically at an [inaudible] or could be in taught to skills of how to understand IT and translate it to business terms. You’re basically the medium between IT people and the business people. That’s what information systems measure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When I was talking those classes to Howards to become that, I took more business class than I took on development. Unlike computer science, you stay on the sciences of computer so you&#8217;re doing a whole bunch of math classes, doing classes on how the operating systems are built, you&#8217;re doing classes on data structures, you&#8217;re doing classes on algorithms. It’s more technical based and understanding computers and algorithms and programming, as opposed to information systems, you&#8217;re all about business.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> With good [inaudible] in my classes that I took that wasn&#8217;t a computer science really or computer systems related was like major in economics, accounting 1 and 2, supply chain management and operations. There’s a lot of classes in that. I had to take time aside and study programming, studying Ruby, studying web development in related to at least somewhat keep up with what the computer science people are doing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to argue there that the skills are more relevant than algorithms, depending on the job you have. But for most development jobs, especially if you&#8217;re a web developer, algorithms aren&#8217;t going to help as much as being able to talk to a business person and being able to understand what stakeholders are asking you for.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. I&#8217;ve seen it in my current projects now like how that really plays a huge role, like how are you able to take whatever the system requirements and functional requirements that the client is asking you for and how do you translate that into tech-related stuff and how to tell developers like these are the things and tools and techs that you&#8217;re going to need so build stuff so we can satisfy once are just the stories that were generated from receiving these requirements.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I must say that with me having an information systems major and being able to understand the business aspect, I&#8217;m able to have a clear vision of how the goals and how the project goals are being translated from the business aspect, design, development, production. I am able to see how the stuff is being built and generated. That’s why I like to tell people in regards to the difference between information systems and computer science.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also you can see it when it comes to pitching because computer science people, they don&#8217;t really know too much about the business aspect as much unless they did some side reading and stuff like that. We may have a business person might be able to translate that and help the masses who don&#8217;t know anything or don&#8217;t know much about the computer and technical aspect. They’ll be able to translate and understand what&#8217;s going on. I&#8217;m sorry, what was the second part to that question?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The second part was why would you not having that computer science degree make someone think that you couldn&#8217;t be a developer?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Arrogance.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Elite to some.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a computer science degree. Well, not me but hypothetical hiring a manager and I&#8217;m good. Therefore, good people have a sick computer science degree.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had to suffer for this computer science degree by taking classes in horrible languages and if you haven&#8217;t, you&#8217;re not worthwhile.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How will I communicate with someone who doesn&#8217;t have my math experience?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think some of that ties in the culture a bit to, which is the most evil thing in the world is hiring for culture fit because hiring for culture fit you&#8217;re like, &#8220;I want or more Erics on this team,&#8221; and you end up with these homogenous teams that only know how to solve the problems of Erics and are really imbalanced and don&#8217;t take advantage of the wealth of different experiences that people have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Zuri, we haven&#8217;t really mentioned as you, woman of color, do you think that influenced some of the nos that you&#8217;ve got?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, I don&#8217;t even know. Honestly, I really don&#8217;t know if that influenced the nos. I haven&#8217;t got past the part of getting a phone call back then. Back then I was like, sent in my email with my resumes and stuff like that and the respondent back with, &#8220;You don&#8217;t have the experience and stuff.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I do have my university on [inaudible] course and I know, Howard University is historically a black college and the accreditors or whoever knows that, like I don&#8217;t know. I really don&#8217;t know if that played a huge role or anything. It would [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know I&#8217;ve seen this at some places where they want to hire people from the same list of schools that they&#8217;re comfortable hiring from and I think they&#8217;re just being lazy in some senses and piggybacking off strict admissions process so it&#8217;s pretty much everyone who goes. That’s school is pretty smart because they got in &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And has the appropriate class background.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, and then the other consequence is they can talk to them, they have shared experiences, they have that class background, that general uniformity so that&#8217;s a negative and it takes more effort to hire from colleges that don&#8217;t have really strict admissions processes. I think this probably applies to boot camps too. Sometimes, their graduates are awesome because their admissions process is tricky.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, or their tuition is prohibitively high.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I totally agree that it&#8217;s just laziness for what you said, Jessica, and I always had a bone to pick with that concept of culture fit, especially being an anthropologist because I know they have no idea what they&#8217;re talking about when they say culture fit.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because the reality is culture is shared experiences. If you want to have a certain culture, you’re supposed to share those experiences with the people you have there, not I go find people who are like me. That&#8217;s not creating a culture. Even if they wanted to use this whole university model, what they should acknowledge is that usually when you go to university, you have a welcome week or something where all the freshman&#8217;s have an opportunity to get to know each other in some sort of social fashion and they indoctrinate you with whatever your university stuff is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then even if you come from different places and you have different backgrounds, you all have this thing now that you share together. That&#8217;s what you should be doing when you&#8217;re talking about creating culture fit. You should be going and finding different people and then bringing them to your Company X and saying, &#8220;Now, you&#8217;re part of us and this is what it means for you to be all in one group,&#8221; and you give them something to latch on to, instead of being lazy and say, &#8220;You don&#8217;t have to have it because I have no idea how to make it because that doesn&#8217;t really exist because I don&#8217;t do anything for what I do.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That has the truth stamp for the day.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Spectacular.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I wanted to mention an article I saw recently in The Harvard Business Review where some researchers had sent out resumes to top law firms and they would vary the gender of the applicants and some of the extracurricular activities and personal interests that gave different clues as to their class. For some people, they would say that they were on the Intelligent Sailing Team. For others, they would say they were doing like the relay team in track and field. That and the gender were the only thing that they changed and surprise, surprise! They found that people with the higher class markers got more [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wait a minute, are you trying to say there&#8217;s bias in the hiring processes, Sam, because this is huge?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is exactly what I have to say.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mind-boggling.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, they&#8217;re speaking of Facebook.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s really, really sad.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t know if anyone saw the Facebook article but it was in Bloomberg, I believe. They initially had made a statement about not being able to have impact of the university in their organization because of the pipeline and they ended up &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And like, there&#8217;s no skills from there. They were saying there&#8217;s no skills, like they can find people in that field that had skill for it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that was their initial claim and their diversity numbers are atrocious. They&#8217;re 84% male, predominantly white. It’s really, really bad. Then it came out that diverse candidates were getting in the door but that they&#8217;re being turned away in later interviews for culture fit reasons.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Even though they had been incentivizing recruiters to find more candidates who weren&#8217;t well-represented at the company and I&#8217;m actually reading directly from the article here. During the final stages, it says here, &#8220;The decision makers were risk averse, often declining the minority candidates.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>They specifically solve their pipeline problem and surprise, surprise! That didn&#8217;t fix their hiring problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s never the pipeline.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, mind-boggling.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There it is. It’s placed exactly of what Astrid said. People are looking for others who already share their experiences, instead of building experiences together. Did I get that right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to work on a team that had more people named Blaine, than it had female engineers. I&#8217;m not making this up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How many Blaines is that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There were two Blaines and one female engineer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that reminds me of an old New York Times article from 2003 about somebody&#8217;s observation of basically the same thing but they called it the Dave-to-Girl Ratio.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As we&#8217;re talking about this and we&#8217;re seeing this issue in the hiring practices. Like I said, it&#8217;s huge, huge problem because now it&#8217;s like [inaudible], getting this in the door is also something that I think that we don&#8217;t really talk much about is how to keep them to stay at the company and maintaining that. As I talk [inaudible] here. Sometimes I also like to fit in or we just feel awkward or we don&#8217;t feel comfortable and that makes us unhappy and we want to go somewhere else. This is a problem that needs to be fix.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This whole diversity issue is not something that you could put a Band-Aid on at all. Absolutely not. This has to be 100% effort, whether it&#8217;s on the policy level, like we&#8217;d be doing [inaudible] or within a company. It has to be from the very beginning all the way to the very end like seeing minorities, women, people of color in leadership positions, that goes a long way for me. Especially, for me I would like to see like, &#8220;We have woman senior lead developer,&#8221; that means I feel like I can get there someday. There’s no [inaudible] like it can be done based off her skills and so stuff so I[inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s why we talk about diversity and inclusivity because woman together doesn&#8217;t make any damn sense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Inclusivity, we have to bring those people who are different from us into shared experiences with us. Is there anything that the people at your company do? This is a question for all of the women on this call, especially the women of color. Is there anything that people at your company do that helps with that feeling of belonging?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I do a lot of going out events. When I say going out, of course, lunch is a typical thing but we also have like Fridays, we play Mario-Margaritas. Anybody who wants to stay up on Friday just go to back office room and play Mario Cart and just have Margaritas. That helps to bring effort together and having fun and being comfortable. Also, attending Meetups together, that&#8217;s one day that we get everybody together and just having an open environment. Everyone here is like pretty much mashed very well together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>At GitHub, there&#8217;s an annual women&#8217;s summit for women employees and that&#8217;s the official thing they gets done. There are also the unofficial women&#8217;s lunches and of course, there is sectionals, we have a women-only channel. We have a tech women channel so if you&#8217;re looking for a code review from someone who&#8217;s maybe going to be a bit more empathetic, you can ask the women tech channel first and there&#8217;s a queer channel and there&#8217;s a trans channel. They&#8217;re unofficial channels for this sorts of things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But I think one of the kind of coolest and strangest things that I noticed about GitHub is that the women&#8217;s restroom on the second floor where engineering sets, there are posted notes, stickers, markers and all of the bathroom stalls are filled with posted notes and stickers and the messages of encouragement, counting how many women are at the company, asking questions and complaining about management and it&#8217;s just really strange open forum for sharing different things about your experiences of women at GitHub and it&#8217;s really &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So there&#8217;s asynchronous anonymous bathroom channel.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is so cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s amazing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Also, I want to add one more thing. We also have one of our senior leaders, Jessica King, She actually has at least, every three months or five months to meets up every woman engineer at the company. She has [inaudible] with us and just to fit like, &#8220;How&#8217;s everything going? How do you feel?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s spectacular.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, and she&#8217;s very, very busy so this is a lot and that&#8217;s really great that we have something like that there was [inaudible] for us within the company.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s awesome. I can save that for my experiences, I&#8217;m not even just being a developer but also often working in very male-dominated industries, it&#8217;s usually the little things that make me feel included like saying hello to me every day or talking to me and asking me questions and listening to me when I reply back to you because the stuff that makes me feel not included is if you walk by me every day but you don&#8217;t ever say hi or if you all go out to lunch but you never invite me. But you don&#8217;t always have to have a huge initiative.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think if you have a company where people are encouraged to get to know each other, it can go a long way with helping people who might not be like everybody else feel more included.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to a moment to give a shout out to one of our supporters, Colin Bruce. Thank you very much for your patronage. Greater Than Code is 100% listener funded. If you like the show and you like to support us, please go to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode, pledge at any level and you can get access to our Patreon only sectional, where you can ask guest questions, just new guest and talk about what we have covered on different episodes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have one more question. One thing that you mentioned at the very beginning of the show, Zuri was that you signed up to lead the Ruby on Rails course meetings.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, the Ruby on Rails Meetups for Women Who Code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You signed up to lead those as you were just starting to learn Rails. That&#8217;s really brave.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I blame Kaylin for that. Here&#8217;s what happened. As I said about Kaylin, she&#8217;s the director of the DC Chapter for Women Who Code at that time. She’s like, &#8220;I was telling him, teach yourself on Ruby on Rails,&#8221; and I was like, &#8220;Awesome. That&#8217;s amazing.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> &#8220;You should read it,&#8221; just like that,&#8221; and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I&#8217;m stuck right there. I don&#8217;t know.&#8221; She&#8217;s like, &#8220;No, you&#8217;re good, you&#8217;re smart. You could do this. You could definitely do this. You can run a Ruby on Rails Meetup.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I was like, &#8220;You know what? Sure why not,&#8221; because when you teach, you also learn on top of that. It was very nerve wrecking because I&#8217;m very critical of myself so I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Oh, my god. Everyone here is going to think I&#8217;m stupid because I don&#8217;t know how to solve to error or whatnot.&#8221; I&#8217;m sure someone here knows Ruby on Rails and they should be doing this, not me. A lot of those thoughts are going through my head but I just do myself out there and [inaudible] read up on it before every meetup and try to grow that meetup. It was like a very, very nerve wrecking.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Did you have help? Did you have people who are more experience to fall back on?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, I was not by myself during this Meetup. Actually, I had [inaudible] Amy. She was also learning Ruby Rails with me but she has some programming background so it&#8217;s really easy to looking at off of her because she&#8217;s really good. She had a way of learning too, which was really, really cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> She had that thing built already and she takes it apart see how the mechanics work. That’s what she was doing with the one-month Rails. she had it done already or I think she took the final code base and start taking things apart to see how the [inaudible] and to create a [inaudible] and stuff like that, just to figure out how that works. She had interest in building stuff and was very good at solving errors. Definitely I had her to piggyback whenever we came across that I had no clue about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It helps when someone says, &#8220;You can do this,&#8221; and also it helps when you&#8217;re not by yourself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, the you-can-do-this part, definitely because Kaylin has really been definitely pushing me. Everyone within Woman Who Code community has definitely been pushing me like, &#8220;You can do this. You’re smart. You&#8217;re really great. This should be no problem with you doing this at all. Don&#8217;t doubt yourself.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s going to be my reflection of the day. I&#8217;ll just hop us by in the reflections. At the end of the show, we like to go around and say, &#8220;What did you learn today? What did you find particularly interesting?&#8221; This is mine because there were so many people who helped you in small ways.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Your professors pushing you to go to the hackathon. Your MIS professor somehow influence you to go into CIS as your major. The people at Women Who Code DC who made you feel welcome and Kaylin who said, &#8220;You can do this,&#8221; and Amy, I think it was who was helping you with the Ruby on Rails workshop and then this your team at the hackathons. You did this. You kept pushing through all discouragements and kept learning. The other thing that I really noticed was that through all of this, you&#8217;re like, &#8220;Well, I learned something so it must be good.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. That’s absolutely right. I was like growing pain, there was people but that what I was trying to do. Everything I go to that at least I try to learn something out of it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, because then you come out as a stronger person. Sam wants to call these things micro-kindnesses or micro-affection. I&#8217;m going to go with micro-mentoring.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, that&#8217;s the perfect word &#8212; micro-mentoring. I like that. We should make this a thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah because we can all do that. It doesn&#8217;t take formality. It&#8217;s these little things that add up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can only led to my big takeaway from this and that is that, Zuri you are very fortunate to have those sorts of supportive people and support networks around you. I think that there are things that more senior developers can do to create those opportunities for micro-mentorship, to create the support networks, to create those structures that will give new people the ability to get through all the nos and to find the yes, and to find those learning experiences. I&#8217;m going to be thinking about how, as a more senior person, I can foster those sorts of environments.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cool. I would like to add on because I just recently got a formal mentor, which I really excited about. But with that interview that was like conducted on me like [inaudible]. I actually decided to make sure if anyone asks me questions or I come across like a J developer, let&#8217;s ask them all these questions and stuff like that, I like to reach out to them privately like, &#8220;How&#8217;s everything going? We should learning all that stuff,&#8221; and try to figure out what their goals are and then giving direction or connect to someone that I know that could probably help them out. Then hopefully, build that relationship and just connect that piece.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If I know someone who&#8217;s trying to study Ruby and Ruby on Rails and I was reflecting on things, &#8220;I wish I had knew,&#8221; or things I wish I had done back then. It’s been great, honestly but there are a lot of things I wish I&#8217;ve done differently back then. I try to, at least to connect with her whenever I got a chance, like every two or three weeks and be like, &#8220;How&#8217;s that thing going? What did you do so far? What are you studying? Let&#8217;s set these goals and stuff.&#8221; Or try to do a simple algorithm problem with her every time we meet up our talk like, &#8220;[inaudible],&#8221; or a palindrome of some sort.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But I feel like if anything guys can do, anything to support that just to simply meetup with the [inaudible], send a message every two or three weeks like, &#8220;How&#8217;s everything going? You should check out this material? Are you having any issues with your current projects?&#8221; That would be pretty really, really helpful for them because it shows that people out there like they&#8217;re rooting for them and wanted to get better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The reflection that I have from our conversation today was to use hackathon as a way to try new things. I know in the past when I&#8217;ve gone to hackathons, I&#8217;m usually been working on something so I&#8217;m not really thinking about trying out new stuff. But I really liked what you talked about earlier, Zuri about as you were interested in new technologies, then you would go to hackathon and see how you could use it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that&#8217;s a really great idea about not just getting out there and trying other stuff but also meeting people who are already good at it. That could help with keeping you more excited about it and keeping you interested and also getting a chance to see more about what your skills are. One of the things I struggled with in the beginning, with so much technology and I didn&#8217;t know exactly what I was interested in and it was hard to figure that out on your own because everyone just tells you to try things. We don&#8217;t know what you&#8217;re doing so it seems like going to a hackathon to try it out, it&#8217;s really a great way to get started.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of my takeaways is actually even a little bit more 101 than what you were just talking about, Astrid. I think I had just sort of reflexively been poo-pooing the entire idea of hackathons so maybe what I should do is just try to go and hang out at one, maybe go for the pitch session and then come by for a couple hours the following day and just hang out and see what people are doing and if anybody feels like chatting because that&#8217;s something that sounds like I&#8217;ve been missing out on. That’s really cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The other thing that I&#8217;m going to take away from this is just the power of post it’s because that idea of having posted some pens in the bathroom is just absolutely amazing. That sounds wonderful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Well, thank you very much, Zuri. This has been a really interesting and useful and educational conversation. We’ve really enjoyed having you on the show so thank you for taking the time to join us and talk to us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Great and thank you for having me. This is really exciting and it&#8217;s a very insightful conversation. Thank you. Bye everybody.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
</div>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Please leave us a review on iTunes!</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><strong>Transcript:</strong></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>OMG. There is so much snow. There is more snow than I have ever seen on the ground in Portland. With that, I would like to say welcome to Episode 15 of Snowpocalypse.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You&#8217;re forgetting, Sam. There&#8217;s no snow here in Chicago.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I should speak more quietly is what you&#8217;re saying?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think you&#8217;re using exclusionary language. I don&#8217;t have snow at all right now.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, damn it! Sorry. What would you prefer I say, instead?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Your weather may vary.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Greater Than Snow?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Sure. I am Coraline Ada Ehmke and I&#8217;m joined today by the wonderful Jessica Kerr.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Coraline. We are also here with Astrid Countee.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you, Jessica and today our guest is Zuri Hunter. Zuri is a software engineer at DigitalGlobe, one of the world leaders in providing high-earth imagery, data and analysis. While studying Computer Information Systems at the illustrious Howard University, Zuri spent about two years teaching herself Ruby on Rails and participating in hackathons to expand her knowledge and experience.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">In her spare time, she loves watching American football and playing video games. Hi, Zuri. Welcome to the podcast.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Hi. Thank you for having me. I think I&#8217;m super excited.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>High-earth imagery, is that like Washington, Oregon, Colorado, and Amsterdam?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m not sure about that but I&#8217;m going to say this. We recently got acquired so formally, our company is The Human Geo and we did a lot like geo-spatial visualization data and then DigitalGlobe which does a lot with satellite imagery and stuff. That was a great fit they do more of that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That sounds really cool. Before we get too far into that, we like to start the show by asking people about their superhero origin stories. So Zuri, How did you get into tech?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When I first came to Howard, it was a marketing major. I took my Imaginary Information Systems class. It&#8217;s like one of the requirements from [inaudible] and I just love the idea like tech and how it&#8217;s being use in businesses and stuff so I decided to switch to Computer Information Systems and with that, they had intro to Java programming and that&#8217;s when I love the idea like, &#8220;Oh, I could be creative and build stuff with my knowledge and stuff.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I decided, from that point on that I want to do web development, software development but I knew that with my Computer Information Systems, it wasn&#8217;t geared towards that so I decide that I was going [inaudible] my skills.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We said in the intro that you spend a couple of years on Ruby on Rails. What attracted you to that platform?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Ruby is really easy to read. When I started at Java programming, I wasn&#8217;t like a fan of Java syntax and it&#8217;s super, super hard but doing that was like web [inaudible] tools and then I attended Women Who Code Meetups in DC. They had opened up one in Ruby on Rails. The founder at the time, Kaylin, she was like, &#8220;Would you like run this and Meetup for us,&#8221; even I was a complete newbie to it. I was like, &#8220;Yeah, let&#8217;s go for it.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> From there, it&#8217;s not easy to pick up for me around that time and a lot easier to create prototypes for hackathons. I must emphasize that. It&#8217;s so bad because in ethical hackathon, I was doing an app in Ionic and that took forever, trying to build up the base in the base behind unlike Rails, you just click.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Do you remember what&#8217;s your first Rails app was?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, I do. It was a Pinterest demo. When we first launch Ruby on Rails for a DC at Women Who Code, I hope I didn&#8217;t butcher his name, [inaudible] one month, he gave us a discount for the ladies to go through his course of one month Rails. That was basically making a Pinterest app, going from design, using Bootstrap, all the way to deployment using [inaudible]. That was like my first Ruby on Rails app right there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have done that so I know exactly what you&#8217;re talking about. That&#8217;s so awesome.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, documentation is so good. It&#8217;s like I could see you down the road and I looked back at it and I appreciate this so much.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Zuri, when did you first start participating in hackathons because I know that you had talked about the fact that you changed your major but when was your first hackathon after you decided that you were going to be interested in learning how to program?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>My first hackathon, back then I didn&#8217;t really participating as soon as I came as spectator. But my professor in the summer of 2013, Professor Henry, he was pushing me to go to these events. Because I&#8217;m really a shy person so he said, &#8220;You don&#8217;t have to do anything, just come. Just see what people are working on. You don&#8217;t have to join the scene. Just show up.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> That summer, I attended my first hackathon. It was IndiaHack. I don&#8217;t think I have been at the time but I just came, went to 1776 Washington DC and just saw greatness in the room with people working on their projects. I think at the time, Google Glasses were hot so I was able to touch and play around Google Glasses for the first time. It&#8217;s no pressure, honestly. Everyone is relax and do things that they love. That was like [inaudible]. After spectating on site, I was enjoying development tutorials and then [inaudible] my professor helps when I was going to cross errors. But I didn&#8217;t participate until my second hackathon.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You sound really enamored of hackathons.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. If you have an idea, you can work on it and this is a perfect opportunity to work on a new technology, that you ever want to work on. The last hackathon that I went to recently was in November and that&#8217;s for this new group called Color Coded. I had this idea since August. But it&#8217;s been back from my college years and I want to use React Native because with my current job, we use React for finance. I was like, &#8220;Let&#8217;s try React Native.&#8221; Of course, it&#8217;s really hard just trying to break in into that but it&#8217;s perfect opportunity for me so I use a new tool at the hackathon.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I actually ran a hackathon back in January. The way we set it up was not like a typical hackathon and that was not competitive. We had five or six different nonprofit organizations and we built teams, grabbing people for the teams and we try to have a mix of different experience levels and different technologies and like front end people and back end people and whatever the difference there and that hackathon as it was noncompetitive. We wanted to be noncompetitive so it wouldn&#8217;t be so intimidating for new people. Do you find the competitive aspects of hackathons appealing? Or do you think it takes something away?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>From a newcomer perspective, it takes away because now [inaudible] is feeling pressured, like for me whenever I get so competitive, I&#8217;m feeling pressured that I can make sure I know everything, that come across the error, I have to fix on the spot. That kind of takes away from the experience.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But as soon as I come to get more experience or get more comfortable with their skills, like I am right now, I guess you don&#8217;t really paid too much attention to the competitive in that aspect. It&#8217;s more of, &#8220;I just want to have fun using this new technology. I just want to have fun and even keep the same interest as me. For newbies, especially when I first got the idea, the competitiveness did take away from wanting to be a part of these hackathons.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That would take away from me as an experience developer as well. I was just saying in the chat that I&#8217;ve never found hackathons appealing for a variety of reasons, like I don&#8217;t do well when I don&#8217;t sleep so the idea of spending a weekend is kind of unappealing. Then even if I wanted to, I have a kid so I can&#8217;t really schedule an entire weekend in town but not at home.</span></p>
<p class="p2"><span class="s1">Then just the idea of having a competitive events and working on something where your whole goal is to slap it together as fast as you can is like really at odds with my preferred mode of taking your time and doing TDD and trying to get things right as you go. For all of those reasons, I&#8217;ve never been really interested in hackathons so it&#8217;s really interesting to hear you talk about how great they are. There’s some aspect of this that I hadn&#8217;t considered. That’s really cool. Thank you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There were going to be like excellent run hackathons and they&#8217;re going to be really, really hard hackathons but it&#8217;s more of like the audience that comes to those things and it&#8217;s what makes it. But I am 100% with you. I can&#8217;t work straight through like I can&#8217;t do a full 24 hours of coding. I need a break. I need sleep.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think we all do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. Some people they&#8217;re built like that and some people, like me are not. The hackathons that really put me on the spot and actually help me get my gig until today, the IndiaHack, Capital One Hackathon, I did take a break during that. My team knows me very well. But I took a break and I said, &#8220;Look guys, in early in the morning, I need to take this break,&#8221; but I think we need to understand that it&#8217;s okay to [inaudible] or take some time to yourself while we are in these events because coding is a lot of mental power right there and you need to rest.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I guess fear of missing out could keep you awake for a while, right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah. For some people, making that last, extra effort so they can win something like price money or some sort. It turns on people and that what drives them.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You just said something interesting about the hackathon that got you your gig and that&#8217;s another thing that I wanted to ask you about was this idea of using a hackathon to sort of break into the field and launch your career. You want to get into that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, sure. I&#8217;ll get into that. It was funny thing that it was like, &#8220;I never saw this coming.&#8221; With me doing the hackathon, I didn&#8217;t see this coming at all, like actually being offered to what interview at my current company and actually getting offered. I was just simply going to this events, trying to meet people, network as well as extend my skills and understand how it to work in a tech environment because that was going to be the very closest thing I can get to in working in a tech environment was that these hackathons. It was a really huge shocker and a blessing at the same time that I have someone [inaudible] my team [inaudible] and it&#8217;s like for anyone looking to get a job.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I do sometimes try to recommend newbies when they&#8217;re asking, &#8220;How to get to [inaudible]?&#8221; And I was like, &#8220;Go to meet ups and to feel that you&#8217;re interested in, talk to people and you will learn an awful lot and you&#8217;re going to see a name of the face and see that you know what you&#8217;re doing and that you have a high interest in it because honestly, I feel like companies are looking for people who are really energetic and have a high interest in the tools that they use. It’s really, really helpful and hackathons are a perfect way to show that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I feel that also to attend hackathons, regardless if you don&#8217;t really get ready or not because I tell you, I was trying to get out of it with my professor, when he was trying to tell to come out to these hackathons and say, &#8220;Just show up. You don&#8217;t have to do anything.&#8221; I say okay because I was not 100% confident in my skill, especially in Java. In fact, in participating a team but when you show up and you&#8217;re comfortable and you are, &#8220;This is not as bad. This is not as intimidating.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You mentioned that your team knows you. Did you show up to that particular hackathon as a full team?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, actually. It was my professor or it&#8217;s my classmate who sent the email out about hackathon and I bought my ticket. We&#8217;re always like, &#8220;If we don&#8217;t find anything or themes that you are interested in, we can all form together,&#8221; and that end up happening up to the pitching session and we just stick together on this one.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What&#8217;s a pitching session?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>What they do, again in hackathons is people who have ideas, they will pitch it to the audience and say, &#8220;This is my idea. These are the text that I&#8217;m interested in working with.&#8221; Or these are that types of people I&#8217;m looking for and this is what I do.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For Color Coded hackathon, the idea was basically an app that allows you to record sessions with your friends or you freestyle over a popular hip hop beat. We usually do this in college all the time. We have album listening party and after is somebody pop in some instrumentals and someone would [inaudible] and we all go in a circle, amazing freestyles.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I went to [inaudible] that makes me [inaudible] to have that process as well as record it and share it with your friends. When I was pitching that idea, I also explained to them like, &#8220;I&#8217;m a full-stack developer. But these are the tools that I&#8217;m interested in working with like React so if you float with React, that&#8217;s great. If you have some experience with audio engineering, that&#8217;s also a plus and I also would like to have a designer.&#8221; That’s what essentially is being covered within the pitching sessions in hackathons.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>We&#8217;ve talked on the show in previous episodes about signaling behaviors and I&#8217;m wondering, as somebody who is new to the field or maybe like me as just new to the idea of hackathons, what are some signals that I should be looking for to decide whether a hackathon is going to be friendly or uber competitive or what?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like to judge hackathons whether it&#8217;s going to be friendly or not based on the types of people who show up. When I tried to do this and talk to other people that are there, I say, &#8220;What do you do? What brings you here?&#8221; You&#8217;ll get the idea that this might be friendly environment. Who knows that? But you might be my future teammate or stuff like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also, take into account the environment that they bring. When I say environment, the setting is it comfortable for you to sit down and start coding. Is there access to the bathroom, is there a whole bunch of water, a whole bunch of food? Those stuff really make or break hackathons and actually contribute to the vibe of hackathons. I do look out for those things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But the key thing is to talk to the people that are there and let&#8217;s say, this person is very stand off-ish or this source are really open and welcoming. I&#8217;m very excited for this. I think that would be a good indicator of whether they want to participate in this hackathon or not. Also, do talk to the coordinators who puts together the hackathons because that can also lead to whether this is going to be a good experience or not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That was interesting. I was maybe wondering if there were signals I could look for before I went to decide if I wanted to go but it hadn&#8217;t occurred to me that you could show up and if you&#8217;re not having a good time, you can leave?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Of course. I mean, if you pay for a spot for hackathons, sure you want to get your money&#8217;s worth. But there were events where you don&#8217;t really have to pay and you can just show up and you can like, &#8220;All right. I am not feeling this.&#8221; See, you&#8217;re not being held there against your will. You go to the show and end up like don&#8217;t have to stay to the entire thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The idea of paying in participating in hackathons seems really strange to me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I&#8217;m assuming that there are some people think, like I paid for numerous hackathons. I wouldn&#8217;t say the most expensive because the only reason it was expensive for me was I had to fly out to get there. But I felt that the cost for this probably goes to food and getting the area and everything. But I think the ones that you do pay for it, you do get better quality and really good Wi-Fi.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Actually it makes me feel a little better if I pay for it because if I&#8217;m not paying for it, who&#8217;s getting the benefit you know who am I there for?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, right. Exactly. That is also something to think about as well. Most cases, if I am not mistaken, the hackathons that I&#8217;ve seen that were free are geared towards helping out nonprofits or up and coming ideas. For example, Call for DC Hackathon, which was if I&#8217;m not mistaken, it was March or April last year. That was a free hackathon but that was geared towards building tools and technologies to help the communities within DC. You do have to take that into account &#8212; if there&#8217;s a free one, who am I servicing and whatnot and if it&#8217;s not free, hope there&#8217;s a great quality too, greater quality in area and settings.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Zuri, you have mentioned before that you&#8217;re kind of a shy person. But you&#8217;ve also talked about pitching at hackathons and walking around and talking to people. What is your advice to other people who would say that they&#8217;re shy and are too freaked out to go to these hackathons and maybe start chatting up people to see if they want to be there?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For me, what’s really contributed me to not opening up is not willing to pitch. I&#8217;m a very critical person on myself like everything has to be 100% perfect before I do the same thing or do anything. At the time, when I was first starting out, I didn&#8217;t think my skills was good enough. I didn&#8217;t think my ideas were actually appealing and that people will like it. That’s occurred to me from going around, talking to people, and actually doing the pitches and stuff like that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> With me seeing that in myself, I was like, &#8220;This is a problem. I need to boost up my confidence.&#8221; That might be a problem for other people why they&#8217;re shy or kind of scared to go in and really put their self out there at these events. It’s probably because they don&#8217;t have strong confidence. My advice to this is if you have that feeling, do what you need to do to get the confident. For me, I felt like I was struggling with Ruby on Rails so I get a whole bunch of Ruby on Rails tutorials, went to a whole bunch of Ruby on Rails Meetups and try to get well-versed in the subject as I can.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then when I went to these events, I was like, &#8220;I know what I&#8217;m talking about. I understand what I&#8217;m talking about and I feel like I can contribute more beyond what I&#8217;m talking about.&#8221; That would be one of my advice I would give to people who are kind of shy like me because if they lack in confidence. It&#8217;s just anything with growing, it&#8217;s going to be uncomfortable, it&#8217;s going to be outside your shell but you have to be willing to grow. That’s what putting yourself out there on these hackathons is going to require you to do to grow and to be confident and network and learn new things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I know that I wanted to grow in my skill so I had to really, really push myself, even though, I&#8217;m definitely shy and don&#8217;t really like talking to people but [inaudible], they&#8217;re amazing people that I come across so far.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I would also like to suggest to our listeners if they haven&#8217;t tried this, that maybe they work up to the hackathon by going to a few local user group in Meetups. First off, it gets you used to being around the kind of people who show up for voluntary tech events. It&#8217;s a lower investment things because you&#8217;re going for maybe a couple of hours until the evening. Even if you don&#8217;t wind up going to hackathons, after that you get some good exposure to user groups which are one of the most valuable resources we have to keep growing and learning in our field.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s a really good advice. That&#8217;s exactly how I started up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Zuri, you said you started by going to Women Who Code DC, was this helpful to find a group that was targeted for women?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. Actually, if it wasn&#8217;t for them, [inaudible] confidence, I wouldn&#8217;t be in this industry. I would probably get out a long time ago. Something about it just make you feel comfortable, you can ask a whole bunch of question and some unique experiences that women go through is sometimes something that men can cope all the time and you do talk about that and relate that with women.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Women Who Code Meetup in DC it&#8217;s like we&#8217;ve grown to part ways. They are organized and they have so much content, so much talks plus it&#8217;s very, very, very helpful. As well as perfect time, perfect group to come across, like mentors or people that you can ask questions with about whatever technology or whatever, say like entrepreneurship too because when my team went to Capital One Hackathon, I had [inaudible] who was a part of Women Who Code DC Meetup that I went to and I see them, &#8220;Where are the next session do in this route and trying to build this business up with my team,&#8221; and she gave some very good, insightful experience. Women Who Code and groups like that, really do help a lot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Zuri, you mentioned winning that hackathon, opened a door to a job opportunity for you. Do you want to talk about that?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was in August, that hackathon, after my team had won, it was like really, really exciting. [inaudible] to my team, imagine like there&#8217;s a team of three, there was three of us. [inaudible] team and hit us like, &#8220;Is someone looking for a job?&#8221; At first, he really, really love the front end as to cover a project, like he was really like [inaudible] for that more than anything else. Then, as [inaudible] was looking, at that time I was temping at this temp agency so I was doing this property management work and it was like [inaudible] that want to do and I was like, &#8220;You know what? Yeah, sure. I had enough of those days. I&#8217;m trying to get in to this industry,&#8221; so I took down his email it took a month before I applied.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think the reason why was because I wouldn&#8217;t have my personal website up before I applied so whoever who was looking at my resume started to look up and like, &#8220;This is her website. It’s pretty nice. She knows her stuff. She built it herself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> A month later, I applied and [inaudible] next we called in person interview. I think it was two days later, I was offered a position here as the technologist at The Human Geo. That was very, very exciting because I kid you not, prior to that, I&#8217;ve been applying to a lot of companies and every single one of them: you don&#8217;t have enough experience or we&#8217;re looking for senior developers and mid-level developers, you don&#8217;t have a computer science degree, you don&#8217;t [inaudible] information systems, your projects are not enough for us to gauge whether we like to bring you for interview. I had a lot of &#8216;nos&#8217; and it has been very discouraging. But for every billion nos or some sort, someone is going to say yes and The Human Geo said yes to me so I was really, really, really excited and happy and more of a blessing than anything else.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You only need one yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Zuri, what did they do when you got hired to bring you up to speed because you were very junior and you had very limited experience? What did they do to help you develop your skills and really get productive as quickly as possible?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>They bought me [inaudible] and I just [inaudible] to everyone, as well as my team and my team manager. My team lead, basically said, &#8220;We&#8217;re going to having you work on the [inaudible] aspect of your application and we&#8217;re going to have you paired up with a senior dev. From there, I was learning and working with a senior developer who is really, really good in front end stuff, especially Angular. I learned a lot from him. It was more of working, I wasn&#8217;t alone, I wasn&#8217;t thrown out and sit on the water and set float. But they paired me up with the same dev and having learned from there.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also the first two weeks they gave me in time so I do self-reading on Angular, JS documentation because I thought we were working on those. First we do that is network with the senior developer and learn from him.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s great. I wish more companies were willing to take what they perceive to be a risk and hire and mentor more juniors because that&#8217;s the only way that anybody is ever going to get mids and seniors.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. Exactly. You&#8217;re so right about that. Also, it&#8217;s [inaudible] because at the time when I joined, I think I was employee number 63 or 64 so we&#8217;re a small company. Most small company, everyone is doing everything, and everyone has started from mentoring but helping junior devs along the way. It&#8217;s really, really good that I have that opportunity to have a senior developer worked with me as well as guide me on what I need to do [inaudible] aspect for our project.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How long have you been there now?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I just reached two years in October.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Congratulations.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. I must say, I grown a lot in my skills. When I first joined, I was scared to work with the command line and everything. But then right now, I&#8217;m going to make this change on vim and I got no problem with it. I&#8217;m doing completely comfortable. It was amazing from zero to a hundred.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Vim does have that property of making you feel really smart when you know how to use it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Definitely.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I definitely never unlocks that level of vim. Vim just makes me feel really stupid all the time.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it does that too.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t know how I ever used vi without Git because with Git, at least I could get back to a history point and it&#8217;s totally possible to just accidentally wipe things out with vi. Although, really the hardest part is just exiting.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, that&#8217;s like the story of my first few weeks on my first job as a developer where I learned vi and I was like, &#8220;How do I get out of this? How do I get out of this? Oh, my God. Oh, my God.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Just close the terminal window and we&#8217;re fine.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, my God. You&#8217;re right because I definitely did that in the early days. I was like, &#8220;Screw this.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The way that I work in my day to day work flow is that I use tmux and I have a vim window open and it just stays in vim for hours or days at a time and then I switch over to another terminal. When I pair with other people who work in a single terminal and they&#8217;re like jump in and out of vim, I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Wait. What are you doing?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There is this wonderful invention. I think it came about in the late 70s, early 80s. Some people call it GUI &#8211; graphical user interface and I find that I really enjoy applications that take advantage of this technology, especially for code editing. It’s something for listeners to check out. If you want to get away from vim, check out something with a GUI. I hope I&#8217;m saying that right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>No, everything was perfect in 1975 and that is the way it will be forever.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Zuri, it sounds like there were a lot of growth opportunities for you early on in your job. Do you still find that you have a lot of opportunities for learning and growing? If so, what are some of the things you&#8217;re interested in developing some skill in.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, it does a lot of growing and learning in the job right now and still have a lot more to go. As far as skills, I&#8217;m now on back end devops type stuff. One of the things that my company is pushing for is for us to get our Amazon Web Services certificate, specifically, the certified solutions architect certificate.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> They bought us accounts for Linux Academy and I&#8217;ve been using that as a way to study for the certificate. Hopefully, check back with me in March. Hopefully, by then I&#8217;ll get my AWS cert from there but that was one of the things that I am focusing on for this New Year. It&#8217;s getting my certification in that. Actually, it has gone really, really popular thing going on right now. But we use it a lot. In our own projects, we use it a lot.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, AWS is super useful. I think it&#8217;s cool that you&#8217;re getting into devops and that operational side so early.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I&#8217;m going to start Year 2. I&#8217;m actually kind of shocked because when I thought I was doing the back end work, I was like, &#8220;Oh, my God. They trust me with that.&#8221; I don&#8217;t trust myself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> For the Rail, I was [inaudible] and you know some funny thing, I thought I was going to be able to keep up. I felt like maybe I&#8217;m not ready for this. I do them for this but no. I didn&#8217;t feel that way the minute I spent in a project. My team lead, he&#8217;s pushing for everyone, regardless that you don&#8217;t know the technology. They agree to help you along the way with it. First step, it was like working with Jenkins, which is [inaudible] tool and integration.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I did worked with creating [inaudible] and then we move on to getting services in Docker Containers, then a little bit on the way that does kind of interact with AWS because we&#8217;re creating this microservices that gets to AWS. It’s helpful for us to get understanding of what&#8217;s going on over there on the [inaudible] side. They’re really trying to mold everyone into full stack developer. Everyone that has a skill set in everything, like not one person knows one thing, like everybody knows everything. That’s how they want to grow people here.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s really fantastic. That&#8217;s a lot of stuff for one year. I never had a certificate in anything. Has anyone else here have gotten one?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I did about 20 years ago. I got a Netware 3 Certification. I was a certified netware engineer and I stopped to using those skills long before I was done paying off the classes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Ouch.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Were the classes expensive?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I went to a six-month thing at [inaudible] College. I think I spent about $4000 dollars on that stuff. Plus there were the testing fees as well.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, that&#8217;s wild.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It was not a good choice for me.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>This is why I was surprised to hear that they&#8217;re encouraging certificates. Maybe this one is a totally useful guide at learning sort of path. But the history of certificates has been pay our company a lot of monies that we will give you a stamp and you will feel important.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, and the funny thing is I was wondering because I remember talking to somebody and actually I was at abstractions that IO conference. I was talking to the fellow agent and he&#8217;s like, &#8220;Yeah, I remember that.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> &#8220;The Microsoft one.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> &#8220;Can&#8217;t remember specifically, which one?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> He was like, &#8220;You see when that one with.&#8221; I see where that one came and how that helped me. It makes me wonder, will this get obsolete? Will be no longer use this technology but as I looking at the history of how cloud services have evolved and how it turns into like a major main thing, I have a feeling that may not go away.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>For any given technology, will this become obsolete? Yes. But will that next thing &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Will my skills transfer?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, and that probably so.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Maybe this is a little bit different because I know what you&#8217;re talking about, Zuri, the Linux Academy because I use that as well when I was working on devops team. But it&#8217;s not Amazon who&#8217;s actually teaching you. It&#8217;s another provider and it is really cool because they give you a server. You get an opportunity to learn how you can SSH into a server and to a remote server and actually teach yourself in the way that you&#8217;ve really been working so it&#8217;s not like you&#8217;re just doing videos, then it&#8217;s not real to you. I don&#8217;t know compared to the way that normal certificates work but it seems like it&#8217;s a good investment of time to learn a skill that&#8217;s really transferable because it&#8217;s not like you won&#8217;t ever do that again.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It will always forever be SSH into servers and making manipulations. Always. I bought a course a long time ago on Udemy, which is really, really good. That&#8217;s how I started off with the free stuff and trying to learn Ruby on Rails but Cloud Guru had a course on AWS certified on software architect so I am going to also use that as well as learning at good Linux Academy for certification.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It sounds like you&#8217;re really excited about all this continuous learning. You’re tested for great career in tech.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Thank you. I hope so. I like when [inaudible]. I don&#8217;t want to do something repetitive over and over again. I think with me having my temp job and do something over and over again and it was like really bugging me a lot and I was like, &#8220;I need to be in something where there&#8217;s always something changing, there&#8217;s always some new technologies out there.&#8221; Like it keeps my mind fresh and ready.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, and we can always take what we&#8217;re doing and do it faster or better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>But not both.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Probably not.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Not at first, anyway. It takes a while to make it faster and better but then we can.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Zuri, before when you were talking about getting your first job, you mentioned that there was a lot of nos that you received. I just wanted to find out what was it that allowed you to keep going and keep looking for new opportunities and keep participating because a lot of people have talked about how getting all those nos or having a really hard beginning in tech made them discouraged. Some people didn&#8217;t come back for a long time. What was different for you that kept you in it?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I like to say it was current temp job. I knew I didn&#8217;t want to do that and that I really, really truly want to be a developer. I just keep going and just keep at it and then what the support of Women Who Code community and having the members tell me like, &#8220;Listen, you know your stuff. Somebody is going to say yes. Just keep on applying.&#8221; That&#8217;s what really kept me going, kept me up applying.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You just scared straight program for new developers.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s usually called working at a job you hate but I&#8217;ll do it for you.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That did it for me. That&#8217;s a lot of what kept me going as I went back from a bachelor&#8217;s in computer science was like I know what happens if I don&#8217;t do this.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, exactly and you don&#8217;t want to love that at all. That really kept me going.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That actually brings up another question I had because I know that in the bio we said that you have a degree in computer information systems but you also said that people mentioned that you don&#8217;t have a degree in computer science. What is the difference between the two? Because I know a lot of people have that question, and why would somebody assume that you can&#8217;t do the developer job because you don&#8217;t have the computer science degree?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>When I did interviews and when I talk to anybody, I always give the quick story of the difference between information systems and the difference between computer science. Information systems, all business aspect, you&#8217;re basically at an [inaudible] or could be in taught to skills of how to understand IT and translate it to business terms. You’re basically the medium between IT people and the business people. That’s what information systems measure.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> When I was talking those classes to Howards to become that, I took more business class than I took on development. Unlike computer science, you stay on the sciences of computer so you&#8217;re doing a whole bunch of math classes, doing classes on how the operating systems are built, you&#8217;re doing classes on data structures, you&#8217;re doing classes on algorithms. It’s more technical based and understanding computers and algorithms and programming, as opposed to information systems, you&#8217;re all about business.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> With good [inaudible] in my classes that I took that wasn&#8217;t a computer science really or computer systems related was like major in economics, accounting 1 and 2, supply chain management and operations. There’s a lot of classes in that. I had to take time aside and study programming, studying Ruby, studying web development in related to at least somewhat keep up with what the computer science people are doing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to argue there that the skills are more relevant than algorithms, depending on the job you have. But for most development jobs, especially if you&#8217;re a web developer, algorithms aren&#8217;t going to help as much as being able to talk to a business person and being able to understand what stakeholders are asking you for.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes. I&#8217;ve seen it in my current projects now like how that really plays a huge role, like how are you able to take whatever the system requirements and functional requirements that the client is asking you for and how do you translate that into tech-related stuff and how to tell developers like these are the things and tools and techs that you&#8217;re going to need so build stuff so we can satisfy once are just the stories that were generated from receiving these requirements.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I must say that with me having an information systems major and being able to understand the business aspect, I&#8217;m able to have a clear vision of how the goals and how the project goals are being translated from the business aspect, design, development, production. I am able to see how the stuff is being built and generated. That’s why I like to tell people in regards to the difference between information systems and computer science.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Also you can see it when it comes to pitching because computer science people, they don&#8217;t really know too much about the business aspect as much unless they did some side reading and stuff like that. We may have a business person might be able to translate that and help the masses who don&#8217;t know anything or don&#8217;t know much about the computer and technical aspect. They’ll be able to translate and understand what&#8217;s going on. I&#8217;m sorry, what was the second part to that question?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The second part was why would you not having that computer science degree make someone think that you couldn&#8217;t be a developer?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Arrogance.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Elite to some.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have a computer science degree. Well, not me but hypothetical hiring a manager and I&#8217;m good. Therefore, good people have a sick computer science degree.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I had to suffer for this computer science degree by taking classes in horrible languages and if you haven&#8217;t, you&#8217;re not worthwhile.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How will I communicate with someone who doesn&#8217;t have my math experience?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I think some of that ties in the culture a bit to, which is the most evil thing in the world is hiring for culture fit because hiring for culture fit you&#8217;re like, &#8220;I want or more Erics on this team,&#8221; and you end up with these homogenous teams that only know how to solve the problems of Erics and are really imbalanced and don&#8217;t take advantage of the wealth of different experiences that people have.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Zuri, we haven&#8217;t really mentioned as you, woman of color, do you think that influenced some of the nos that you&#8217;ve got?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Oh, I don&#8217;t even know. Honestly, I really don&#8217;t know if that influenced the nos. I haven&#8217;t got past the part of getting a phone call back then. Back then I was like, sent in my email with my resumes and stuff like that and the respondent back with, &#8220;You don&#8217;t have the experience and stuff.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I do have my university on [inaudible] course and I know, Howard University is historically a black college and the accreditors or whoever knows that, like I don&#8217;t know. I really don&#8217;t know if that played a huge role or anything. It would [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You know I&#8217;ve seen this at some places where they want to hire people from the same list of schools that they&#8217;re comfortable hiring from and I think they&#8217;re just being lazy in some senses and piggybacking off strict admissions process so it&#8217;s pretty much everyone who goes. That’s school is pretty smart because they got in &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And has the appropriate class background.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, and then the other consequence is they can talk to them, they have shared experiences, they have that class background, that general uniformity so that&#8217;s a negative and it takes more effort to hire from colleges that don&#8217;t have really strict admissions processes. I think this probably applies to boot camps too. Sometimes, their graduates are awesome because their admissions process is tricky.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, or their tuition is prohibitively high.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I totally agree that it&#8217;s just laziness for what you said, Jessica, and I always had a bone to pick with that concept of culture fit, especially being an anthropologist because I know they have no idea what they&#8217;re talking about when they say culture fit.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1">[Laughter]</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Because the reality is culture is shared experiences. If you want to have a certain culture, you’re supposed to share those experiences with the people you have there, not I go find people who are like me. That&#8217;s not creating a culture. Even if they wanted to use this whole university model, what they should acknowledge is that usually when you go to university, you have a welcome week or something where all the freshman&#8217;s have an opportunity to get to know each other in some sort of social fashion and they indoctrinate you with whatever your university stuff is.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Then even if you come from different places and you have different backgrounds, you all have this thing now that you share together. That&#8217;s what you should be doing when you&#8217;re talking about creating culture fit. You should be going and finding different people and then bringing them to your Company X and saying, &#8220;Now, you&#8217;re part of us and this is what it means for you to be all in one group,&#8221; and you give them something to latch on to, instead of being lazy and say, &#8220;You don&#8217;t have to have it because I have no idea how to make it because that doesn&#8217;t really exist because I don&#8217;t do anything for what I do.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That has the truth stamp for the day.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Spectacular.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, I wanted to mention an article I saw recently in The Harvard Business Review where some researchers had sent out resumes to top law firms and they would vary the gender of the applicants and some of the extracurricular activities and personal interests that gave different clues as to their class. For some people, they would say that they were on the Intelligent Sailing Team. For others, they would say they were doing like the relay team in track and field. That and the gender were the only thing that they changed and surprise, surprise! They found that people with the higher class markers got more [inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wow.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Wait a minute, are you trying to say there&#8217;s bias in the hiring processes, Sam, because this is huge?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is exactly what I have to say.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Mind-boggling.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, they&#8217;re speaking of Facebook.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s really, really sad.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I don&#8217;t know if anyone saw the Facebook article but it was in Bloomberg, I believe. They initially had made a statement about not being able to have impact of the university in their organization because of the pipeline and they ended up &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>And like, there&#8217;s no skills from there. They were saying there&#8217;s no skills, like they can find people in that field that had skill for it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that was their initial claim and their diversity numbers are atrocious. They&#8217;re 84% male, predominantly white. It’s really, really bad. Then it came out that diverse candidates were getting in the door but that they&#8217;re being turned away in later interviews for culture fit reasons.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Even though they had been incentivizing recruiters to find more candidates who weren&#8217;t well-represented at the company and I&#8217;m actually reading directly from the article here. During the final stages, it says here, &#8220;The decision makers were risk averse, often declining the minority candidates.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>They specifically solve their pipeline problem and surprise, surprise! That didn&#8217;t fix their hiring problem.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s never the pipeline.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, mind-boggling.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There it is. It’s placed exactly of what Astrid said. People are looking for others who already share their experiences, instead of building experiences together. Did I get that right?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to work on a team that had more people named Blaine, than it had female engineers. I&#8217;m not making this up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>How many Blaines is that.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>There were two Blaines and one female engineer.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, that reminds me of an old New York Times article from 2003 about somebody&#8217;s observation of basically the same thing but they called it the Dave-to-Girl Ratio.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>As we&#8217;re talking about this and we&#8217;re seeing this issue in the hiring practices. Like I said, it&#8217;s huge, huge problem because now it&#8217;s like [inaudible], getting this in the door is also something that I think that we don&#8217;t really talk much about is how to keep them to stay at the company and maintaining that. As I talk [inaudible] here. Sometimes I also like to fit in or we just feel awkward or we don&#8217;t feel comfortable and that makes us unhappy and we want to go somewhere else. This is a problem that needs to be fix.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> This whole diversity issue is not something that you could put a Band-Aid on at all. Absolutely not. This has to be 100% effort, whether it&#8217;s on the policy level, like we&#8217;d be doing [inaudible] or within a company. It has to be from the very beginning all the way to the very end like seeing minorities, women, people of color in leadership positions, that goes a long way for me. Especially, for me I would like to see like, &#8220;We have woman senior lead developer,&#8221; that means I feel like I can get there someday. There’s no [inaudible] like it can be done based off her skills and so stuff so I[inaudible].</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s why we talk about diversity and inclusivity because woman together doesn&#8217;t make any damn sense.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Inclusivity, we have to bring those people who are different from us into shared experiences with us. Is there anything that the people at your company do? This is a question for all of the women on this call, especially the women of color. Is there anything that people at your company do that helps with that feeling of belonging?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I do a lot of going out events. When I say going out, of course, lunch is a typical thing but we also have like Fridays, we play Mario-Margaritas. Anybody who wants to stay up on Friday just go to back office room and play Mario Cart and just have Margaritas. That helps to bring effort together and having fun and being comfortable. Also, attending Meetups together, that&#8217;s one day that we get everybody together and just having an open environment. Everyone here is like pretty much mashed very well together.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>At GitHub, there&#8217;s an annual women&#8217;s summit for women employees and that&#8217;s the official thing they gets done. There are also the unofficial women&#8217;s lunches and of course, there is sectionals, we have a women-only channel. We have a tech women channel so if you&#8217;re looking for a code review from someone who&#8217;s maybe going to be a bit more empathetic, you can ask the women tech channel first and there&#8217;s a queer channel and there&#8217;s a trans channel. They&#8217;re unofficial channels for this sorts of things.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But I think one of the kind of coolest and strangest things that I noticed about GitHub is that the women&#8217;s restroom on the second floor where engineering sets, there are posted notes, stickers, markers and all of the bathroom stalls are filled with posted notes and stickers and the messages of encouragement, counting how many women are at the company, asking questions and complaining about management and it&#8217;s just really strange open forum for sharing different things about your experiences of women at GitHub and it&#8217;s really &#8212;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>So there&#8217;s asynchronous anonymous bathroom channel.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That is so cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It&#8217;s amazing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Also, I want to add one more thing. We also have one of our senior leaders, Jessica King, She actually has at least, every three months or five months to meets up every woman engineer at the company. She has [inaudible] with us and just to fit like, &#8220;How&#8217;s everything going? How do you feel?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s spectacular.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, and she&#8217;s very, very busy so this is a lot and that&#8217;s really great that we have something like that there was [inaudible] for us within the company.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s awesome. I can save that for my experiences, I&#8217;m not even just being a developer but also often working in very male-dominated industries, it&#8217;s usually the little things that make me feel included like saying hello to me every day or talking to me and asking me questions and listening to me when I reply back to you because the stuff that makes me feel not included is if you walk by me every day but you don&#8217;t ever say hi or if you all go out to lunch but you never invite me. But you don&#8217;t always have to have a huge initiative.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think if you have a company where people are encouraged to get to know each other, it can go a long way with helping people who might not be like everybody else feel more included.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I want to a moment to give a shout out to one of our supporters, Colin Bruce. Thank you very much for your patronage. Greater Than Code is 100% listener funded. If you like the show and you like to support us, please go to Patreon.com/GreaterThanCode, pledge at any level and you can get access to our Patreon only sectional, where you can ask guest questions, just new guest and talk about what we have covered on different episodes.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I have one more question. One thing that you mentioned at the very beginning of the show, Zuri was that you signed up to lead the Ruby on Rails course meetings.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, the Ruby on Rails Meetups for Women Who Code.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>You signed up to lead those as you were just starting to learn Rails. That&#8217;s really brave.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I blame Kaylin for that. Here&#8217;s what happened. As I said about Kaylin, she&#8217;s the director of the DC Chapter for Women Who Code at that time. She’s like, &#8220;I was telling him, teach yourself on Ruby on Rails,&#8221; and I was like, &#8220;Awesome. That&#8217;s amazing.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> &#8220;You should read it,&#8221; just like that,&#8221; and I&#8217;m like, &#8220;I&#8217;m stuck right there. I don&#8217;t know.&#8221; She&#8217;s like, &#8220;No, you&#8217;re good, you&#8217;re smart. You could do this. You could definitely do this. You can run a Ruby on Rails Meetup.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I was like, &#8220;You know what? Sure why not,&#8221; because when you teach, you also learn on top of that. It was very nerve wrecking because I&#8217;m very critical of myself so I&#8217;m like, &#8220;Oh, my god. Everyone here is going to think I&#8217;m stupid because I don&#8217;t know how to solve to error or whatnot.&#8221; I&#8217;m sure someone here knows Ruby on Rails and they should be doing this, not me. A lot of those thoughts are going through my head but I just do myself out there and [inaudible] read up on it before every meetup and try to grow that meetup. It was like a very, very nerve wrecking.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Did you have help? Did you have people who are more experience to fall back on?</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, I was not by myself during this Meetup. Actually, I had [inaudible] Amy. She was also learning Ruby Rails with me but she has some programming background so it&#8217;s really easy to looking at off of her because she&#8217;s really good. She had a way of learning too, which was really, really cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> She had that thing built already and she takes it apart see how the mechanics work. That’s what she was doing with the one-month Rails. she had it done already or I think she took the final code base and start taking things apart to see how the [inaudible] and to create a [inaudible] and stuff like that, just to figure out how that works. She had interest in building stuff and was very good at solving errors. Definitely I had her to piggyback whenever we came across that I had no clue about.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>It helps when someone says, &#8220;You can do this,&#8221; and also it helps when you&#8217;re not by yourself.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, the you-can-do-this part, definitely because Kaylin has really been definitely pushing me. Everyone within Woman Who Code community has definitely been pushing me like, &#8220;You can do this. You’re smart. You&#8217;re really great. This should be no problem with you doing this at all. Don&#8217;t doubt yourself.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>That&#8217;s going to be my reflection of the day. I&#8217;ll just hop us by in the reflections. At the end of the show, we like to go around and say, &#8220;What did you learn today? What did you find particularly interesting?&#8221; This is mine because there were so many people who helped you in small ways.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Your professors pushing you to go to the hackathon. Your MIS professor somehow influence you to go into CIS as your major. The people at Women Who Code DC who made you feel welcome and Kaylin who said, &#8220;You can do this,&#8221; and Amy, I think it was who was helping you with the Ruby on Rails workshop and then this your team at the hackathons. You did this. You kept pushing through all discouragements and kept learning. The other thing that I really noticed was that through all of this, you&#8217;re like, &#8220;Well, I learned something so it must be good.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Right. That’s absolutely right. I was like growing pain, there was people but that what I was trying to do. Everything I go to that at least I try to learn something out of it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah, because then you come out as a stronger person. Sam wants to call these things micro-kindnesses or micro-affection. I&#8217;m going to go with micro-mentoring.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yes, that&#8217;s the perfect word &#8212; micro-mentoring. I like that. We should make this a thing.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>JESSICA:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Yeah because we can all do that. It doesn&#8217;t take formality. It&#8217;s these little things that add up.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>CORALINE:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>I can only led to my big takeaway from this and that is that, Zuri you are very fortunate to have those sorts of supportive people and support networks around you. I think that there are things that more senior developers can do to create those opportunities for micro-mentorship, to create the support networks, to create those structures that will give new people the ability to get through all the nos and to find the yes, and to find those learning experiences. I&#8217;m going to be thinking about how, as a more senior person, I can foster those sorts of environments.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Cool. I would like to add on because I just recently got a formal mentor, which I really excited about. But with that interview that was like conducted on me like [inaudible]. I actually decided to make sure if anyone asks me questions or I come across like a J developer, let&#8217;s ask them all these questions and stuff like that, I like to reach out to them privately like, &#8220;How&#8217;s everything going? We should learning all that stuff,&#8221; and try to figure out what their goals are and then giving direction or connect to someone that I know that could probably help them out. Then hopefully, build that relationship and just connect that piece.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> If I know someone who&#8217;s trying to study Ruby and Ruby on Rails and I was reflecting on things, &#8220;I wish I had knew,&#8221; or things I wish I had done back then. It’s been great, honestly but there are a lot of things I wish I&#8217;ve done differently back then. I try to, at least to connect with her whenever I got a chance, like every two or three weeks and be like, &#8220;How&#8217;s that thing going? What did you do so far? What are you studying? Let&#8217;s set these goals and stuff.&#8221; Or try to do a simple algorithm problem with her every time we meet up our talk like, &#8220;[inaudible],&#8221; or a palindrome of some sort.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> But I feel like if anything guys can do, anything to support that just to simply meetup with the [inaudible], send a message every two or three weeks like, &#8220;How&#8217;s everything going? You should check out this material? Are you having any issues with your current projects?&#8221; That would be pretty really, really helpful for them because it shows that people out there like they&#8217;re rooting for them and wanted to get better.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ASTRID:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>The reflection that I have from our conversation today was to use hackathon as a way to try new things. I know in the past when I&#8217;ve gone to hackathons, I&#8217;m usually been working on something so I&#8217;m not really thinking about trying out new stuff. But I really liked what you talked about earlier, Zuri about as you were interested in new technologies, then you would go to hackathon and see how you could use it.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> I think that&#8217;s a really great idea about not just getting out there and trying other stuff but also meeting people who are already good at it. That could help with keeping you more excited about it and keeping you interested and also getting a chance to see more about what your skills are. One of the things I struggled with in the beginning, with so much technology and I didn&#8217;t know exactly what I was interested in and it was hard to figure that out on your own because everyone just tells you to try things. We don&#8217;t know what you&#8217;re doing so it seems like going to a hackathon to try it out, it&#8217;s really a great way to get started.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>SAM:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>One of my takeaways is actually even a little bit more 101 than what you were just talking about, Astrid. I think I had just sort of reflexively been poo-pooing the entire idea of hackathons so maybe what I should do is just try to go and hang out at one, maybe go for the pitch session and then come by for a couple hours the following day and just hang out and see what people are doing and if anybody feels like chatting because that&#8217;s something that sounds like I&#8217;ve been missing out on. That’s really cool.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> The other thing that I&#8217;m going to take away from this is just the power of post it’s because that idea of having posted some pens in the bathroom is just absolutely amazing. That sounds wonderful.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"> Well, thank you very much, Zuri. This has been a really interesting and useful and educational conversation. We’ve really enjoyed having you on the show so thank you for taking the time to join us and talk to us.</span></p>
<p class="p1"><span class="s1"><b>ZURI:<span class="Apple-converted-space">  </span></b>Great and thank you for having me. This is really exciting and it&#8217;s a very insightful conversation. Thank you. Bye everybody.</span></p>
<p class="p1">
<p><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">This episode was brought to you by the panelists and Patrons of &gt;Code. To pledge your support and to join our awesome Slack community, visit </span></i><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">patreon.com/greaterthancode</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">. Managed and produced by </span></i><a href="http://twitter.com/therubyrep"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">@therubyrep</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;"> of </span></i><a href="http://devreps.com/"><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">DevReps, LLC</span></i></a><i><span style="font-weight: 400;">.</span></i></p>
]]></content:encoded>
					<itunes:summary><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |<br />
</span><a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ZuriHunter"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Zuri Hunter</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Welcome to “Snowpocalypse!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:50</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Zuri’s Background and Origin Story</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.zurihunter.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Blog<br />
</span></a><a href="https://www.digitalglobe.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Digital Globe<br />
</span></a><a href="https://www.womenwhocode.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Women Who Code</span></a></p>
<p><b>04:19</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Hackathons</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://blog.codewithveni.com/meet-zuri-queen-hackathons/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Meet Zuri. The Queen of Hackathons.<br />
</span></a><a href="http://colorcoded.voxmedia.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Color Coded</span></a></p>
<p><b>16:37</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Overcoming Shyness</span></p>
<p><b>20:47 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Navigating the Channels of Your Career</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interface"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Graphical User Interface (GUI)</span></a></p>
<p><b>27:07</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Developing Skills and Keeping up with New Technologies</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-solutions-architect-associate/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">AWS Certified Solutions Architect</span></a></p>
<p><b>33:31</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Hiring Practices; Culture Fit</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://hbr.org/2016/12/research-how-subtle-class-cues-can-backfire-on-your-resume"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume (&#8220;No Silver Bullet&#8221; for D&amp;I)<br />
</span></a><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-09/facebook-s-hiring-process-hinders-its-effort-to-create-a-diverse-workforce"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Facebook’s Hiring Process Hinders Its Effort to Create a Diverse Workforce<br />
</span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/22/technology/an-imbalance-casting-a-wider-net-to-attract-computing-women.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">An Imbalance; Casting a Wider Net to Attract Computing Women (&#8220;Dave-to-Girl Ratio&#8221;)</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>We are (currently) listener supported!<br />
Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Thank you, Colin Bruce, for your support!</b></p>
<p><b>50:23</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Leading While Learning</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Takeaways:</b></p>
<p><b>Jessica:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Helping others in small ways. #Micromentoring!</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="und"><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/micromentoring?src=hash">#micromentoring</a> <a href="https://t.co/D51s0HoA8m">https://t.c]]></itunes:summary>
					<googleplay:description><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Panelists: </b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/jessitron"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Jessica Kerr</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/ianthro"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Astrid Countee</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> | </span><a href="https://twitter.com/CoralineAda"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Coraline Ada Ehmke</span></a><span style="font-weight: 400;"> |<br />
</span><a href="http://twitter.com/geeksam"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Sam Livingston-Gray</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Guest Starring:</b></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://twitter.com/ZuriHunter"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Zuri Hunter</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Show Notes:</b></p>
<p><b>00:16</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Welcome to “Snowpocalypse!” …we mean, “Greater Than Code!”</span></p>
<p><b>01:50</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Zuri’s Background and Origin Story</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.zurihunter.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Blog<br />
</span></a><a href="https://www.digitalglobe.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Digital Globe<br />
</span></a><a href="https://www.womenwhocode.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Women Who Code</span></a></p>
<p><b>04:19</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Hackathons</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://blog.codewithveni.com/meet-zuri-queen-hackathons/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Meet Zuri. The Queen of Hackathons.<br />
</span></a><a href="http://colorcoded.voxmedia.com/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Color Coded</span></a></p>
<p><b>16:37</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Overcoming Shyness</span></p>
<p><b>20:47 </b><span style="font-weight: 400;">– Navigating the Channels of Your Career</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_user_interface"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Graphical User Interface (GUI)</span></a></p>
<p><b>27:07</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Developing Skills and Keeping up with New Technologies</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://aws.amazon.com/certification/certified-solutions-architect-associate/"><span style="font-weight: 400;">AWS Certified Solutions Architect</span></a></p>
<p><b>33:31</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Hiring Practices; Culture Fit</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://hbr.org/2016/12/research-how-subtle-class-cues-can-backfire-on-your-resume"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Research: How Subtle Class Cues Can Backfire on Your Resume (&#8220;No Silver Bullet&#8221; for D&amp;I)<br />
</span></a><a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-01-09/facebook-s-hiring-process-hinders-its-effort-to-create-a-diverse-workforce"><span style="font-weight: 400;">Facebook’s Hiring Process Hinders Its Effort to Create a Diverse Workforce<br />
</span></a><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/22/technology/an-imbalance-casting-a-wider-net-to-attract-computing-women.html"><span style="font-weight: 400;">An Imbalance; Casting a Wider Net to Attract Computing Women (&#8220;Dave-to-Girl Ratio&#8221;)</span></a></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>We are (currently) listener supported!<br />
Support us via </b><a href="https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode"><b>Patreon</b></a><b>!<br />
</b><b>Thank you, Colin Bruce, for your support!</b></p>
<p><b>50:23</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> – Leading While Learning</span></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><b>Takeaways:</b></p>
<p><b>Jessica:</b><span style="font-weight: 400;"> Helping others in small ways. #Micromentoring!</span></p>
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
<p dir="ltr" lang="und"><a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/micromentoring?src=hash">#micromentoring</a> <a href="https://t.co/D51s0HoA8m">https://t.c]]></googleplay:description>
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					<itunes:duration>59:52</itunes:duration>
					<itunes:author>Mandy Moore</itunes:author>
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